Malaika Jabali, New Arizona Fellow, is the Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence Magazine. Her writing on race, class, and politics has appeared in Teen Vogue, the New Republic, Very Smart Brothas, Jacobin, and the Guardian, where she was a columnist.
Her first book It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On (forthcoming October 2023) is an illustrated relationship guide to dumping capitalism that centers revolutionaries of color. A graduate of Columbia Law School and licensed attorney, Jabali wrote policy as a Senior Counsel of the New York City Council. Her first politics feature, “The Color of Economic Anxiety,” published in Current Affairs Magazine, received a 2019 New York Association of Black Journalists Award for magazine/feature. She is currently writing a book on Black Midwesterners to reframe dominant, misleading narratives of the working class and their crucial role in our democracy.
Selected Work
- The Color of Economic Anxiety: A narrative essay for Current Affairs exploring the economic anxiety of Black Milwaukeeans and other swing-state nonvoters that were overlooked in the 2016 post-mortems focusing on white Trump voters.
- Left Out: A short film on YouTube examining the economic crisis facing Black Milwaukeeans and its potential impact on voting.
- Economic Anxiety Is Not Just For White Men: An essay for the Root looking at the lives of two men—one white-passing, one Black, struggling with late-stage capitalism and disparate policing.
- Minnesota’s Unrest is Decades in the Making. Most Americans Just Forgot That Black Midwesterners Exist: An op-ed for Vox drawing attention to the class dynamics fueling the unrest in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s murder.