Heather McGhee, welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
Thank you. I'm so glad to be with you.
I'm so excited for this conversation.
You cannot even understand.
I'm excited because this is a concept
that I have been preaching to my friends
and anyone who's within earshot of me
for, like, the last five, six, seven years of my life.
But I do not have the time nor the commitment
to do any of the research to back up any of my claims.
And my claims are simple.
Number one, I believe that racism costs everyone,
especially white people, a lot of money.
And it costs all of society money.
And I've always said to people
that racism is one of the craziest concepts to me,
because it causes the people
who oftentimes harbor the belief to hurt themselves.
So, I welcome you to the show
because you've done the work behind this.
You've actually done the data science behind it,
and you've written a book entitled The Sum of Us.
Tell me a little bit about what the book is about
and why that title is so important.
I wrote this book, because after nearly 20 years
of trying to find solutions to economic inequality,
and our big problems in society,
I kept running up against a wall.
And I kept asking myself, "Okay,
why can't we just seem to have nice things?"
And by nice things, I don't mean, like, hovercraft
or laundry that does itself.
I mean universal health care,
a public health system to handle pandemics,
reliable modern infrastructure
in a country with so much wealth.
So, I set off on this journey across the country.
I immersed myself in the research.
And it turns out that racism is at the core
of all of our most vexing public problems.
As I've traveled throughout the world,
the countries where they have the most fair ideas
are the countries where they also have
the most homogenous populations, where they believe,
"Everyone should have because everyone is like me."
It feels like it is easier for people to not believe
that life is a zero-sum game when they think
that everybody's benefiting
because everybody should benefit.
Talk me through some of that
and what you discovered in your research.
That's exactly right.
The book is called The Sum of Us,
because at its core, when we say "racism,"
it's the world view that our society is a zero-sum game,
that progress for people of color has to come
at the expense of white people,
a dollar in our pocket has to mean a dollar less in theirs.
And, of course, economically, that's just not true.
Just last year, Citigroup found that over the past 20 years,
the racial economic divides-- which are here
because of policy, past and present--
cost this country $16 trillion.
But I kept hearing it, across the country,
when I talked to people.
I went to Mississippi
and talked to a factory worker named Joey
who explained that his white coworkers voted no
to join a union that would have given them better wages
and benefits, because the mentality was, as he said,
"If the Blacks are for it, I'm against it."
That has been the overarching ideology
and worldview of many, if not most, white Americans,
according to the public opinion data,
really, particularly since the civil rights movement,
well, you know, sort of forced them to share
the spoils of a country that used to be, basically,
the benefits were for whites only.
You know, you... you've run think tanks,
and you've worked in the world of just looking at the numbers,
but for this book, you combined the numbers
with the personal stories.
What have you found is the best method
to get a person to understand
that racism is costing them money,
even though they're the one being racist?
You know, it calls to mind a visit I had
with a woman named Bridgett.
This is a white woman who has spent her whole life
working in fast food.
She lives in Kansas City.
And she totally had bought the "us versus them, zero-sum,
anti-immigrant,
anti, you know, people in the inner city" story.
And because of that, I think,
in many ways she actually didn't believe
that she herself, a minimum wage worker,
was ever gonna be worth more than $7.25 an hour.
But she was approached by workers who were organizing
with the Fight for $15, $15 an hour.
And she went to the first organizing meeting.
She saw a Latina woman stand up and describe her life,
her bad plumbing, her apartment, having three kids
and feeling trapped, and she said, "I saw myself in her."
And Bridgett came to realize that it wasn't a zero-sum game.
As she says, "You know, Black, white or brown,
"it's not us versus them.
For me to come up, you've got to come up, too."
She said, "As long as we're divided, we're conquered."
And that movement, the cross-racial Fight for $15,
has been unlocking what I began to call
the "solidarity dividends," these gains we can achieve
but only when we link arms together across race.
Higher wages, cleaner air,
better funded schools for everyone.
In America, one of the things that intrigued me the most,
because it was similar to South Africa,
was the story of the public swimming pools.
I even have standup bits about this where I would say:
You know, racism is such a powerful drug
that it would make white people drain swimming pools.
The thing that they love more than anything,
they decimated them.
You've used this as the central, you know, like, the through line
to the book and the telling of the story.
Why are public pools the perfect example
of how racism hurts
the people who are oftentimes the most racist?
I went to Montgomery, Alabama, where there's this park
in the middle of the town called Oak Park.
And it used to have one of the nearly 2,000 grand, resort-style
public swimming pools that were built
in the '20s, '30s and '40s,
at a time when it was just one little symbol
of a big government commitment to everyone having
a high quality of life.
This was when the sort of American dream really set...
took root.
The swimming pool was public, it was funded with tax dollars,
and yet it was segregated.
During the civil rights movement,
Black families said, "Hey, what about us?"
And instead of integrating it, the town of Montgomery
closed the swimming pool, drained the public pool,
backed a truckful of dirt,
filled it in...
Actually closed the entire Parks and Recreation Department.
Trevor, they even sold off the animals in the zoo.
(laughing)
And they kept it closed for a decade--
-the entire 1960s. -It's wild.
It's wild, but it is the perfect example
of the way that racism has a cost for everyone.
It feels like in America, ever since the civil rights movement,
we've all been sort of dealing
with living in the bottom of a drained pool.
It feels like, since then-- and the evidence bears this out--
we have seen white people, with their votes, turn their backs
on the formula that created the great middle class,
that made... would have made all of our lives better,
because they would have to share it
with people they've been taught--
and that's the key, that they've been taught--
to disdain and distrust.
You know, what I also enjoyed about the book
is that you lay out the possibilities,
you lay out the conversations that need to be had,
and you lay out the economic benefits of it all.
Before I let you go, one of the more interesting things
that you propose is having
some sort of truth and reconciliation commission
where people talk about these things.
Now, as a South African, I saw the benefits,
and I've also seen the shortcomings
of not doing something post the conversation.
So, walk me through why you think America would benefit
from having some sort of truth and reconciliation commission.
So, we have a country, the United States was born
with this view of a zero-sum racial hierarchy
built into the economic justification
for stolen land, stolen people and stolen labor.
This is a very old idea.
And yet we've never gotten on the same page
about our history.
So I think it's not possible for us to actually move forward,
if we're still contesting the basic facts
about our history and even our present.
So obviously, we have to have a sort of truth effort,
but it can't just be a commission in Washington.
What's so exciting to me is that it's happening
at the community level.
You've got to take action, but you also have to start
with telling the truth.
And that's what's been robbed from us.
Our truth in this country is so much more terrible,
but also, because of the overcoming,
so much more beautiful
than we've been allowed to truly know.
Well, hopefully, um, reading your book
will be the first journey on that, uh...
first part of that journey, rather,
because I think it's insightful, it's wonderful,
it is optimistic, but it's also truthful at the same time.
Heather McGhee, thank you so much for taking the time,
and congratulations on a fantastic book.
Thank you, Trevor, thank you so much.