Plenty Good Room lays out in clear terms the hope of democratic socialism for a world ravaged by intensifying racial capitalism and social injustice. Unleash your ingenuity for systems that offer plenty good room—not for just a few but for all.
Economic inequality yawns as wide as ever. Capitalism is working as it was designed: replicating an uneven balance of power, constraining life chances, and limiting imaginations. Those of us concerned about injustice often confine ourselves to issue-by-issue activism. The end result? Owners, investors, and a politics of inequality win.
But what if there's another way to organize our common life—and what if it's as homegrown as sweet potato pie? What if we could become moral engineers who co-create the world we all deserve?
Plenty Good Room helps readers understand Black Christian socialism, a stream of the Black radical tradition, from the perspective of a Brooklyn pastor and political scientist's civic awakening. As the former director of the Drum Major Institute, founded by America's most famous democratic socialist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Andrew Wilkes mounts a challenge to the endless greed, inequality, and profiteering of racial capitalism.
Tugging on the threads of history and scripture and pointing to the work of Black radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rev. Addie Wyatt, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Wilkes weaves a narrative of "plenty good room moments": times in which communities and individuals had sufficient resources, human rights, and beauty. He invites us to join a movement that a day-laboring Christ initiated as he organized the dispossessed, the disinherited, and those pushed to the edges of society. Wilkes also introduces contemporary efforts pushing for reparations, community ownership, participatory democracy, and solidarity economies. These stories show us that we can create a world of care and reciprocity by envisioning an economy of enough for all—one rooted in justice, equity, and the God whose spirit falls on all flesh.