Khiara M. Bridges’s newest book, Expecting Inequity, “has been a long time coming,” the UC Berkeley law professor told The Nation in early March. Bridges, who earned a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University, where she also received her JD, first studied the roles of class and race in maternal healthcare in her 2011 book Reproducing Race, offering what she now calls a “scathing critique of Medicaid and its program of prenatal care…that completely disregards the desires of the pregnant person and also completely disregards the discretion of the provider,” especially compared with people who receive commercial insurance and can make a lot more choices about their care. This system treats the poor, she wrote, as a “fictional uniform population” and erases their unique desires and needs, undermining their agency while allowing inequality, and racial inequality in particular, to continue unabated. But people attending her book talks questioned whether the dehumanization that low-income people of color experience is really due to their race or primarily a function of their poverty. They were right, Bridges says, that poor people in the United States are treated unjustly. “But implicit in that question was the assumption that racism doesn’t show up when you have class privilege—that you [can] escape dehumanization and negative outcomes if you are a person of color with some degree of wealth or affluence.” Expecting Inequity is Bridges’s investigation into whether that is possible.

The answers are surprising.