As I approached Twenty-First Street I began to despair that I had come to Sacramento to speak about New York. That’s when another man dressed in jeans and a work shirt stepped into my path, looking like he might be needing directions. He did: “Do you know where the Meals on Wheels truck is, man?” he asked.

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America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. You just need eyes and ears and stories. Walk around any American city and evidence of the shattered compact with citizens will present itself. There you will see broken roads, overloaded schools, police forces on edge, clusters and sometimes whole tent cities of homeless people camped in eyeshot of shopping districts that are beginning to resemble ramparts of wealth rather than stores for all. Thick glass windows and security guards stand between aspirational goods and the people outside in Portland, Oregon; in San Francisco; in Seattle; Los Angeles; New York; and Miami. The soaring cost of living in these cities—which have become meccas for luxury and creative economy work, but depend on service labor to run their dream machines—has a lot to do with this state of affairs. Adjusting for rent and costs, the middle-class residents of these cities now have the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area. And across the nation at large, America’s* top 10 percent earns nine times as much as the bottom 90 percent.*

This is not just an urban problem. In smaller cities and towns and in rural America the gulf between the haves and have-nots stretches just as wide, even if its symptoms are not so visible. California might be home to more than one hundred billionaires—whose collected assets dwarf the GDP of most nations in the world—but nearly a quarter of the state is poor. The jobs that were once done by hand are increasingly done by machine. Appalachia, upstate New York, Michigan—inequality stretches to almost unthinkable gulfs there too. No matter how much one hears of recovery and new jobs, what those jobs are and what they promise tend to get left out. These jobs are often short-shift work, work without benefits, work so temporary it has created a new term: the precariat. This unease became the pivot point of the 2016 presidential election.

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Financial inequality is not just a symptom of bad public policy, though, or something that has emerged only in tandem with the forces of the recent election. It was formed by decades of injustice and structural inequality in America produced by the nation’s growth on the back of stolen labor, the failure of Reconstruction, the entrenchment of racial bias in the culture, restrictions on immigration and the way immigration law is enforced, the long aftermath of the war on drugs, sexism, gender imbalances, and the complicity of financial services in preying upon populations afflicted by these inequalities with predatory loaning. We also haven’t introduced meaningful progressive taxation in decades. Whatever benefits the once-robust welfare state ensured have been all but demolished by this deeply enmeshed system of inequality, putting far more at risk than just upward mobility. It has put people’s bodies at risk. Writing in the wake of a lethal police shooting in Charlotte earlier last year, the pastor William Barber II noted: “When Charlotte’s poor black neighborhoods were afflicted with disproportionate law enforcement during the war on drugs, condemning a whole generation to bad credit and a lack of job opportunities, our elected representatives didn’t call it violence. When immigration officers raid homes and snatch undocumented children from bus stops, they don’t call it violence. But all of these policies and practices do violence to the lives of thousands of Charlotte residents.”

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The way systems of oppression have entrenched themselves in the United States calls out for a new framework for writing about inequality. We need to look beyond statistics and numbers and wage rates. We need to create a framework that accounts for what it feels like to live in this America, a framework that can give space to the stories that reveal how many forces outside of wages lead to income inequality, which is a symptom of a network of inequalities. The work of writing has been done for decades by writers who do not have a choice but to pay attention to these forces. This anthology is an attempt to bring together the best of these writers and recast the story of America in their words.

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Piece by piece you will watch as these writers demolish the myth of Horatio Alger and replace it with the reality of what it feels like to try to keep a foothold in America today. In a poignant essay, Manuel Muñoz pays tribute to his dying father, who came north from Central America to pick lettuce and cotton—jobs that are all but vanishing as work that can sustain a family.