June 14, 2021 • 38 mins
Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy, and author of the best-selling book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. She is the former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos and now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. Dr. Kendi sat down with the self-described “policy wonk” to discuss how a racist society hurts everyone. Together they explore how, by investing in each other, we can all achieve better jobs, better health, better democracy, better schools, better neighborhoods for our kids—and so much more. For further reading, resources, and a transcript of this episode, visit pushkin.fm/show/be-antiracist-ibram-kendi.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Most people in this country need a lot of things,
and we can afford them, and we can make sure
that people who contribute to the prophets and the wealth
of our economy are getting their fair share. And yet
(00:36):
the coalition that could make that happen on a consistent
way is splintered because of racism. Racism is harmful not
just to black people, not just to indigenous people, not
just to Asian Americans and Latin X Americans, to everyone.
And while the harm done to people of color is
(00:57):
playing to see, we're often blind to the ways racism
also harms white people. I'm Ebra Mexican, and this is
be anti racist. Now. I'm not stating that racism harms
white people to the same extent that it does people
(01:19):
of color. I'm stating that the racism of white people
can harm white people too. I'm an historian, a storyteller.
Let me tell you a story. It takes place in
eighteen forty seven. Tensions were running high in the United States.
Two years prior, Congress had voted to annex Texas, a
(01:42):
huge state with many powerful slaveholders. This annexation caused many
in the North to worry about the western spread of
enslavers and the enslaved. At the same time, white workers
feared that they would soon lose their jobs to the
growing number of black and immigrant laborers being placed in
(02:03):
skilled positions along the East Coast and in the slave
holding South. At the Tradeger Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia,
white workers went on strike in eighteen forty seven. They
demanded an increase in pay and the removal of the
negroes from skilled work. Enslavement wouldn't be abolished in Virginia
(02:24):
for almost another twenty years, and these white workers hated,
as they put it, being classed and associated with slaves.
This strike was a huge deal, one of the first
among white workers in the South, and it was part
of a broader movement against enslaved labor at the time,
(02:44):
meaning the movement did not focus on challenging the way
enslaved people were terrorized to labor in fields and homes
without pay. This movement went by the name Free Soil.
One of its leaders was David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania.
Congressman Wilmot wanted to end the western spread of slavery
(03:05):
because enslave labor threatened the labor of white workers. Congressman
Wilmot gave a speech in the House of Representatives claiming
with the Negro slave labors, the free white man cannot
labor by his side without sharing in his degradation and disgrace.
(03:25):
The workers on strike in eighteen forty seven wanted the
skilled positions at Tredeger Iron Works to be free soil,
but they had a hope problem with their free soil
being surrounded by enslaved soil. Like other working class Southern Whites,
the strikers had been taught since birth to value their
(03:46):
race over their class. They used slogans such as every
laborer a slaveholder. Many white laborers aspired to be wealthy enslavers,
just as many white working class men aspire to be
billionaire Donald Trump today. Many white laborers saw wealthy enslavers
as their allies, but the feeling was in mutual then
(04:10):
or now. Wealthy white enslavers viewed the white strikers as
dangerous kind of like free soilers up north. The white
power structure of Richmond, Virginia, rallied behind the owners, not
the workers of Tredeger Iron Works. The strike dragged on
from May to June eighteen forty seven without any victories,
(04:34):
the iron workers dropped their wage grievance and to a
certain extent, toned down their racist rhetoric. The local newspaper
reported that the objection to working with negroes did not
govern the striker's action, but that it was the mere
fear that the negroes were intended hereafter to take their places.
(04:55):
In the end, the white factory owners fired the white strikers,
teaching them a lesson that Frederick Douglas would explain years later.
The slaveholders, with the craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging
the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the blacks,
succeed in making the said white man almost as much
(05:18):
a slave as the black slave himself. From the time
of enslavement until today, the ruling elites have divided and
conquered and subjugated working class white people and people of color.
(05:38):
Welcome to be Anti racist in Action podcasts, where we
discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, How to
save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the
destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to free humanity
through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness
(06:01):
of anti racist power and policy. On b Anti Racist
we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how
to bring into being what modern humans have never known,
a just in equitable world. You ready, let's roll. In
(06:33):
the nineteen thirties and forties, the United States went on
a nationwide building boom of public amenities funded by tax dollars,
which in Montgomery, Alabama, included the Oak Park Pool, except
the Oak Park Pool was for whites only. When a
federal court finally deemed this unconstitutional, the reaction of the
(06:54):
town council was swift. They would drain the public pool
rather than let black families swim to heaven. McGee is
an expert in economic and social policy and the author
of the best selling book Some of Us, What Racism
Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather explodes
(07:16):
one of the greatest racial myths, that white people lose
as people of color gain. She shows that as racism wins,
we all lose. Heather is one of America's sharpest thinkers,
The former president of the inequality focused think tank Demos
and its drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly
(07:40):
to New shows, including NBC's Meet the Press. She now
chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation's largest
online racial justice organization. I sat down with Heather McGee
recently to learn how by investing in each other, we
can all achieve better jobs, better health, better democracy, better schools,
(08:03):
better neighborhoods for our kids, and so much more. Heather,
as always, it's truly an honor to speak with you.
Your book, The Some of Us, is the type of
book that I learned from that I think many Americans
and many people around the world can learn from. I
wrote this book because I felt like we were missing
(08:27):
something in the great pursuit of a society. It should
be to have progress, to have people have less want
and more joy, people to have more of the fruits
of economic progress and technological progress, and for our problems
to be solved generation after generation, right, And it felt
(08:50):
like that progress slowing down, slash reversing. When some Americans
imagine the transformation of this country, they imagine that they're
going to lose if we actually create inequitable and just,
anti racist America. And it seems, as you've written that
(09:11):
that's based on a zero sum myth. So I left
a career in economic policy to go out on this
quixotic journey in some ways, to find the answer to
the question of why can't we seem to have nice things?
And what are the roots of our dysfunction? And it's
there that I came upon this paradigm of the zero sum.
(09:34):
It's a term that means there's no such thing as
mutual progress when you have people who are in a
competition with one another. If Team A scores one more point,
team B scores one less point, the points will always
add up to zero, positive on one side, negative on
the other. Progress for team A has to come at
(09:56):
the expense of team B. There's a limited or fixed pie.
And that idea resonated so deeply with me. It sort
of gave a name and a description to something I
had sensed my whole life life, this fear that when
white supremacy falls, that the world will become one that
(10:20):
white people should fear. Therefore, racism is really great for
white people, really terrible for people of color, and so
their self interest is in preserving racism at all costs.
And it's the at all costs piece that really felt
so important for me to lay out, what are the
costs of racism to our entire society. What exactly is
(10:45):
the price white people are willing to pay to keep
the system as it has been? And once I started looking,
the list just kept growing, and that made it clear
to me that we have these self interested elites packaging marketing,
selling this zero sum lie to most white Americans, and
(11:07):
they're doing it for their own but our side, when
we only talk about racism as something that's good for
white people, are kind of like helping out a little bit. Right.
My provocation, the agitation that made me feel like, Okay,
maybe I do have something to add to this conversation
was we haven't told the full story of what it
has cost this entire country. You were specifically writing about
(11:32):
white folks who think that they're going to lose, But
as a man of color reading it, I also think
men of color too have bought into this myth of
the zero sum, and I think that as they've seen
women of color organizing and advocating in some cases rising,
(11:52):
they too have felt threatened as if they're losing. Yeah,
but back to white folks, this is what I've been
sort of saying, and I want to know whether I'm
just wrong that white Americans typically compare their lock two
people of color, and so, in other words, if their
school has more resources, in a way, their child's school
(12:17):
is almost like a first class school. They're like, whoa,
if we create equity, then I'm gonna be back in coach. Yeah,
I don't want that. I'm gonna lose. My kid's gonna lose.
But it seems to me that white Americans should be
assessing themselves from other white people in the Western world. Yeah,
and when they make that comparison, that's when they can
(12:37):
see actually what they don't have, how they're in coach.
That's right, And in fact, maybe in other societies in
the Western world, everybody's just in first class. There's no
little curtain that the flight attendant moves over right, and
everyone gets food right, everyone has a leg room, you know,
everybody gets to bring a bag. You know, this really
(12:59):
comes from and is a feature of how brutally hierarchical
our society is. In the first chapter of the Some
of Us, I go back in our history to the
beginning to find out where this zero sum worldview and
this lie came from, whose interest it served, and why
it sort of reanimated generation after generation, and as it
(13:20):
turns out, it was created as a way to sort
of discipline white Europeans in the colonial era to be
satisfied with their lot in a society where wealth was
still quite concentrated, and where, because of chattel slavery in
(13:41):
the plantation economy, there actually wasn't a lot of room
a white person who was not a plantation owner. Their
labor wasn't needed in the southern economy, right, like, what
do we need you for? Right? This myth of white
supremacy was sold to white masses so that they could have,
of course, as w B depoys said, the psychological wages
(14:03):
of whiteness rather than material wages, and those psychological wayes
were knowing all always that in a deeply unequal economy
they could nonetheless count on being more than and better
than black people. Precisely, and of course we're not as
familiar with the roughly five million or so non slaveholding
(14:28):
working class and poor whites, many of whom opposed succession
during the Civil War, many of whom rioted for food,
many of who sent their sons and fathers and brothers
to the battlefields to die. For slaveholders who were maintaining
their poverty as they were enslaving other people, and then ironically,
(14:51):
their great great grandchildren are now carrying around Confederate flags. Absolutely,
that is that's the okie doke, right. That is the
way in which the loss cause ideology, which is just
one more name and form of this big lie about
(15:12):
white supremacy, that communicates what white people's relative worth is
to black people and how they need to feel about
black people. You now have white people in the same
breath deny that their family had anything to do with slavery,
which might be true, but then deny that the Confederate
(15:35):
flag is a symbol of slavery and attach themselves to
what is a very cheap symbol of an aspirational status.
Right that you know didn't feed them. Didn't feed them then,
isn't feeding them now? And what I try to do
(15:56):
is to lay out how many things our country desperately needs.
And by our country, I mean most people in this country,
most people in a country where one percent of the
population owns more wealth in the middle class. Most people
in this country need a lot of things, and we
can afford them, and we can rewrite the rules around
(16:17):
the way business acts and operates in order to make
sure that people who contribute to the profits and the
wealth of our economy are getting their fair share of it.
And yet the coalition that could make that happen on
a consistent way is splintered because of the lie of
the zero sum and most importantly, the vehicles for collective
(16:40):
action that would bring us shoulder to shoulder and allow
us to have the power to get what we need
out of society. Government and labor unions have been degraded
in the white imagination because of racism. White Americans turn
their backs on the pro government, pro labor formula that
(17:01):
created the white middle class in the middle of the
twentieth century because of racism in the wake of the
Civil Rights movement. I'm Heather c McKee, and you're listening
to be anti racist with Abram X Candy. I think
the zero sun game does not allow Americans to realize
(17:26):
that we are part of a greater community, and we
need to defend that greater community, because if we leave
the community exposed, we're going to become exposed. And I
think the chapter that for me exposed this the most was,
of course, your chapter detailing what actually happened during the
Great Recession. I'm so glad you asked me about this chapter.
(17:46):
It is the one that I am closest to because
it was really the issue that I worked on for
the first half of my career, the deregulation of the
financial industry, which basically just means powerful people in the
market can regulate themselves. If you say the people who
should decide are the winners in the market, right right,
(18:06):
that's not a lot of people of color, that's not
a lot of women. So you're shifting who gets to
decide how much workers are paid, how much people can pollute,
how much people can charge on interest, not from the government,
as most advanced societies do and have, but rather to
the usually wealthy white men themselves. So the deregulation of
the financial sector happened just around the time when the
(18:29):
federal government was finally moving to end its explicitly racist
practices of redlining and discriminating against black would be property
owners and would be customers of banks. So it was
a perfect storm. And there are a couple of pieces
of this that I try to say as much as
(18:50):
possible because they're really flouting the conventional wisdom. One often
the idea is that this was people who needed subprime
mortgages in order to buy their first home. And in fact,
the majority of subprime mortgages were refinances, so it's people
who already had homes who then got a refinance loan
(19:11):
that often wound them up in foreclosure. So that's how
you see a net loss in homeownership. And then, of course, second,
the core myth is the idea that these were risky
borrowers who shouldn't have been eligible for good credit, and
therefore it was sort of a risk that everybody took.
The borrower took a risk, the lender took a risk,
and whoops, it didn't work out. But that's not the case.
(19:32):
In two thousand and seven, Wall Street Journal huge studying
all the subprime mortgage holders in the country. The majority
of them had prime credit scores. Then why were there
these subprime loans which really just meant they were more
expensive and had worse terms, more likely to end up
in foreclosure. Why were they flourishing? Why were they one
out of every five mortgages at the peak? And it
(19:54):
was because they were so profitable, and how could they
get away with it? Because they started in the late
nineteen nineties and early two thousands, testing out this new
exotic mortgage product on the people who were the least
protected and the least respected by financial industry people and
by regulators, the relative newcomers in many ways to homeownership,
(20:19):
Black and brown homeowners in these sort of equity rich
working in middle class black neighborhoods. So what happened was
you started to see these massive foreclosures in the early
two thousands, and as an advocate at that time for
consumer protection, I was in many conversations with people who
had the power to address a sort of quiet crisis
(20:41):
that was burning through black and brown neighborhoods before subprime
became a household word. And it was so clear that
the age old stereotypes that equated black people with risk
were stopping them from seeing the crisis for what it
was before it was too late. Literal quote from Senate
Banking Committee staffer was we put these people in homes
(21:04):
when we shouldn't have. It's like, who's the wee, right?
These are black people who have grimmed and saved and
by the very edge of their fingernails, grabbed onto the
American dream. Despite everything that people in this room have done,
and it was so heartbreaking to see so much predation
and so much loss, and so much indifference in the
(21:24):
halls of power. And it wasn't until the formula was
tested and perfected and it was so profitable that that machine,
fueled by racism and greed, rolled over the rest of
the wider and whiter mortgage market. And then we know
where the story ends with the crash and the Great Recession.
It's just amazing how many livelihoods could have been saved
(21:49):
during the Great Recession if people did not have a
zero sum perspective, if people actually challenge racism. During the
coronavirus pandemic, it was originally assumed that black people were
primarily being infected in field because they were so lazy,
(22:12):
obese and not taking the problems seriously, and then it
led to this refusal to check the problem aggressively. If anything,
things were opened back up, and then by the end
of the year, Middle America states like the Dakotas were
(22:33):
facing the highest rates of infection and death in the
number of white lives that could have been saved during
the coronavirus if those white lives actually cared about black lives.
The parallels are really profound. Speaking about housing, you'll have
some Americans who will say, Okay, you know what, Yes, Heather,
I could understand how that's a problem. Obviously, we should
(22:57):
have taken those subprime mortgages seriously when they were attacking
black home buyers. We shouldn't have seen black people as
the problem. Certainly we can see how that led to
the Great rest. And I'm specifically talking about wealthy white
Americans who are sitting right now in homogeneous white neighborhoods,
who then can't make the connection between that problem and
(23:21):
the problem that you actually talk about in a chapter
called Living Apart, where you actually document that it's not
just a racist idea that predominantly white schools and neighborhoods
are good. It's actually demonstratively false, and it's not even
good for white people. That's right. I wrote the chapter
(23:43):
Living Apart to interrogate and flip on its head the
way we normally think of segregation as something that white
people do to people of color, to exclude us, to
put us in a ghetto, to keep us away from
all the good things for themselves inside. I want to
just ask the question, what are the costs of segregation?
(24:04):
To our entire society, and yes to white people too.
There were a few big things that I discovered that
helped me sort of pull together the whole picture. The
first is a study that was done by the Urban
Institute and the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, my hometown,
one of the most segregated cities in the country, to
try to equip people who wanted to do something about integration,
(24:26):
who are often getting pushback right like, oh, how much
is it going to cost us to cite affordable housing
in these richer neighborhoods. What's the cost of changing the
status quo? And they came up with astronomical figures of
lost lives, lost wealth, lost income, lost education because of segregation.
And then I had this kind of common sense understanding
(24:50):
that white people who are paying a lot to get
the suburban house in the quote unquote good school district
are actually like laying out cash in order to avoid
what racism has wrought on public education, in order to
avoid the neighborhoods that have too many black and brown
people and where the test scores are not as high
(25:11):
as they are in these white segregated schools. So I thought, okay,
we can actually calculate that, oh, it's twenty something thousand
more dollars short a house that's the same as a
house in a school district that's slightly less highly rated.
But then I dug even deeper and it became clear that,
in fact, not only are white families often paying in
(25:32):
order to segregate their children out of a sense that
that is somehow going to be better for them, but
it's not better for them. YEA. The Brown versus Board
of Education decision should have been when we stopped this madness.
That should have been where the story of segregation and
education ended, and of course it wasn't. I look at
a part of the very famous social science appendix that
(25:55):
was presented to the justices to make the case that
segregation communicates negative stories two black children about their own
self worth, and that was what the justices invoked in
their decision. But there was another part of the appendix
that basically laid out the psychological harms of segregation to
(26:21):
white children, the moral disconnect, the ways in which being
taught to assign your worth based on something as shallow
as skin color was distorting to your personality and to
your sense of identity. Formation, the ways in which it
would create guilt feelings and then resentment, the ways that
it would lean you towards authoritarianism was actually in this appendix,
(26:44):
And I chuckle because nothing has changed, right, I mean,
it seems like they could be talking about today, and
so ultimately, for the justices not to rely on the
full weight of the evidence, the full story, I think
cost us something because by suggesting that it is only
bad for black children not to be with white children
(27:05):
and not bad for white children not to be with
black children, we've actually maintained the myth that white is better.
And it's that myth that is still operative today. And
there's just a body of evidence that shows diversity basically
makes white kids smarter, It makes them think with more
(27:27):
rigor and creative problem solving. It sort of puts them
on their game. And so these families that are sort
of chasing the lily white school districts are actually losing
out on the most powerful educational experience they could have,
which is the real gift, right. I think diversity is
America's superpower, and yet we so often don't tap into it.
(27:51):
You certainly have some white parents, just as you have
parents of color, who recognize that at an interpersonal, intercultural level,
they want their children to be exposed to difference and
they value that. They can't imagine raising an anti racist
child in a homogeneous setting. So it's fascinating that let's
(28:14):
say you don't care about any of them. All you
want is a child who's a great student. The studies
show that too, right. But finally, let's turn to the solution,
what you call the solidarity dividend. So in discovering that racism,
(28:34):
more than any other factor, is what is keeping Americans
from having nice things, the flip side, it actually becomes
easier to conceive of progress on all of these big
economic and social challenges if we come together across lines
of race. And that's what I began calling the solidarity divodend.
(28:58):
It's all these gains that we can unlock by coming
together to find solutions to our common problems. Things like
higher wages, better rates of unionization, more healthcare, cleaner air,
better funded schools. These are all the things that we
are denying ourselves as a people basically because of the
(29:20):
belief in this zero some racial hierarchy, and because of
the phenomenon of seeing public goods wier in this country
because support has been degraded as the public has grown
to include more people of color, whom white people have
been taught to disdain and distrust. That's how we got
here from having the greatest middle class the world I've
(29:43):
ever seen, to being one of the most unequal societies
in the world. But if we refill the pool of
public goods for everyone, that's a solidarity dividend. And the
only way we can get there is through cross racial solidarity.
I think in many ways it is our destiny in
this country. Right as we quickly become a country with
no racial majority, we can dismantle the lie of racial hierarchy.
(30:08):
And when we do that, when we stand up for
one another, when we see that there's a fire raging
in black communities, and we don't think, well, that's something
wrong with black people, but rather we say, let's fix
that problem. Now, we get a solidarity dividend of the
United States having the best in the world coronavirus response. Right,
(30:29):
we could have done that. We were sort of set
up to do that with all of our resources, all
of that, and yet so many of the ways that
we failed, and that we had one of the worst
certainly the worst in the advanced economy world was because
of racism and because of the public goods that we
don't have. You know, we could have had a society
(30:53):
where the response was, let us move towards one another,
let us protect one another, let us make sure that
the essential workers have everything they need in order to
still work, and let us pay people to stay home,
right exactly other countries exactly when we weren't really equipped
for that. And I think a large part of the
(31:14):
reason why we weren't was because of racist and difference,
because of the racist draining of public goods and public
services and benefits, and because we have this fractured political
debate which is so rooted in racist fear mongering and scapegoating.
And so when I say that we can have a
solidarity dividend in this country, it's that we can have frankly,
(31:40):
a little bit of what we're seeing right now in
our politics. We had a multi racial, anti racist majority
that voted in a change in our politics in November,
and then waiting through high water to vote in January
to give a slim majority to a party that was
promising to address the challenges of inequality. The pandemic, corruption,
(32:05):
our democracy, climate change, and racial justice out of the gate,
a rescue plan that cuts child poverty in half, to
remind us that black, white, and brown poverty is a
policy choice. That's a solidarity dividend, real family leave and childcare,
which was defeated in the early nineteen seventies because of
(32:29):
the fears of integration. Having that in this country, finally,
that's a solidarity dividend. How does someone carry out the
solidarity dividend and refill the pools? Yeah, I think it's
so important. I mean, I'm a policy wank, that's been
my career, But after the journey to write to some
(32:51):
of us, I'm more and more in love with the
transformative power of organizing. And thankfully we are in a
sort of boom time for organizing. People have taken action
through the Trump era and through this pandemic, more so
than in generations, and so we have to keep going.
I do believe that finding an issue is really a
(33:16):
good way to start. Pick a local issue that means
a lot, and work with your neighbors to change the
rules to allow for more opportunity for everyone. I don't
want people to be stuck reading our books right. I
want people to read the books, close them, take action,
pick up the phone, go online, pick up a clipboard,
(33:36):
and go next door. Right. I think that is where
people ultimately have the most enduring consciousness change. I'm reminded
of a woman whom I met in Kansas City named
Bridget who is a lifelong fast food worker, minimum wage worker,
white woman who believe the anti immigrant, anti black narratives
that her community and her family had believed and taught
(33:59):
to her, the kind of right wing fear mongering and scapegoating.
And she also believed that her own labor was never
going to be worth more than twenty five an hour.
But it was when she was approached to join an
organizing meeting with the Fight for Fifteen in the Union
that she saw a Latina woman stand up and talk
(34:20):
about her own life, you know, having three kids in
a house of bad plumbing, and she said, I saw
myself in her, and something switched and through the act
of organizing for something that would lift both of them,
and she was able to put away those racist ideas.
And as she says to me, now it's not a
matter of us versus them. For us to come up,
(34:41):
they've got to come up. As long as we're divided,
we're conquered. She says racism is bad for white people too,
because it keeps us divided from our black and brown
brothers and sisters. That consciousness change for a white woman
who should have firmly been in the sort of Trump camp,
comes from organizing. And that's what I think we need
to do all across this country. Precisely. I could not
(35:03):
agree more to echo. As they would say in the sixties,
to those who were just reading and learning, they would say,
stop being those armchair radicals. Who needs you to get
up and fight and organize. Thank you so much for
your brilliance, for your work, for your book to some
of us, and for taking some time to join this community.
(35:25):
Thank you, Thank you. Abel. The zero sub myth claims
that progress for people of color means a loss for
white people, as Heather rights in the sum of us.
This is the fable that racist power has pedaled for
(35:45):
centuries before and after the Civil War. It was the
fable that the free soilers and factory owners alike told
white workers in both the North and the Sound and
Tredegar iron works ended up producing over half of the
armament that was used during the Civil War by the Confederacy.
(36:07):
We lost more than six hundred in lives during the
Civil War, more American lives than any other war in history.
When we buy into the zero sum, we all lose,
just like the white workers who struck at Tredegar Iron
Works in eighteen forty seven lost. But when we change
(36:28):
the game in working coalition, we all win together. Yet
racial division continues to depress and deplete us. We can
come together across our racial, cultural, and historical differences in
cash in on our solidarity dividend, as Heather calls it,
(36:48):
and the dividend pays off in higher wages, better housing,
quality schools, cleaner air, safer neighborhoods, and elected officials who
are responsible to us and not special interests. Tangible benefits
that improve the lives of black, Indigenous, latinas in Asian
people also improve the lives of white people. My conversation
(37:14):
with Heather showed us how we can each contribute to
the solidarity dividend and why the zero sum fable has
such a deep hold on our national consciousness. We should
throw our political weight behind policymakers and policies that universalize
the essentials of life, like basic income, housing and healthcare.
(37:38):
But that's only the beginning. We must target our resources
to create equity between groups. We need equitable policies that
ensure the groups with the greatest needs are provided the most.
We must stop battling against each other and start battling
against racism altogether. We must be anti racist. Be Anti
(38:09):
is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is
written and hosted by doctor Ibram x Kindy and produced
by Alexandra Garratton with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our engineer
has been Talliday, Our editors Julia Barton and our shore
runner Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Onlie Tam Mullat
and Mia Lobell. Many thanks to Timmy Win and doctor
Heather Sandford at the Center for Anside Racist Research at
(38:31):
Boston University for all of their help at Pushkin. Thanks
to Heather Fame, Carli Migliori, John Schnarz, and Jacob Wiseberg.
You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r
Ebrahm and on Instagram at Ebram xk. You can find
Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods. You can
sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To
find more Pushkin podcast, listen on the iHeart Radio app,
(38:53):
Apple Podcasts, or whatever you'd like to listen
Pushkin. Most people in this country need a lot of things,
and we can afford them, and we can make sure
that people who contribute to the prophets and the wealth
of our economy are getting their fair share. And yet
(00:36):
the coalition that could make that happen on a consistent
way is splintered because of racism. Racism is harmful not
just to black people, not just to indigenous people, not
just to Asian Americans and Latin X Americans, to everyone.
And while the harm done to people of color is
(00:57):
playing to see, we're often blind to the ways racism
also harms white people. I'm Ebra Mexican, and this is
be anti racist. Now. I'm not stating that racism harms
white people to the same extent that it does people
(01:19):
of color. I'm stating that the racism of white people
can harm white people too. I'm an historian, a storyteller.
Let me tell you a story. It takes place in
eighteen forty seven. Tensions were running high in the United States.
Two years prior, Congress had voted to annex Texas, a
(01:42):
huge state with many powerful slaveholders. This annexation caused many
in the North to worry about the western spread of
enslavers and the enslaved. At the same time, white workers
feared that they would soon lose their jobs to the
growing number of black and immigrant laborers being placed in
(02:03):
skilled positions along the East Coast and in the slave
holding South. At the Tradeger Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia,
white workers went on strike in eighteen forty seven. They
demanded an increase in pay and the removal of the
negroes from skilled work. Enslavement wouldn't be abolished in Virginia
(02:24):
for almost another twenty years, and these white workers hated,
as they put it, being classed and associated with slaves.
This strike was a huge deal, one of the first
among white workers in the South, and it was part
of a broader movement against enslaved labor at the time,
(02:44):
meaning the movement did not focus on challenging the way
enslaved people were terrorized to labor in fields and homes
without pay. This movement went by the name Free Soil.
One of its leaders was David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania.
Congressman Wilmot wanted to end the western spread of slavery
(03:05):
because enslave labor threatened the labor of white workers. Congressman
Wilmot gave a speech in the House of Representatives claiming
with the Negro slave labors, the free white man cannot
labor by his side without sharing in his degradation and disgrace.
(03:25):
The workers on strike in eighteen forty seven wanted the
skilled positions at Tredeger Iron Works to be free soil,
but they had a hope problem with their free soil
being surrounded by enslaved soil. Like other working class Southern Whites,
the strikers had been taught since birth to value their
(03:46):
race over their class. They used slogans such as every
laborer a slaveholder. Many white laborers aspired to be wealthy enslavers,
just as many white working class men aspire to be
billionaire Donald Trump today. Many white laborers saw wealthy enslavers
as their allies, but the feeling was in mutual then
(04:10):
or now. Wealthy white enslavers viewed the white strikers as
dangerous kind of like free soilers up north. The white
power structure of Richmond, Virginia, rallied behind the owners, not
the workers of Tredeger Iron Works. The strike dragged on
from May to June eighteen forty seven without any victories,
(04:34):
the iron workers dropped their wage grievance and to a
certain extent, toned down their racist rhetoric. The local newspaper
reported that the objection to working with negroes did not
govern the striker's action, but that it was the mere
fear that the negroes were intended hereafter to take their places.
(04:55):
In the end, the white factory owners fired the white strikers,
teaching them a lesson that Frederick Douglas would explain years later.
The slaveholders, with the craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging
the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the blacks,
succeed in making the said white man almost as much
(05:18):
a slave as the black slave himself. From the time
of enslavement until today, the ruling elites have divided and
conquered and subjugated working class white people and people of color.
(05:38):
Welcome to be Anti racist in Action podcasts, where we
discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, How to
save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the
destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to free humanity
through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness
(06:01):
of anti racist power and policy. On b Anti Racist
we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how
to bring into being what modern humans have never known,
a just in equitable world. You ready, let's roll. In
(06:33):
the nineteen thirties and forties, the United States went on
a nationwide building boom of public amenities funded by tax dollars,
which in Montgomery, Alabama, included the Oak Park Pool, except
the Oak Park Pool was for whites only. When a
federal court finally deemed this unconstitutional, the reaction of the
(06:54):
town council was swift. They would drain the public pool
rather than let black families swim to heaven. McGee is
an expert in economic and social policy and the author
of the best selling book Some of Us, What Racism
Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather explodes
(07:16):
one of the greatest racial myths, that white people lose
as people of color gain. She shows that as racism wins,
we all lose. Heather is one of America's sharpest thinkers,
The former president of the inequality focused think tank Demos
and its drafted legislation, testified before Congress and contributed regularly
(07:40):
to New shows, including NBC's Meet the Press. She now
chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation's largest
online racial justice organization. I sat down with Heather McGee
recently to learn how by investing in each other, we
can all achieve better jobs, better health, better democracy, better schools,
(08:03):
better neighborhoods for our kids, and so much more. Heather,
as always, it's truly an honor to speak with you.
Your book, The Some of Us, is the type of
book that I learned from that I think many Americans
and many people around the world can learn from. I
wrote this book because I felt like we were missing
(08:27):
something in the great pursuit of a society. It should
be to have progress, to have people have less want
and more joy, people to have more of the fruits
of economic progress and technological progress, and for our problems
to be solved generation after generation, right, And it felt
(08:50):
like that progress slowing down, slash reversing. When some Americans
imagine the transformation of this country, they imagine that they're
going to lose if we actually create inequitable and just,
anti racist America. And it seems, as you've written that
(09:11):
that's based on a zero sum myth. So I left
a career in economic policy to go out on this
quixotic journey in some ways, to find the answer to
the question of why can't we seem to have nice things?
And what are the roots of our dysfunction? And it's
there that I came upon this paradigm of the zero sum.
(09:34):
It's a term that means there's no such thing as
mutual progress when you have people who are in a
competition with one another. If Team A scores one more point,
team B scores one less point, the points will always
add up to zero, positive on one side, negative on
the other. Progress for team A has to come at
(09:56):
the expense of team B. There's a limited or fixed pie.
And that idea resonated so deeply with me. It sort
of gave a name and a description to something I
had sensed my whole life life, this fear that when
white supremacy falls, that the world will become one that
(10:20):
white people should fear. Therefore, racism is really great for
white people, really terrible for people of color, and so
their self interest is in preserving racism at all costs.
And it's the at all costs piece that really felt
so important for me to lay out, what are the
costs of racism to our entire society. What exactly is
(10:45):
the price white people are willing to pay to keep
the system as it has been? And once I started looking,
the list just kept growing, and that made it clear
to me that we have these self interested elites packaging marketing,
selling this zero sum lie to most white Americans, and
(11:07):
they're doing it for their own but our side, when
we only talk about racism as something that's good for
white people, are kind of like helping out a little bit. Right.
My provocation, the agitation that made me feel like, Okay,
maybe I do have something to add to this conversation
was we haven't told the full story of what it
has cost this entire country. You were specifically writing about
(11:32):
white folks who think that they're going to lose, But
as a man of color reading it, I also think
men of color too have bought into this myth of
the zero sum, and I think that as they've seen
women of color organizing and advocating in some cases rising,
(11:52):
they too have felt threatened as if they're losing. Yeah,
but back to white folks, this is what I've been
sort of saying, and I want to know whether I'm
just wrong that white Americans typically compare their lock two
people of color, and so, in other words, if their
school has more resources, in a way, their child's school
(12:17):
is almost like a first class school. They're like, whoa,
if we create equity, then I'm gonna be back in coach. Yeah,
I don't want that. I'm gonna lose. My kid's gonna lose.
But it seems to me that white Americans should be
assessing themselves from other white people in the Western world. Yeah,
and when they make that comparison, that's when they can
(12:37):
see actually what they don't have, how they're in coach.
That's right, And in fact, maybe in other societies in
the Western world, everybody's just in first class. There's no
little curtain that the flight attendant moves over right, and
everyone gets food right, everyone has a leg room, you know,
everybody gets to bring a bag. You know, this really
(12:59):
comes from and is a feature of how brutally hierarchical
our society is. In the first chapter of the Some
of Us, I go back in our history to the
beginning to find out where this zero sum worldview and
this lie came from, whose interest it served, and why
it sort of reanimated generation after generation, and as it
(13:20):
turns out, it was created as a way to sort
of discipline white Europeans in the colonial era to be
satisfied with their lot in a society where wealth was
still quite concentrated, and where, because of chattel slavery in
(13:41):
the plantation economy, there actually wasn't a lot of room
a white person who was not a plantation owner. Their
labor wasn't needed in the southern economy, right, like, what
do we need you for? Right? This myth of white
supremacy was sold to white masses so that they could have,
of course, as w B depoys said, the psychological wages
(14:03):
of whiteness rather than material wages, and those psychological wayes
were knowing all always that in a deeply unequal economy
they could nonetheless count on being more than and better
than black people. Precisely, and of course we're not as
familiar with the roughly five million or so non slaveholding
(14:28):
working class and poor whites, many of whom opposed succession
during the Civil War, many of whom rioted for food,
many of who sent their sons and fathers and brothers
to the battlefields to die. For slaveholders who were maintaining
their poverty as they were enslaving other people, and then ironically,
(14:51):
their great great grandchildren are now carrying around Confederate flags. Absolutely,
that is that's the okie doke, right. That is the
way in which the loss cause ideology, which is just
one more name and form of this big lie about
(15:12):
white supremacy, that communicates what white people's relative worth is
to black people and how they need to feel about
black people. You now have white people in the same
breath deny that their family had anything to do with slavery,
which might be true, but then deny that the Confederate
(15:35):
flag is a symbol of slavery and attach themselves to
what is a very cheap symbol of an aspirational status.
Right that you know didn't feed them. Didn't feed them then,
isn't feeding them now? And what I try to do
(15:56):
is to lay out how many things our country desperately needs.
And by our country, I mean most people in this country,
most people in a country where one percent of the
population owns more wealth in the middle class. Most people
in this country need a lot of things, and we
can afford them, and we can rewrite the rules around
(16:17):
the way business acts and operates in order to make
sure that people who contribute to the profits and the
wealth of our economy are getting their fair share of it.
And yet the coalition that could make that happen on
a consistent way is splintered because of the lie of
the zero sum and most importantly, the vehicles for collective
(16:40):
action that would bring us shoulder to shoulder and allow
us to have the power to get what we need
out of society. Government and labor unions have been degraded
in the white imagination because of racism. White Americans turn
their backs on the pro government, pro labor formula that
(17:01):
created the white middle class in the middle of the
twentieth century because of racism in the wake of the
Civil Rights movement. I'm Heather c McKee, and you're listening
to be anti racist with Abram X Candy. I think
the zero sun game does not allow Americans to realize
(17:26):
that we are part of a greater community, and we
need to defend that greater community, because if we leave
the community exposed, we're going to become exposed. And I
think the chapter that for me exposed this the most was,
of course, your chapter detailing what actually happened during the
Great Recession. I'm so glad you asked me about this chapter.
(17:46):
It is the one that I am closest to because
it was really the issue that I worked on for
the first half of my career, the deregulation of the
financial industry, which basically just means powerful people in the
market can regulate themselves. If you say the people who
should decide are the winners in the market, right right,
(18:06):
that's not a lot of people of color, that's not
a lot of women. So you're shifting who gets to
decide how much workers are paid, how much people can pollute,
how much people can charge on interest, not from the government,
as most advanced societies do and have, but rather to
the usually wealthy white men themselves. So the deregulation of
the financial sector happened just around the time when the
(18:29):
federal government was finally moving to end its explicitly racist
practices of redlining and discriminating against black would be property
owners and would be customers of banks. So it was
a perfect storm. And there are a couple of pieces
of this that I try to say as much as
(18:50):
possible because they're really flouting the conventional wisdom. One often
the idea is that this was people who needed subprime
mortgages in order to buy their first home. And in fact,
the majority of subprime mortgages were refinances, so it's people
who already had homes who then got a refinance loan
(19:11):
that often wound them up in foreclosure. So that's how
you see a net loss in homeownership. And then, of course, second,
the core myth is the idea that these were risky
borrowers who shouldn't have been eligible for good credit, and
therefore it was sort of a risk that everybody took.
The borrower took a risk, the lender took a risk,
and whoops, it didn't work out. But that's not the case.
(19:32):
In two thousand and seven, Wall Street Journal huge studying
all the subprime mortgage holders in the country. The majority
of them had prime credit scores. Then why were there
these subprime loans which really just meant they were more
expensive and had worse terms, more likely to end up
in foreclosure. Why were they flourishing? Why were they one
out of every five mortgages at the peak? And it
(19:54):
was because they were so profitable, and how could they
get away with it? Because they started in the late
nineteen nineties and early two thousands, testing out this new
exotic mortgage product on the people who were the least
protected and the least respected by financial industry people and
by regulators, the relative newcomers in many ways to homeownership,
(20:19):
Black and brown homeowners in these sort of equity rich
working in middle class black neighborhoods. So what happened was
you started to see these massive foreclosures in the early
two thousands, and as an advocate at that time for
consumer protection, I was in many conversations with people who
had the power to address a sort of quiet crisis
(20:41):
that was burning through black and brown neighborhoods before subprime
became a household word. And it was so clear that
the age old stereotypes that equated black people with risk
were stopping them from seeing the crisis for what it
was before it was too late. Literal quote from Senate
Banking Committee staffer was we put these people in homes
(21:04):
when we shouldn't have. It's like, who's the wee, right?
These are black people who have grimmed and saved and
by the very edge of their fingernails, grabbed onto the
American dream. Despite everything that people in this room have done,
and it was so heartbreaking to see so much predation
and so much loss, and so much indifference in the
(21:24):
halls of power. And it wasn't until the formula was
tested and perfected and it was so profitable that that machine,
fueled by racism and greed, rolled over the rest of
the wider and whiter mortgage market. And then we know
where the story ends with the crash and the Great Recession.
It's just amazing how many livelihoods could have been saved
(21:49):
during the Great Recession if people did not have a
zero sum perspective, if people actually challenge racism. During the
coronavirus pandemic, it was originally assumed that black people were
primarily being infected in field because they were so lazy,
(22:12):
obese and not taking the problems seriously, and then it
led to this refusal to check the problem aggressively. If anything,
things were opened back up, and then by the end
of the year, Middle America states like the Dakotas were
(22:33):
facing the highest rates of infection and death in the
number of white lives that could have been saved during
the coronavirus if those white lives actually cared about black lives.
The parallels are really profound. Speaking about housing, you'll have
some Americans who will say, Okay, you know what, Yes, Heather,
I could understand how that's a problem. Obviously, we should
(22:57):
have taken those subprime mortgages seriously when they were attacking
black home buyers. We shouldn't have seen black people as
the problem. Certainly we can see how that led to
the Great rest. And I'm specifically talking about wealthy white
Americans who are sitting right now in homogeneous white neighborhoods,
who then can't make the connection between that problem and
(23:21):
the problem that you actually talk about in a chapter
called Living Apart, where you actually document that it's not
just a racist idea that predominantly white schools and neighborhoods
are good. It's actually demonstratively false, and it's not even
good for white people. That's right. I wrote the chapter
(23:43):
Living Apart to interrogate and flip on its head the
way we normally think of segregation as something that white
people do to people of color, to exclude us, to
put us in a ghetto, to keep us away from
all the good things for themselves inside. I want to
just ask the question, what are the costs of segregation?
(24:04):
To our entire society, and yes to white people too.
There were a few big things that I discovered that
helped me sort of pull together the whole picture. The
first is a study that was done by the Urban
Institute and the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, my hometown,
one of the most segregated cities in the country, to
try to equip people who wanted to do something about integration,
(24:26):
who are often getting pushback right like, oh, how much
is it going to cost us to cite affordable housing
in these richer neighborhoods. What's the cost of changing the
status quo? And they came up with astronomical figures of
lost lives, lost wealth, lost income, lost education because of segregation.
And then I had this kind of common sense understanding
(24:50):
that white people who are paying a lot to get
the suburban house in the quote unquote good school district
are actually like laying out cash in order to avoid
what racism has wrought on public education, in order to
avoid the neighborhoods that have too many black and brown
people and where the test scores are not as high
(25:11):
as they are in these white segregated schools. So I thought, okay,
we can actually calculate that, oh, it's twenty something thousand
more dollars short a house that's the same as a
house in a school district that's slightly less highly rated.
But then I dug even deeper and it became clear that,
in fact, not only are white families often paying in
(25:32):
order to segregate their children out of a sense that
that is somehow going to be better for them, but
it's not better for them. YEA. The Brown versus Board
of Education decision should have been when we stopped this madness.
That should have been where the story of segregation and
education ended, and of course it wasn't. I look at
a part of the very famous social science appendix that
(25:55):
was presented to the justices to make the case that
segregation communicates negative stories two black children about their own
self worth, and that was what the justices invoked in
their decision. But there was another part of the appendix
that basically laid out the psychological harms of segregation to
(26:21):
white children, the moral disconnect, the ways in which being
taught to assign your worth based on something as shallow
as skin color was distorting to your personality and to
your sense of identity. Formation, the ways in which it
would create guilt feelings and then resentment, the ways that
it would lean you towards authoritarianism was actually in this appendix,
(26:44):
And I chuckle because nothing has changed, right, I mean,
it seems like they could be talking about today, and
so ultimately, for the justices not to rely on the
full weight of the evidence, the full story, I think
cost us something because by suggesting that it is only
bad for black children not to be with white children
(27:05):
and not bad for white children not to be with
black children, we've actually maintained the myth that white is better.
And it's that myth that is still operative today. And
there's just a body of evidence that shows diversity basically
makes white kids smarter, It makes them think with more
(27:27):
rigor and creative problem solving. It sort of puts them
on their game. And so these families that are sort
of chasing the lily white school districts are actually losing
out on the most powerful educational experience they could have,
which is the real gift, right. I think diversity is
America's superpower, and yet we so often don't tap into it.
(27:51):
You certainly have some white parents, just as you have
parents of color, who recognize that at an interpersonal, intercultural level,
they want their children to be exposed to difference and
they value that. They can't imagine raising an anti racist
child in a homogeneous setting. So it's fascinating that let's
(28:14):
say you don't care about any of them. All you
want is a child who's a great student. The studies
show that too, right. But finally, let's turn to the solution,
what you call the solidarity dividend. So in discovering that racism,
(28:34):
more than any other factor, is what is keeping Americans
from having nice things, the flip side, it actually becomes
easier to conceive of progress on all of these big
economic and social challenges if we come together across lines
of race. And that's what I began calling the solidarity divodend.
(28:58):
It's all these gains that we can unlock by coming
together to find solutions to our common problems. Things like
higher wages, better rates of unionization, more healthcare, cleaner air,
better funded schools. These are all the things that we
are denying ourselves as a people basically because of the
(29:20):
belief in this zero some racial hierarchy, and because of
the phenomenon of seeing public goods wier in this country
because support has been degraded as the public has grown
to include more people of color, whom white people have
been taught to disdain and distrust. That's how we got
here from having the greatest middle class the world I've
(29:43):
ever seen, to being one of the most unequal societies
in the world. But if we refill the pool of
public goods for everyone, that's a solidarity dividend. And the
only way we can get there is through cross racial solidarity.
I think in many ways it is our destiny in
this country. Right as we quickly become a country with
no racial majority, we can dismantle the lie of racial hierarchy.
(30:08):
And when we do that, when we stand up for
one another, when we see that there's a fire raging
in black communities, and we don't think, well, that's something
wrong with black people, but rather we say, let's fix
that problem. Now, we get a solidarity dividend of the
United States having the best in the world coronavirus response. Right,
(30:29):
we could have done that. We were sort of set
up to do that with all of our resources, all
of that, and yet so many of the ways that
we failed, and that we had one of the worst
certainly the worst in the advanced economy world was because
of racism and because of the public goods that we
don't have. You know, we could have had a society
(30:53):
where the response was, let us move towards one another,
let us protect one another, let us make sure that
the essential workers have everything they need in order to
still work, and let us pay people to stay home,
right exactly other countries exactly when we weren't really equipped
for that. And I think a large part of the
(31:14):
reason why we weren't was because of racist and difference,
because of the racist draining of public goods and public
services and benefits, and because we have this fractured political
debate which is so rooted in racist fear mongering and scapegoating.
And so when I say that we can have a
solidarity dividend in this country, it's that we can have frankly,
(31:40):
a little bit of what we're seeing right now in
our politics. We had a multi racial, anti racist majority
that voted in a change in our politics in November,
and then waiting through high water to vote in January
to give a slim majority to a party that was
promising to address the challenges of inequality. The pandemic, corruption,
(32:05):
our democracy, climate change, and racial justice out of the gate,
a rescue plan that cuts child poverty in half, to
remind us that black, white, and brown poverty is a
policy choice. That's a solidarity dividend, real family leave and childcare,
which was defeated in the early nineteen seventies because of
(32:29):
the fears of integration. Having that in this country, finally,
that's a solidarity dividend. How does someone carry out the
solidarity dividend and refill the pools? Yeah, I think it's
so important. I mean, I'm a policy wank, that's been
my career, But after the journey to write to some
(32:51):
of us, I'm more and more in love with the
transformative power of organizing. And thankfully we are in a
sort of boom time for organizing. People have taken action
through the Trump era and through this pandemic, more so
than in generations, and so we have to keep going.
I do believe that finding an issue is really a
(33:16):
good way to start. Pick a local issue that means
a lot, and work with your neighbors to change the
rules to allow for more opportunity for everyone. I don't
want people to be stuck reading our books right. I
want people to read the books, close them, take action,
pick up the phone, go online, pick up a clipboard,
(33:36):
and go next door. Right. I think that is where
people ultimately have the most enduring consciousness change. I'm reminded
of a woman whom I met in Kansas City named
Bridget who is a lifelong fast food worker, minimum wage worker,
white woman who believe the anti immigrant, anti black narratives
that her community and her family had believed and taught
(33:59):
to her, the kind of right wing fear mongering and scapegoating.
And she also believed that her own labor was never
going to be worth more than twenty five an hour.
But it was when she was approached to join an
organizing meeting with the Fight for Fifteen in the Union
that she saw a Latina woman stand up and talk
(34:20):
about her own life, you know, having three kids in
a house of bad plumbing, and she said, I saw
myself in her, and something switched and through the act
of organizing for something that would lift both of them,
and she was able to put away those racist ideas.
And as she says to me, now it's not a
matter of us versus them. For us to come up,
(34:41):
they've got to come up. As long as we're divided,
we're conquered. She says racism is bad for white people too,
because it keeps us divided from our black and brown
brothers and sisters. That consciousness change for a white woman
who should have firmly been in the sort of Trump camp,
comes from organizing. And that's what I think we need
to do all across this country. Precisely. I could not
(35:03):
agree more to echo. As they would say in the sixties,
to those who were just reading and learning, they would say,
stop being those armchair radicals. Who needs you to get
up and fight and organize. Thank you so much for
your brilliance, for your work, for your book to some
of us, and for taking some time to join this community.
(35:25):
Thank you, Thank you. Abel. The zero sub myth claims
that progress for people of color means a loss for
white people, as Heather rights in the sum of us.
This is the fable that racist power has pedaled for
(35:45):
centuries before and after the Civil War. It was the
fable that the free soilers and factory owners alike told
white workers in both the North and the Sound and
Tredegar iron works ended up producing over half of the
armament that was used during the Civil War by the Confederacy.
(36:07):
We lost more than six hundred in lives during the
Civil War, more American lives than any other war in history.
When we buy into the zero sum, we all lose,
just like the white workers who struck at Tredegar Iron
Works in eighteen forty seven lost. But when we change
(36:28):
the game in working coalition, we all win together. Yet
racial division continues to depress and deplete us. We can
come together across our racial, cultural, and historical differences in
cash in on our solidarity dividend, as Heather calls it,
(36:48):
and the dividend pays off in higher wages, better housing,
quality schools, cleaner air, safer neighborhoods, and elected officials who
are responsible to us and not special interests. Tangible benefits
that improve the lives of black, Indigenous, latinas in Asian
people also improve the lives of white people. My conversation
(37:14):
with Heather showed us how we can each contribute to
the solidarity dividend and why the zero sum fable has
such a deep hold on our national consciousness. We should
throw our political weight behind policymakers and policies that universalize
the essentials of life, like basic income, housing and healthcare.
(37:38):
But that's only the beginning. We must target our resources
to create equity between groups. We need equitable policies that
ensure the groups with the greatest needs are provided the most.
We must stop battling against each other and start battling
against racism altogether. We must be anti racist. Be Anti
(38:09):
is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is
written and hosted by doctor Ibram x Kindy and produced
by Alexandra Garratton with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our engineer
has been Talliday, Our editors Julia Barton and our shore
runner Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Onlie Tam Mullat
and Mia Lobell. Many thanks to Timmy Win and doctor
Heather Sandford at the Center for Anside Racist Research at
(38:31):
Boston University for all of their help at Pushkin. Thanks
to Heather Fame, Carli Migliori, John Schnarz, and Jacob Wiseberg.
You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r
Ebrahm and on Instagram at Ebram xk. You can find
Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods. You can
sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To
find more Pushkin podcast, listen on the iHeart Radio app,
(38:53):
Apple Podcasts, or whatever you'd like to listen
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