We the Unequal: 250 Years of Resilience and Rebellion
Gabriel was an enslaved Black man. The law treated him as property, so we don’t know his last name. He lived near Richmond, Virginia and spent his days over hot coals shaping horseshoes and nails for people who didn’t consider him fully human.
It was 1800. George Washington died only eleven months earlier. The ink on the Constitution was barely dry. The Revolutionary War ended seventeen years before. Everything was so new. Nobody could say, “that’s how it’s always been,” because it hadn’t really always been anything — yet.
Unless you were like Gabriel. He was chained by his master and forced to do hard labor. At this point, slaves had been captured in Africa and transported to the Americas for centuries. Gabriel looked at The United States and clinched his fists so tight his knuckles ached. The freedom it promised didn’t include him.
But Gabriel was a rebel. And like all good rebels, he planned a rebellion.
He recruited other Black men around Richmond and they began organizing. They forged homemade swords in Gabriel’s smithy as they concretized their strategy. They were going to march on Richmond, seize the armory, take Governor James Monroe hostage, and demand freedom for all enslaved people. As they met in secret around late night campfires, using coded language and silent gestures, hope fueled their unmitigated resolve. Would it work? Nobody knew. They did know, however, that their lives depended on it.
The day finally arrived. August 30, 1800. But torrential rains flooded roads and washed out bridges. Travel was impossible. Two enslaved men from a nearby plantation, fearing the consequences, informed white authorities. By morning, a militia was mobilized and arrests spread across Richmond. Gabriel fled. He wanted to make it to Norfolk. Maybe he could even make it to the Caribbean where the Haitian Revolution was reshaping everything.
But he was captured, returned to Richmond, and tried without a jury.
Gabriel was executed on October 7, 1800. He was hanged alongside at least twenty-five others.
According to the James Monroe Museum, “The hanging of Gabriel did not put an end to the story; another conspiracy was thwarted in 1802 by one of Gabriel’s followers named Sancho. The memory of both attempted uprisings would burn deeply into the minds of enslavers and the enslaved alike for decades. Enslaved people continued efforts to liberate themselves throughout the 19th century, including the attempt of Nat Turner, who put many of Gabriel’s plans into action with his revolt in 1831. Fears of these uprisings led to further restrictions on enslaved people throughout the South, increased legislation protecting the institution of slavery, and further tension between free states and slave states as they battled with questions of national and regional ideals.”
Gabriel didn’t succeed that day. His efforts led to his death. He left no writings. Nobody recorded his last words. But his fight for equality was not in vain. His death offered a question for everyone to consider: “What kind of country are we building, and who is it meant for?”
Gabriel helped me uncover many other people who tried to shift the young nation's story. A century later, William Jennings Bryan asked a similar question: “Who does this country serve, and who does it leave behind?”
Bryan was born in 1860, a year before the Civil War started. He studied law like his father, and called himself a defender of “the common people.” He sounded less like a politician than a preacher giving hope to crowds in revival tents, but he was the Democratic Party nominee for President three times before he died in 1925. He championed the cause of farmers and laborers and opposed the gold standard. He pushed for reforms that would later be adopted, such as the graduated income tax, popular election of U.S. senators, and women's suffrage. He believed, more than climbing the political ladder in Washington, D.C., that he was following a moral calling. Like a missionary for “the cause of humanity.”
In that way, I feel William Jennings Bryan and I are kindred spirits. He didn’t want to live in a world where wealthy elites lived off the backs of everyone else. He chose to die on some hills I would never climb, like temperance and an opposition to teaching evolution, but those hills were dwarfed by the mighty mountains he moved for the average citizen. He truly loved people.
I feel like Bryan was fighting for people just like me, but he must have known that unless there was a drastic change, the precarity of the common people wouldn’t disappear.
And he was right!
I couldn’t believe what I learned when I really dived in and investigated our history for myself. We the Unequal started out as an essay about the rights of “the common people” and the oppressive power of the billionaire class. That essay blossomed into this book.
It started with Gabriel. Then I read about people like William Jennings Bryan and events like Shays's Rebellion. I read a ton of books, like David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Then I talked to experts including historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, activists, organizers, ecologists, sociologists, researchers, authors, and educators. I talked to Indigenous people. I talked to people of various races, sexualities, and genders. I talked to disabled people and immigrants. And I’ve talked the ears off my friends and family about how much I’ve learned as I’ve unveiled so many of the stories hidden in our history.
The unequal have always organized. In 1977, activists led by Judy Heumann helped stage the 504 Sit-in — a nearly month-long occupation of a federal building in San Francisco to demand enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (a civil rights protection for disabled people). The point was simple: the law meant nothing if it wasn’t implemented. They held their ground until the government signed the regulations. It was rebellion with a clipboard and a sleeping bag — and it worked.
Many of us don’t have to imagine what it’s like to learn a history that doesn’t include us. We sit in classrooms, watch documentaries, and even celebrate holidays that are based on a narrative that doesn’t include us. The dominant narrative has always been the story of rich, property-owning, white men. If you’re not white, not rich, and not male, there’s a good chance that the history you learned is one that doesn’t include you.
But it’s more than that. The history we know best is incredibly exclusive. It’s the story of the wealthy elite — the smallest minority with a disproportionate amount of decision-making power.
We The Unequal is a retelling of history. It’s the history of the common people. It answers questions like, “How has our history led us to this moment?” And in the final chapters, it offers a vision for a future where thriving isn’t reserved for a few, but is open to all. Including you.
Now, I have to let you in on a little secret. I never thought I’d write a history book. But it makes perfect sense.
I’ve been a community organizer for years. In 2016, I started a nonprofit called VideoOut. We traveled all over the United States recording and telling queer stories that were overwhelmingly left out throughout history. Along with my teammates, Selena, Dustin, Katy, Jeff, Oscar, and Ken, we helped tell the stories of queers that lived in communities across the United States. Across seven years, we produced programs in 36 states in collaboration with real people who lived, worked, and played in the communities we served.
That work often led me to queer history. To organize effectively, I had to understand what queer people had already done and how they had done it.
I learned about queer people who lived and worked in community before the 1960s. People like We’wha (a Zuni Native American lhamana from New Mexico), Magnus Hirschfeld, Henry Gerber, Evelyn Hooker, Harry Hay, Phylis Lyon and Del Martin, and Christine Jorgensen (the first trans woman to be widely known in the U.S.).
Evelyn Hooker wasn’t queer, but she was one of the first psychologists to study gay men outside of prisons and institutions. Her gay student, Sam From, convinced her to try to understand gay people, not cure them. Her research changed the entire field of psychology.
I also learned about the incredible work of the queer people during the explosive civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s: James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray (who rewrote civil rights law), Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings (used Evelyn Hooker’s research to secure the 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), Barbara Jordan, José Sarria (the first openly gay person to run for public office), Troy Perry, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, and Sylvia Rivera.
There was no shortage of folks organizing during the AIDS epidemic. People like Larry Kramer, Cleve Jones, Keith Haring, Arthur Ashe, and Elizabeth Taylor.
There were incredible women of color making a huge difference, like Miss Major, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde (who said, “Your silence will not protect you”).
People who challenged marginalization at the intersections of identity, like Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Larry Levan (a Black, gay DJ), Frankie Knuckles, Jose Xtravaganza, Willie Ninja, RuPaul, and Pedro Zamora (one of the first openly gay men with AIDS to be portrayed in popular media).
I learned about storytellers like Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry (who wrote for an underground lesbian magazine using only her initials, L.H.), Tony Kushner, Mary Oliver, Eric Marcus (host of Making Gay History Podcast), Laverne Cox, Andrea Gibson (whose poetry will turn you inside out), adrienne maree brown, Bowen Yang, Alok Vaid-Menon (a present day prophet, in my opinion), and Ocean Vuong.
I even began learning about people who met the moment when history became present, like Sarah McBride (the first openly transgender person elected to Congress), Pete Buttegieg, Edie Windsor, Stacey Milbern (a South Korean and American activist for disability justice), Honey Balenciaga, Dylan Mulvaney, Chase Strangio, and so many more.
I learned about The Society for Human Rights (1924), The Mattachine Society (1950), Daughters of Bilitis (1955), and the 150 or so organizations that existed before the Stonewall riots. I was breathing in queer history as if it were lifeforce.
I was often tapped as the de facto queer historian in the room — queer being the most important word just to clarify the very real limits of my expertise. I was the de facto queer historian because there haven’t been many queer history experts to fill the rooms where they’ve been needed. (I made a list of some actual experts — incredibly smart and prolific queer historians — that you can find in the back of the book.) For years, I led an LGBTQ+ walking tour around NYC, and I presented queer history keynotes for nonprofits and fortune 500 companies.
Based on numbers from the American Historical Association (AHA), there are roughly 5,000 to 6,000 professional U.S. historians working around the world. If you take into account all the colleges and universities, historians working in government, libraries, and nonprofits, that likely increases the number to 30,000 to 50,000 people worldwide. That’s it! There are only about 50,000 U.S. historians in the world.
When we look at the same metrics for historians worldwide whose primary specialization is queer or LGBTQ+ history, there’s an estimated 400 to 800. That’s about 0.00001% of the global population. That’s why I was the de facto queer historian, because even people like me who only know a fraction of what others do must help tell the history that includes queer people.
But getting to this moment was never part of the plan.
I grew up believing I would be a missionary doctor that saved both bodies and souls. But that didn’t happen.Religion gave me a taste of what I was looking for, but my personal experience was that it didn’t give me enough.
As a Star-Trek-loving science nerd, I was obsessed with the unseen architecture of things. As a teenager, I ran odd experiments with my pets, wondering why organisms changed their behavior under different environmental circumstances. I had two gerbils, Fred and Ethel, and I observed how they raised their babies when I placed them under a heater or a fan. I think I was already studying power without realizing it. Who gets comfort, and who gets scarcity? Who gets to move freely, and who doesn’t?
My queerness sharpened that lens. When I was told I didn’t fit in, I wanted to figure out why. VideoOut gave me thousands of stories of queer people, past and present, that taught me history is what happens and how we remember it. Queer history, like so many people’s histories, survives because people love it enough to refuse its erasure.
That’s how I got here. That’s why I’m writing a book about inequality in the United States. But it’s not just about the forces that marginalize us. It’s the bravery, the intelligence, and the power of the people that stood up to those forces. It’s their resilience, and the rebellions they led, that inspired me to write We The Unequal.
Everything I’ve gone through has helped me see that the United States is a country that perfected the art of forgetting the people it harms. But this book won’t let us forget them. They are included in this telling of history.
So while I may not be a historian in the academic sense, I am a storyteller and a student of shared humanity. This book is a love letter to “the common people.” It shows what power has obscured and what we, the unequal, have endured.
This book is my attempt to trace how the wealthy engineered, enforced, and normalized inequality and how the common people resisted.
I will make mistakes. I will likely speak beyond my own experience at times. But I will try, always, to honor the voices that history tried its hardest to silence.
If I have a method, it is this: equal parts science, storytelling, queerness, ethics, and the stubborn belief — instilled by my mom, by the bullied kid I once was, and the adult that now realizes my magic — that a better world is not only possible, but long, long overdue.
“The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity.”
— William Jennings Bryan, 1896
I didn’t know I was poor. Hanging in the bedroom I shared with my older brother was a needlepoint my mom made which read, “Richer than me, no man can be. I had a mother who read to me.” As a kid, I was enveloped in love.
There were times when my parents felt it, but my brothers and I were shielded from their financial precarity. When the power was turned off, we’d have candlelight dinners and campouts in the den. When we couldn’t afford a trip to the amusement park, we’d create obstacle courses in our backyard. We didn't go on fancy vacations, but we had our bikes and the great outdoors. Who could want more? Truly, my childhood was rich in so many ways.
That’s part of the United States’ magic — and its myth. It has this ability to make you feel rich in spirit while the system keeps you poor in fact.
One day, a classmate who was one of the bullies that always made school a challenge for me, said plainly, “You’re poor.” I suppose he thought that would resonate with me, inflaming some sort of shame about my family’s lack of wealth. My mom drove an old 15-seater van — a gray Dodge Ram with two rows of naugahyde seats and enough storage for the equipment she used to clean houses. I loved that van, but my bully noticed the dented front door, the growls, and screeches, the crack in the windshield, and he couldn’t help but point out what I had never realized. We were, in fact, poor.
That’s when the bullying really took off. I was made fun of for the clothes I wore and the apparent lack of money my family had. It was an easy entrance into other vulnerable parts of me, like my effeminate mannerisms.
I felt like Dolly Parton. In her song, Coat of Many Colors, she says, “I couldn't understand it, for I felt that I was rich. And I told 'em of the love my momma sewed in every stitch. And I told 'em all the story Momma told me while she sewed, and how my coat of many colors was worth more than all their clothes.” When I was a kid, my mom made me a gray sweatsuit with royal blue bands around the neck, wrists, and ankles. When I was about ten, she made me a pair of pajamas that I still wear to this day. I loved everything my mom made for me.
In hindsight, I feel like Loretta Lynn. In her song, Coal Miner’s Daughter, she said, “We were poor but we had love. That's the one thing that daddy made sure of. He shoveled coal to make a poor man's dollar.” My grandfather was a coalminer, but my dad was an insurance adjuster. He worked a stable job, foregoing his dreams of law school so that he could provide for our family. I have endless admiration for my dad. I’m so grateful for what he did for us.
This book is about all of us. Not just my family. It’s full of stories of real people who lived with financial precarity, unjust systems, a chain on their ankles, and a boot on their neck. It’s a holistic view of the social justice movements of the last 250 years — all of which have included economic security as a central demand.
At its core, this book is a microscope view of the systems built in the United States that have enriched the wealthy and have marginalized the poor. This book is a vision for a future of equity — including financial freedom. I try to bring the heart of people to the story of money. And to do that, I’m resting heavily on my own family’s narrative. Especially the story of my mom who passed away on December 19th, 2025.
My mom, Sue Reeves, was a formidable human. She was born into a lower-middle class family in Edgewater, Alabama. Her father was a steel worker and her mother was a homemaker. Mom married young. With a heart full of hope and a son on her hip, she was making her own way. Her first marriage ended in divorce — but she soon married my dad and had three more children. I’m the youngest.
My mom was a serial entrepreneur. The first thing I remember her doing is producing craft shows in our basement featuring her own work. She sent out invitations at our school and posted signs at church and on grocery store bulletin boards. When we were a little older, she started a cleaning business called Sue Reeves Domestic Engineering. She also made cookies and cakes for events and private clients through her company, Mom’s Cookies. But the thing she enjoyed most was cooking Wednesday night suppers at North Highlands Baptist Church. Hundreds of people paid $5.50 each for a meat and three — what, in the South, we called a plate with a serving of meat, three servings of vegetables, bread, dessert, and as much sweet tea as you could possibly drink. After decades of that kind of work, she put herself through school — not once, but twice. For the last 15 years of her career, she worked as a registered nurse.
Mom’s story is all too common. The doctors gave her two years to live and a laundry list of potential treatments, all of them which seemed to inevitably lead to end of life care.
Through it all, my mom has worked harder than anyone I know. Even so, financial precarity has always been an obstacle. There is a treatment called TIL — a form of advanced immunotherapy — that they believed would have made a difference. But at more than $1 million, access to treatments like TIL were cost prohibitive for her. After years of doctor visits, the mounting medical bills were almost too much to manage. I’m telling you all of this because this book is about more than U.S. history. It’s about more than politics. It’s personal. It’s about what happens when the rich are made richer and the poor are left behind.
Too many of us are being left behind.
This idea isn’t abstract. You or someone you know has felt it. It’s living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s choosing which bill to pay. It’s millions of families rationing insulin or juggling rent or choosing to drive without car insurance. And it’s the throughline that connects our history, from the Declaration of Independence to the Progressive Era to right now. Just like William Jennings Bryan said, this is about the “cause of humanity.”
So let’s start at the beginning — not of my mom’s story, but of the United States.
In 1773, colonists in Boston Harbor pulled off one of the most infamous protests in U.S. history. They were not happy about British-imposed taxes on the colonies, so they dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into the harbor. Of course, it wasn't just about tea. It was about who gets to make the rules. Samuel Adams insisted that the Boston Tea Party was a protest of colonists asserting the idea: "No taxation without representation."
Then came something I had never learned about. Thirteen years after the Boston Tea Party, veterans who had not been paid for their military service and farmers who had been driven into debt — common people — shut down courts and attempted to seize a federal armory in protest of state tax policies and foreclosures in Massachusetts. This rebellion — Shays's Rebellion (1786) — helped spur the creation of the U.S. Constitution.
Imagine that: a rebellion about economic injustice lit a fire under the framers’ butts. We now know that they could have written protections into law that prevented future circumstances like the ones that led to Shays’s Rebellion, but that’s not what happened. I often wonder if we have adapted the way we organize today or if we are still organizing like the people of Shays's Rebellion did back then. We’ll explore the evolution of these rebellions, for sure, but also the resilience of common people as we continue to demand something better.
Shays's Rebellion was the first large-scale uprising of U.S. citizens against domestic economic policies, but it wasn’t the first fight for survival on this land. Indigenous nations had long resisted the economic systems that displaced them. Enslaved people resisted the systems that exploited them.
Long before Shays’s Rebellion, Indigenous resistance was already organized, strategic, and world-altering. In 1680, a Tewa religious leader named Popé coordinated what we now call the Pueblo Revolt — a rare moment when multiple Pueblo communities united to drive Spanish colonizers out of Santa Fe and reclaim their homelands, even if only temporarily. Accounts describe messengers carrying knotted cords from village to village—an embodied countdown to uprising. Popé wasn’t “reacting.” He was building power.
Popé was not an outlier. A century later, an Odawa leader named Pontiac led another Indigenous uprising — this time against the British Empire itself. In 1763, Native nations across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley rose up together, capturing forts, cutting supply lines, and forcing the most powerful empire on Earth to confront Indigenous sovereignty. Like Popé, Pontiac wasn’t pleading for inclusion. He was asserting self-determination. These rebellions didn’t disappear. They echoed. They taught the next generation how to organize. They proved that empire could be challenged — and sometimes forced to retreat.
That lineage didn’t end in the 1700s. In 2016, at Standing Rock, Indigenous people once again put their bodies on the line to defend land, water, and sovereignty — this time against a billion-dollar oil pipeline. Like Popé and Pontiac, they organized across tribes, built community, and refused to surrender what was sacred. What looked to the outside world like a protest was, to those inside it, something much older: a people asserting their right to exist.
There’s a peculiar juxtaposition that exemplifies what many today refer to as “the system.” The Boston Tea Party helped inspire revolution, but Shays's Rebellion inspired something else.
Both the Boston Tea Party and Shays's Rebellion were protests. They physically disrupted the systems that maintained inequality. British elites saw the Boston Tea Party as a dangerous reaction to their rule, but in the U.S. it became a celebrated origin story — one of the great patriotic myths retold in classrooms and textbooks.
You’d think that’s how the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have seen Shays’s Rebellion, too. But acts of resistance by enslaved people, Indigenous nations, and poor farmers were feared, punished, or erased from the narrative entirely.
Resistance is heroic as long as it comes from the “right” people. Gabriel must have seen this when he organized the rebellion of 1800. William Jennings Bryan must have seen this when he stood up for the common people in the late 1800s. Rebellion is sanitized when it serves the powerful and vilified when it serves the rest of us.
That is why the movements against domestic economic oppression, including Shays's Rebellion, never earn the same reverence as the Boston Tea Party of 1773. U.S. elites have usually viewed them the same way their British counterparts viewed the Boston Tea Party: as a dangerous threat to their order.
George Washington said, “There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to.” His fear of rebellion was widely shared among his contemporaries. Thomas Jefferson was an outlier — at least on paper — when he wrote, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing… It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” But Jefferson’s “medicine” wasn’t meant for everyone. He owned hundreds of enslaved people and fought to expand land seized from Indigenous nations. Even his call for rebellion was rooted in a vision of democracy that only served men like him.
Most of the founders saw Shays's Rebellion not as economic desperation, but as a threat to the new Republic. While the Boston Tea Party became patriotic folklore, Shays's Rebellion was nearly erased. That smells like a double standard to me.
It makes me wonder which stories are still buried under elitist control that’s been baked into U.S. history. Did we bury the stories of families quietly losing everything to illness, the stories of soaring profits for corporations and crippling debt for the workers that support them — stories of real people just like you and me — and my mom?
The U.S. has always had movements demanding economic justice. Those in the middle class, as we now call it, have been fighting this fight for centuries. As David Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “The struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors.” The U.S. is no exception.
My mom’s life is proof that the fight never ended. She worked hard her whole life and could barely afford her healthcare at the end. Her story is a continuation of the movement as we now understand it. Indebted to those that may save her life.
So how did we get to this place where, by many measures, inequality is worse than it has ever been?
That’s what we will figure out in this book. We’re going to investigate ten historical eras through which we’ll trace this fight for equity in the United States, each one painting a picture of our journey to present-day inequality. These are the moments that designed, upheld, and fought back against economic inequality. This is more than history. This is the real story of all of us.
Each chapter in this book covers a different era:
The Birth of Enshrined Inequality (200,000 BC–late 1700s)
The Foundations of the United States (1770s–1870s)
The Gilded Age (1870s–1890s)
Progressive Era (1890s–1920s)
New Deal Era (1930s–1940s)
The Prosperity Myth (1945–1959)
Civil Rights & Economic Justice: The Linked Struggle (1960s–1970s)
Neoliberal Reversal & Resistance (1980s–2000s)
Occupy Wall Street & The Post-2008 Era (2011–2019)
The Second Gilded Age (2020-Present)
The Future: A Bold Vision for Financial Freedom
I’m going to talk about my mom a lot. In many ways she’s like so many of us — the so-called “average” U.S. citizen. Except there’s nothing average about her. That’s the point. We can’t reduce this story to averages or broad strokes. Inequality isn’t a chart or a statistic. You see how it’s lived in real bodies and empty bank accounts, in families and their uncertain futures. My mom is one example. You probably have your own. As I bring her into this story, I hope you’ll remember “the common people” in your life who carry the weight of economic inequality, too.
My mom is also an inspiration. Despite the systems that made it nearly impossible, she continued to find ways to live life to the fullest. As we unveil the rebels that fought for structural change, we will also see people just like my mom who lived a simple life. She worked hard, went to church, and spoiled her grandkids as much as she could.
I hope you'll dream with me about the future we want. Here's to everyone feeling like a kid on a particularly abundant Christmas morning — but with the real stability of financial freedom.
Buckle up. Let’s dive in.
I can’t wait to finish writing this book. But I can’t do it without your support.
I’m actually building two big things this year that I believe could change lives. One is We the Unequal, a storytelling project and book about the real history of the middle class — and the people this country has always left behind. The other is the Financial Freedom Fellowship, a bold new 20-year initiative to fund 50 people with $150K/year to pursue their purpose and transform their communities.
These projects are rooted in the simple belief that in community, we already have everything we need.
To keep this work going, I need to raise $3,000 this month for development, writing time, and design support. If you’ve been moved by my work in the past — or you believe in the power of stories, justice, and financial freedom — I’d be so grateful for your support. Every single bit helps.
You can Venmo me directly at @danjorree. And PLEASE message me if you want to talk more about any of this. Thank you for believing in me. For showing up. For dreaming with me. I love you with a passion that burns with the intensity of 1,000 white hot suns..
Joyfully,
Jordan
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