A geographer and activist for racial rights in the United States, Lewis is a professor and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on experiences of economic and racial inequality and the development of frameworks for reparations, not only as a means to redress past grievances, but with the aim of fostering progress in Black communities. Between 2021 and 2023 he was a member of the Reparations Task Force for the state of California, the first reparations commission organized by the US government. Today, he leads a group of economists and political scientists who study racial disparities in wealth. Lewis is the founder of the Berkeley Black Geographies project, focused on studying the key role of racialization in the organization of modern societies. He is the author of Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022).