It once seemed so obvious that the American Dream was fractured in the cities we'd abandoned and the rural outposts we’d forgotten. That's why I began my career as a journalist in Philadelphia, where my coverage of mass school closings earned me recognition as the nation’s top education beat reporter. Later, at Education Week, my award-winning features and investigations took me from the sweet potato farms of central Mississippi to the sagging trailer parks of western Colorado in search of the source of the country's troubles. 

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. My first inkling of this came in 2015,  when a flood of devastating headlines began pouring out of my hometown, an aging inner-ring suburb ten miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. After running up a staggering $172 million debt, the same school district that had once served my white family so well was suddenly on the verge of collapse, threatening the hopes and dreams of thousands of Black families who'd come to suburbia in search of the same generous social contract that had made my comfortable middle-class life possible.

I wrote Disillusioned because suburbs like Penn Hills are the new front lines in the fight to realize America's promise. For far too long, the American Dream has been tethered to whiteness, lifting the fortunes of some by excluding, exploiting, and punishing others. But this pattern cannot and will not last forever. I'm grateful to those who have paid such a dire price to sustain other visions of what's possible, and I'm proud to dedicate my work to accountability, healing, and repair.