Appendix E
Notes and Sources
Listen to this chapter8 min 50 s
About the narration: This narration is an AI-generated voice. These books are a passion project, and I wanted them to be accessible to everyone, including people who would rather listen than read. The voice may stumble over some names and Afrikaans words.
This book blends memoir with data, and data must answer to its sources. The key statistical claims are listed below by chapter, with the principal source for each. Where a figure changes from year to year (budgets, backlogs, scores), the year named in the text is the reference point.
Prologue. Global sea level has risen roughly eight to nine inches since 1880: NOAA Climate.gov, “Climate Change: Global Sea Level.”
Prologue and Chapter 4. Kansas Senate Bill 180 (2023), redefining sex in state law: Kansas Legislature.
Prologue. Millimeter wave body scanners in United States airports require the operator to select male or female before each scan, and anatomy that does not match the selection registers as an anomaly requiring a physical search: Transportation Security Administration guidance for transgender passengers; Advocates for Trans Equality, know-your-rights material on airport screening.
Chapter 1. United States immigration enforcement spending, including the roughly $170 billion added by Congress in 2025: American Immigration Council; Brennan Center for Justice; Congressional Research Service.
Chapter 2. The richest 1% of American households hold more wealth than the middle 60% combined: Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts.
Chapter 3. The world’s richest 1% owned more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people: Oxfam, “Time to Care” (2020).
Chapter 3. Approximately 530,000 American families bankrupted by medical costs each year, and 66.5% of bankruptcies tied to medical issues: Himmelstein et al., American Journal of Public Health (2019).
Chapter 4. 3,362 instances of book bans in the 2022-2023 school year: PEN America, “Banned in the USA” (2023).
Chapter 5. Formerly redlined neighborhoods measurably hotter than non-redlined ones: Hoffman, Shandas, and Pendleton, Climate (2020).
Chapter 5. Cyclone Idai damage in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi estimated near $2 billion: World Bank and United Nations assessments (2019).
Chapter 6. Immigration court backlog of nearly 3.8 million cases and multi-year asylum waits: TRAC Immigration, Syracuse University (2025).
Chapter 8. Gender-affirming care associated with roughly 60% lower odds of depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality among trans youth: Tordoff et al., JAMA Network Open (2022).
Chapter 8. Approximately 3.6 million eviction cases filed annually in the United States: Eviction Lab, Princeton University.
Chapter 9. Racial disparities in traffic stops and searches: Stanford Open Policing Project. Black women roughly three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chapter 10. Section 377, enacted under British rule in 1860 and read down by India’s Supreme Court in 2018: Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India.
Chapter 11. Twenty consecutive years of decline in global freedom: Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2026.”
Chapter 13. Life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest 1% (about 14 years for men and 10 for women): Chetty et al., JAMA (2016).
Chapter 13. Voter identification possession gap (roughly 8% of white versus 25% of Black voting-age citizens without government photo identification): Brennan Center for Justice, “Citizens Without Proof” (2006). This survey is old and its method has been contested; it is cited here as the origin of a widely repeated figure, and the direction of the gap, not its precise size, is what the argument rests on.
Chapter 13. Black-white homeownership gap (roughly 74% versus 45%): United States Census Bureau; National Association of Realtors.
Chapter 14. 84% of South Africans rely on a public health system served by roughly 30% of the country’s doctors: Econex and national health reviews.
Chapter 14. 81% of Grade 4 learners unable to read for meaning in any language: PIRLS 2021. 46% of water systems failing safety standards: Department of Water and Sanitation, Blue Drop Report (2023).
Chapter 15. Roughly one actively licensed doctor per 6,400 people: Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council licensing figures for 2026, as reported in the Ugandan press (August 2026). The older, still widely repeated figure of 1:25,000 is out of date. Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023): Parliament of Uganda. 2021 nationwide internet shutdown and the house arrest of Bobi Wine during the count: contemporaneous reporting and NetBlocks monitoring.
Chapter 15. Medical bankruptcy: Himmelstein et al., American Journal of Public Health (2019), which found that roughly two thirds of debtors filing for bankruptcy cited a medical cause among their reasons. It is often misquoted as a finding that medical bills cause two thirds of bankruptcies; it does not say that, and this book does not either.
Chapter 15 and Appendix A. Norway: turnout and electoral system, Statistics Norway; the Sami assimilation record, Norway’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to the Storting (2023); the right to a healthy environment, Constitution of Norway, Article 112.
Chapter 15 and Appendix A. Uruguay: the 2004 constitutional referendum making water a human right; Ley 19.684 (2018), the comprehensive law for trans persons, including legal self-determination and the reparations pension; the 2023 Montevideo drought and the salinity of the municipal supply, OSE and contemporaneous reporting; prison conditions, reports of the Comisionado Parlamentario Penitenciario; health coverage, Sistema Nacional Integrado de Salud.
Chapter 15. Uruguay’s income per person, roughly $25,000 against roughly $89,000 in the United States in 2025: International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Uruguay’s press freedom: Reporters Without Borders, World Press Freedom Index (2025 and 2026), where Costa Rica leads Latin America.
Chapter 19. Nearly 3,500 newspapers lost since 2005, and some 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news: Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, “The State of Local News 2025.” Healthcare algorithm and Black patients: Obermeyer et al., Science (2019).
Chapter 20. CAHOOTS answered about 17 percent of the Eugene Police Department’s call volume in 2017: Eugene Police Department and White Bird Clinic.
Chapter 21. Women perform 76.2 percent of unpaid care work: International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (2018). 12.5 billion hours a day, worth at least $10.8 trillion a year: Oxfam, “Time to Care” (2020). One in seven adults in immigrant families avoided benefits: Urban Institute (2019).
Appendix A. All scores are readings for 2025, made by the author from public data, and are published category by category so that they can be contested individually.