Heather McGhee: How to End Zero-Sum Thinking

Written By Elise Fissmer

Heather McGhee is a designer of, and advocate for, solutions to inequality in America. On this episode of PULLING THE THREAD, we discuss her New York Times bestselling book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, in which she seeks to push us all past zero-sum thinking, or the idea that if you get something you want or need, it must mean that I get less. In fact, she points to numerous examples throughout history that show how this framework has made our society more cruel and poorer than it otherwise would be. Heather pushes us to recognize the fingerprints of racism in all of our core dysfunctions, from climate change, to the roots of the financial crisis, to the ongoing fight for universal healthcare. 

“We must stop the siloed thinking that racism is great for white people and bad for people of color,” Heather says, “if you pull that thread, that’s exactly the same zero sum logic racists hold, that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people, that we are at odds, fighting over crumbs…there has to be a better paradigm of mutual benefit.” The Sum of Us is a story of why “drained pool politics”—an idea named after the fact that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many towns chose to fill in their public pools and lose access to this social good rather than integrate them and share them with Black people—is costing everyone, in ongoing ways. She offers that with multiracial coalitions we can subvert fear mongering about an equitable society and fight for a more prosperous nation for all. Click here for our conversation.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity)

ELISE LOEHNEN:

Thank you for joining me. And congratulations. I can only imagine how many years you spent writing this book and researching this book. It is so well-crafted so beautiful. And I know obviously it's a huge seller, so congrats.

HEATHER MCGHEE:

Thank you. It definitely was a labor of love, probably three years start to finish, but you know, kind of probably 20 years of wrestling and puzzling and struggling,

ELISE:

Your book is an incredible accomplishment. And so clarifying. I feel like recently there have been just like a legion books that have really re-contextualized the way that we understand race. And your book obviously is one of them. It feels like almost the perfect counterpoint to, to Caste, or, you know, Ibram X. Kendi’s book, just in the context of giving us a greater understanding of like, why we are here. And the central thesis around this idea of zero sum thinking and that paradigm feels so widely applicable to so many parts of our society in a way that you really deftly explore. So what, like, what was that moment for you? I know that there were many in your work where you were like, oh you had, you had a light bulb come on. But at what point were you like able to synthesize around that as a thesis?

HEATHER:

You know, I had always felt a little bit uncomfortable with the way that people in my field…so I spent nearly 20 years in the economic policy world being a researcher and an advocate around problems in the American economy: What was going on, why inequality was growing, why economic insecurity was growing, why wages were stagnant and declining while productivity was still increasing. Just sort of like what gives, you now? Why is it so hard for so many families to, to get ahead. And there were a lot of parts of the kind of typical progressive economic story that just didn't add up to me. And one of the things that I often really bristled at was the way in which we would talk about race. This is, you know, still a pretty white, male dominant field—economists, think tanks, et cetera. And we would often just sort of talk about people of color as this like pitied afterthought, like, you know, wages are stagnant and they're declining for Black and brown workers.

You know, like student debt is climbing, and it's worse for Black and brown workers. You know, it was just sort of like, and it just didn't feel like it had any context. And it also felt like it created this weird kind of division between what was going on with different parts of the American society without explaining why at all. And there's sort of no context or no thing that gave us a sense that we're interconnected. And I remember I was riding on the subway, and I was thinking at the time about the financial crisis, which is the issue that I worked on for the first half of my career, the subprime lending that led to it, and then the aftermath and trying to put rules on wall street in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And I was just thinking about how racist so much of the logic and the practices were that fueled the subprime crisis and how many racist tropes were being used to try to undermine regulation even after the crash.

And I said, you know what? Racism is a cost to white people too. And like that sentence came to me kind of like in total, like that's right, that's right. Like I want to explore more of that. I want us to stop this kind of siloed thinking where it's like, it's great for white people and bad for people of color. And therefore, you know, we're S we're completely separate and at odds. And if you pull that thread, you realize that that's the same zero sum logic, that racist hold, right. That progress for people of color has to come at the white folks expense that, you know, we, we are, we are at odds. We are, we are fighting over, you know, crumbs—and it just felt like there's gotta be a better paradigm of mutual benefit. There's gotta be a better paradigm that is more realistic about the ways in which you can only exploit one part of our society for so long. There's just gotta be a better way. And there's gotta be a truer story here.

ELISE:

Um, no, I mean, and this idea of when there's oppression, society, class, race, gender, how more common it is to see sort of horizontal oppression rather than actually like fighting or addressing the system that creates the inequity, and how easy it is to turn people against each other who should be united against a more common enemy. Even if that enemy might be sort of the invisible, the invisible structure. And I loved, I thought that this the way that you also start the book with this beautiful metaphor of the public pools that, you know, disappeared across the country in the North and in the South with desegregation. But this idea too, that it was so entrenched that white people would rather not have the public goods than share the public goods, which is also just so wild. You know, your description of that, the pool in St. Louis, Missouri, that could accommodate, was it like 10,000 people that, that would be disappeared rather than integrated is so wild? Like where, where, what do you, and I know the book is an exploration of that, but like, how does that start? Like where does that fear come from?

HEATHER:

I tell the story of the drained public pools, not because I'm a big swimming aficionados, although I do, I do love to swim, but it's because it's really a metaphor for what happened to the entire kind of new deal, public goods, commitment: Social security, massive investment in housing, strong collective bargaining and labor laws, antitrust rules that made it easier for small businesses to compete, just sort of a responsive government that invested massively in infrastructure and research and development that kept college affordable by having government pick up the tab. All of those public goods helped to create the greatest middle-class the world had ever seen. And, you know, to be honest, when Trump talks about “Make America Great Again,” the kind of better part, the less nefarious and evil part of that nostalgia, that he was sort of plucking as a note in our collective consciousness was the desire to get back to that.

The time when we were putting a man on the moon, not like a billionaire into upper space, but like a man on the moon, you know. And a time when one guy could like walk into a factory and come out set for life, and where, you know, there was just this sort of strong middle-class security. But as I talk about in the book, all the public goods that created that were from whites only, either explicitly as in the massive investments in housing and home ownership, which the federal government explicitly required private developers and private banks to exclude Black people from the housing developments and from the entire mortgage market out of some never substantiated idea that Black people were risky, and or things that were less explicit, like the GI bill, which was a huge benefit that helped shore up the middle class and expand it after World War II.

But because those public benefits were filtered through racial exclusionary, higher education and housing sectors, Back GI’s, who were coming home were often discriminated against them, weren't eligible. And so that whole sort of public goods ethos, but only for a public that is perceived to be good, really was tested by the Civil Rights movement, and was tested by, you know, in very concrete ways, literally Black families showing up at the pool and saying, “Hey, you know, these are our tax dollars. We want our kids to swim too.” And, you know, the result was in so many places across the country, these drained public pools and a retreat from the public, and a shift towards the private sector as the solution for everything, and the sort of rise of this sort of like market fundamentalism, and a sort of unwillingness of the majority of white Americans to support the vision and the formula that had created in large part, their economic security, right?

We, the, the, the stat that just blew my mind was it's from this big survey data called the ANES, is this not that important, but in 1956, and 1960, two-thirds of white Americans believed that government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one, who couldn't find one in the private and guarantee a minimum level of income, that no one should fall below. I mean, that's like wild in today's politics, right? Those are like radical socialist ideas. You have a job guarantee and an income guarantee, nearly 70% of white folks. And, and between 1960 and 1964 support among white people fell in half for that, those two ideas. And so I looked at that and I was like, you don't, you don't have that. Like, it was the next time that this every four year survey was fielded. So you don't have that kind of a dramatic decline without something exogenous happening. It's something happening in the world that shifted people's public opinion.

And I thought about, okay, so what happened between 1960 and 1964? Right? We had the March on Washington in1963 at, which was for jobs and freedom, and which included a job guarantee and a national living wage as part of demands, like the very small number of demands that the Black activists mostly were bringing to the Mall. And then we had, um, 1963 was the year that President Kennedy went on this media blitz around civil rights, sort of bringing into American’s homes, this idea that the party of the New Deal was going to also be the party of civil rights. And then of course, we know that his success or Lyndon Johnson would become after signing the civil rights and voting rights acts and sort of, you know, being the civil rights president, he would become the last Democrat running for president to win the majority of the white vote.

ELISE:

Throughout, there are these other statistics to support the fact that even now, I mean, the fact that, that a majority, is it a majority, or it's close to a majority of Republicans want universal healthcare. Like the policies of people in parties are typically far more progressive or the policies that they desire are far more progressive than how we're being represented in Washington. And yet it's the same… I want to talk about. I mean, there are so many, so many flags, you know, subprime mortgages and healthcare and all of these things. But first let's talk a little bit about you talk about how sort of the old fashioned biological racism, how that's waned, right? So the statistic you give is a 1972, 31% of white people subscribed to biological racism; by 1986, just 14%, but still high. I would hope it's lower, but it's unclear. But then you talk about sort of this transition away from overt racism to racial resentment, and the dog whistling that was happening from Reagan, from others, implying that, of course, you know, Black people are struggling because they are takers, not givers, you know, all of these sort of binaries, these racial stereotypes that have been seeded and flogged as, as some sort of universal truth.

Where did that, was it Reagan who really sort of, sort of started driving those stakes in or how did that start?

HEATHER:

Yeah, I mean, so in the book, I try to kind of denaturalize all of these things where I try to think, okay, well, the zero-sum way of looking at the world, it's not natural, right? It's not like human nature. As, as I said, you know, white folks tend to see the world more through this zero-sum prism than do people of color. So it's obviously a story, as they say in the book, you know, everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. So I want to know the story to white folks. And, and why are they buying it, who is selling it for their own profit? Like why is it profitable to them? And it turns out that the story is really old. It's really an old way of seeing the world that was created in order to justify the economic system in the colonial era.

That was created by the colonial plantation elite to sell basically European indentured people, bonds, people, servants, on the idea that they were better than indigenous and Black servants, that they were often, you know, working side by side with. And it was really accelerated this sort of zero-sum worldview in the wake of a whole bunch of cross-racial servant uprisings that threatened to overthrow the colonial plantation elite. And they were like, whoa, wait a second. We, we can't have all of the people who are not rich, you know, taking up arms against us. We need the white skinned people, our fellow European Christians to be on our side, even though we're expoloiting them. And so that basic story is what you see time and time again and again, and it sort of re-animated every generation, you know, racism is this old wound, but there's always, you know, basically a narrow self-interest elite that's willing to, to profit by salting it, salting that wound.

And, you know, so the most obvious current example is the way that the right wing has really taken this racial resentment story and made it their core narrative. But in the modern era, it definitely came, you know, first from Nixon with the “Law & Order” politics, the sort of, you know, this, all of the social upheaval during the Vietnam war era and civil rights and women's rights, that's terrifying to the sort of white forgotten silent majority. And so let's basically realign white voters to see progress as threatening to them, and put a racial cast on it. But it was really you're right, Ronald Reagan, who sort of married the racist dog whistles with anti-government policy, right. Because it's not a given that someone, some white person who doesn't like their Black and brown neighbors who, who sort of believes racist stereotypes about them also doesn't want free healthcare.

You know what I mean? Like it's, it's not clearly a given like that has to be worked at, to firmly associate government with race. And that's what really happened. I mean, it first happened by, as I talk about in the drained pool, at first happened by basically saying that the public is going to include all of the public and the beneficiaries of America's prosperity are going to include all the people who contribute to it. Right? Like that, that sort of core I get to the government went from the enforcer of the racial hierarchy to the upender of the racial hierarchy, with civil rights, and integration, and school desegregation that happened all very quickly. Right. And frankly, a lot of the people in Washington today were, you know, kids and teenagers when that happened. And it was a betrayal of the stories that powerful people in government and business had told white Americans about their sort of place in the world.

And I don't know that just like on a deeper level, I think that was sort of a wound. It was like, “Yu told me I was the best and I was on top and I was naturally good. And that there was something wrong with these other people. And now you're going to tell me that I have to be equal to them. And I don't trust you then.” And the, you was, the public was, the government was policy was politics. And so I think that's really like the core underlying logic that Reagan was able to exploit, you know, government is what we do together and that together, the we, you know, if it's a multi-racial, we, if the we, and we, the people is really all of us, that's scary to people who really do believe there's something wrong with people of color. Or, most people of color.

Right? So like, you know, today's biological racism is as, as you noted it that that's not usually the flavor. It's more like it's not Black people, it’s thugs. It's not brown people it's illegals. Right? So it's a, a moral judgment on a subsection of a culture that nonetheless sort of stands in for the whole culture. And so it's like, we don't want to, as you know, I heard very often, for example, I traveled to Mississippi and talked to workers who had just been working to organize their auto factory, a Nissan car factory, and a lot of the rhetoric among the people who voted no was well, the union is for Black people because Black people are lazy. And, you know, it was one of those things where it's like, well, actually Black people are most likely because of a lot of jobs discrimination at the plant, the management's almost universally white.

The Back folks are more likely to be the ones on the assembly line who are actually working like at the pace of the robots. So there's actually, you know, and as one of the sort of older Black workers told me, he said, “You know, the kinds of jobs that you're more likely to get if you're white or so cush, he called them. He said, they're so cush that you can go straight from the plant to the happy hour. You don't have to go home and shower.” Right. So that's that inverse like actually, you know, who's working really, back-breaking, dirty, hard jobs. It's the people whom are supposed to be, you know, thinking are lazy.

ELISE:

I mean, I think you, you mentioned sort of the, that the wounds of racism, the intergenerational trauma, that probably majority of people in America feel in some way, like we've been we've, we've historically, everyone's sort of been brutalized in time in terrible ways. And then, you know, traumatized people traumatize peoples, but I think the other, you know, which you touch on, but there's this also this undercurrent, particularly in the context of class in this country and the way that the middle class has been decimated, the working class is being exploited and how racism shows up in terms of policing, all of the things there's this, this woman, a prison abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And she talks about sort of this idea of racism is also being sort of people who are feel very proximal to death. Like you are just barely surviving, you could be killed.

And I feel like that's, that is America. You know, we have no social system, social support, except obviously there's welfare for corporations. And we have no problem giving companies massive tax breaks, essentially giving them social services. We have a such an upside-down system, but we have no social net. I mean, when you talk about sort of welfare and that, or sorry, Medicaid, and that fight, the federal desire to broaden Medicaid, to insure massive amounts of people. And then people like Rick Perry in Texas being like, I don't want your money. And keeping that bar set up, what is it? $3,600 or something in order to qualify like we, there is something so sadistic about the way that we keep Americans on the precipice of death or one fatal decision or one missed payment resulting in devastation in a way that is so visceral. I mean, I can, I feel it, as like a relatively affluent white woman where I'm like, I'm not going to, you know, as my whole life going to fall apart.

HEATHER:

There's no security because there's no valuing of our lives and our humanity. And I really, I can't, I just think there's no way that that's not traced back from the original ways in which we were so callous about life in this society. Um, we were founded on genocide, kidnapping, torture, forced labor, rape—like that that's our founding, right? And so that's what created the original wealth in this country. That's what we were able to tolerate in the name of profit. And it's what we were able to ignore while we extolled freedom and equality and liberty. Right. So core contract prediction, you know, we're so young, right? I mean, it's, it's really, it's still with us in many ways. And I think the disciplining force that kind of like the, the flames lapping at the heels, right? The sort of like, there's this hierarchy of human value.

There's a ladder where it's like, you know, you can be at the very top and afford your own space rocket, but if you're at the bottom, you know, if you're at the bottom and you may even work at the same company, right. But if you're at the bottom of that ladder, you are one busted break away from losing your home and losing custody of your kids, right. As sort of like snowball of what could happen there. And I think because of that, that scarcity and that cruelty, which I think we wouldn't have without systemic racism and without the racist logic of dehumanization, paradoxically then feeds zero-sum thinking and resource hoarding and desire to not see your neighbor get his fingers on your rung of the ladder, this, this thing called last place, a version of group status threat. This idea that for other people to come up, you got to go down and it's simply not true economically.

And I talk about that throughout the book, that even things like reparations, which I think are often thought of in very zero-sum ways. And there's a lot of like purse clutching like, oh my God, like what will happen if we really pay the debt that this country owes to Black people? And it's like, it's not coming out of your pocket. You know, any more than any like teen is like, we're not, you know, it's not like there's going to the, government's going to knock on every door and ask people to write a check back to the nearest Black neighbor. Like that's not the way it works. Like it is about a collective debt that is owed by the same government that enforced and wrote all of these laws to strip and deny wealth from people of color and just in an intergenerational way. And righting that wrong is, is about an investing seed capital in the nation we're becoming, because, you know, we, we've really got to recognize that we all need to have more economic security.

And if you look at the kinds of policies that Black Americans tend to support more, right, we are, we are the biggest voting block, right? 90 plus percent consistently voting for one party and one ideology. And, you know, second just behind that is white Americans who, you know, depending around the, around, you know, the seventies and eighties, depending on when the, when the, the, the campaign is, but the vision that keeps Black voters voting as a block is not like racial vengeance. It's like additional social security benefits for caregivers for the years you're out of the workforce. It's like, you know, canceling student debt and universal health care and affordable housing and childcare and paid family leave. Like those are the things that Black Americans want. And there are things that would be great for everyone, you know? And so I think that we really need to recognize the ways in which systemic racism makes our entire society sort of meaner and poorer than it would be if we had more of a sense of social solidarity and a willingness to invest in one of them.

ELISE:

So you talk about sort of this white Southerner, in 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper, and this book that he published The Impending Crisis of the South and How to Meet It. And you talk about how he was an avowed racist, but he went and counted all these public institutions and the number: Pennsylvania, there were 393 public libraries versus South Carolina, where there were 26; Maine, 236 versus Georgia, 38; New Hampshire: 2,381 versus Mississippi: 782. And I thought it was so interesting the way that you tease out and explored, you know, slavery, which I think people in the North Americans love to sort of be like, “Wow, like you guys were on the wrong side, but right”. Slavery was what supported the entire U.S. economy. There were places in the North, as you remark that were equally racist and the New York city wanted to secede.

HEATHER:

Right. When the civil war happened, the New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy. 40% of the city's exporting business businesses through warehousing shipping, insurance, and sales were Southern cotton exports that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the south.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, it's wild. And then the bigger point that Helper was making was about sort of white commoners and how deprived they were. If you don't mind. If I read to you from your book, you write: “Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southerners. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of land and political power: ‘non-withstanding the fact that the white non slave holders of the south are in the majority as five to one, they have never yet had any part or law and framing the laws under which they live,’ Helper wrote. And without a voice in the policy making common white southerners were unable to win much for themselves.” And so essentially there was no investment in public goods, right. It was all, all power was sort of in these plantations, there was nothing else to support the society. And then you sort of throughout the book, talk about how that's become sort of the, the prevailing narrative of America, right? Like limiting all of these public services and goods and all the power being in Jeff Bezos's pocket. No, but, but the way that we continue with like that, that economic model has sort of permeated the whole country when it should have been the reverse.

HEATHER:

And this was really helpful to me, the Helper book to have a contemporary, a white Southerner under slavery who became very anti-slavery and very useful to abolitionists in the North, because he was saying that it basically was only in the narrow economic interests of the, as he called them, the oligarchs of the lash, to have this exploited a system, because like, you know, your average white southerner, if they weren't profiting off of slavery, they didn't have much economic prospects, right? Like the entire economy of the south was dependent on this captive labor force. The plantation didn't need very many white workers at all. And because the logic that creates the impulse to fund public goods, right, wealthy people will tax themselves in order to fund roads and bridges and infrastructure in schools, because it's in some aspect of their own, self-interest right. They need this infrastructure to get their goods to market.

They need an educated workforce, right, to employ. They, they, all of that, just that logic didn't exist. Right. It's sort of this plantation mentality of this is a closed system. I will exploit the workers within this system and I don't owe anything or need anything from anybody without. And, you know, I thought about that logic again recently, when the chamber of commerce reacted to President Biden's proposal to have a slight increase in the corporate tax rate in order to pay for infrastructure. And the chamber of commerce was like, well, we don't think that the corporate sector should shoulder the burden of these infrastructure, like broad universal broadband, and public transit and clean energy and, you know, great improvements and, you know, road and other infrastructure, ports, bridges, you know, all this stuff, or even the human infrastructure, right. As if like corporations do not benefit from universal childcare so that their workers can actually feel confident going to work and all of those, right. And, and the logic was, you know, as a Chamber of Commerce said, we think that the, you know, the sort of users of the infrastructure should pay for it. Like there should be like private fees along all the infrastructure. It's like, like the toll road system. And it's that idea, right? That like we owe nothing to one another. They have benefited not at all from all of the investments that made their business possible. It's so ridiculous. And yet it is, it is a very old logic.

ELISE:

And it, it, as you say, I mean, you, throughout the book, you're sort of like, oh, and then they made sort of the beverage company give back $24 million in taxes that they had somehow avoided paying. Like there's so many moments in our sort of pro-business, anti-government society where we're being denied sort of the basic components of what makes the society safe. So that theoretically those benefits trickle down in some inconceivable way, which is clearly only in executive pay, shareholder returns, et cetera, all of these systems in which so many people don't participate. No, it's maddening. Let's talk about, I mean, one of the things that I loved about the book is that it's also quite optimistic and which doesn't, it doesn't sound that way, but it is. And there are so many moments, stories that you tease out of people moving past these racial divides, these sort of stoked fear and antipathy towards each other to unite— the solidarity dividend of uniting for sort of common good, whether it's fighting for a $15 minimum wage, or what's happening in Connecticut, or how immigrants are, have revitalized, Lewiston, all of these, these moments throughout our country, that sort of fly in the face of what we've all been told will invariably happen if we have more equitable society, do you want to talk like, where, where should we go? Should we talk about sort of Nissan unions? Do you want to talk about Lewison? Do you want to talk about..?

HEATHER:

I'm happy to talk. I tend to like to end on a high note. So, um, so The Sum of Us is a story of a journey of me going around the country and finding the fingerprints of racism in all of our core dysfunction, whether it's our unwillingness to address global climate change, or the roots of the financial crisis, or our singular refusal to give our citizens universal healthcare among advanced economies, we stand alone. All of these are issue areas, and there were so many communities across the country where I saw these issues really play out where it felt like, you know, you can see why zero-sum thinking and drained pool politics is costing everyone. And yet I also was able to see evidence of the opposite of people really coming together across lines of race and rejecting the zero sum and forming multi-racial coalitions that were willing to fight for common solutions to our common problems.

And I began to call this phenomenon a solidarity dividend. For me, solidarity dividends are gains that can be unlocked only when you come together across lines of race, things that you sort of can't accomplish when you're divided that any individual can't win on their own, things like cleaner air, and better wages, and better funded schools. One of the more surprising places where I found evidence of the solidarity dividend was in the whitest state in the nation, in Maine, where a dying milltown very much like, you know, de-industrialized towns all over the country had really seen its best days behind it. And yet by sort of an accident of policy and faith, really, a group of African Muslim refugees and immigrants began to take up residence, and home, and refuge, in this dying milltown. And I talked to white Mainers who had seen not only their main street revitalized, their tax base grow ,the school, which had been possibly going to close the same way that so many kinds of depopulating milltowns had been closing their schools, expands and they built a new school and they win the state championship five times in soccer.

And you know, they, on an individual level, I talked to white Mainers who really experienced that kind of putting aside the distrust and the received wisdom, the stories from politicians basically, who were kind of scapegoating and demonizing refugees and immigrants, and saying, as they did often in the sort of Republican formula in Maine politics at the time, they would say, we have to cut welfare in Maine because illegal immigrants and refugees are stealing our money. And of course the vast majority of people who are on welfare in Maine are white, like elderly Mainers, you know, and yet, you know, those kinds of politicians were voted back in again, you know, again and again, because there was a coherent story, this finger pointing. And yet in this town, I met these white Mainers who were willing to put that all aside and to link arms with these African Muslim refugees who in some ways had like the least in common with them of like any type of person in the world, and both of them, this woman Cecile and this man named Bruce, it saved their lives and it transformed their lives. And it gave meaning to their lives and it helped improve their community to find that solidarity dividend and to fight together. And, um, on my last trip to, to Maine before, I ended up meeting him kind of concluding the book. They had created this multi-racial coalition anchored by these Somali taxi drivers who were able to drive around and pick up sort of home-bound elderly, white Mainers, and bring them to the polls. This coalition was able to win a ballot initiative, expanding Medicaid over the five time veto of their little mini-Trump is terrible guy named Paul LePage, who was a governor for far too long and Maine because the people of Maine, mostly white people really needed access to healthcare and were paid too little to be able to afford it on their own.

And so I do believe that even since the book has been completed, there has been more evidence of this solidarity dividend all throughout the country, right. We, we had our multi-racial coalition that in November, and then again in January, waded through high water to do the impossible and reject the Trumpist politics of divide and conquer, you know, vote for the idea that we could do big things together, like tackle this pandemic and, and, and, you know, roll out a vaccine and, and help one another. The American rescue plan includes that was passed, you know, on a single party vote in, in, in the winter, you know, is now creating a nearly 50% decrease in child poverty. That's estimated for this year because of checks that are going to families to help deal with the high cost of raising families. And it's, it's not everything, but it's a huge, it'll make a huge difference in the lives of working families of all backgrounds.

And to me, that's a solidarity dividend. It would not have been possible without a multiracial coalition. And it is refilling the pool of public goods to say, you know what? It costs a lot. We're not going to make families try to do this on their own. When we know the math doesn't add up, we're not going to ignore the evidence of our country, having the worst in the world, child poverty rates for a country, with our advanced economy. We're not going to just ignore that and pretend like it's the kid's fault. We're going to just give people money and trust parents, to be able to figure it out, to make the math add up themselves. That is like a new day in our politics. And ultimately quite hopeful and optimistic because that's just one aspect of where I think the sort of emerging and multi-racial majority in this country is headed. That's where the policies are. And frankly, supported by a bipartisan majority of the country.

ELISE:

In, in rural communities, hospitals, medical centers are one out of seven people are employed there, right? So there are all these, these institutions and goods that we're also, you know, people are ironically dependent on for their healthcare that then disappear from these local communities, leaving people in a real bind, primarily white people, white, poor people. So I do, I love how hopeful the book is. It's also such an incredible education, particularly in, in the chapter about the financial collapse in 2008 and what was happening with subprime mortgages and how predatory those were and how this, you know, I had heard this, the myth of like, oh, it was just people who were completely, you know, buying their third house and, you know, couldn't afford a house at all. Whereas as you explained, it was majority people of color being sought out for refinancing loans and being completely screwed, which again, it goes to that whole, that racial stereotype, that trope that's been, that's such a current of, of financial irresponsibility and people bringing this on themselves, which is sort of counter to the reality of the actual facts.

So I thought that was such a huge public service that chapter alone, incredible. And the other thing, this was staggering to me, but I feel like is it's such an important piece of education when you talk about sort of how we all share the same sky. And of course, you know, marginalized neighborhoods are typically laddered with like all the toxic waste dumps, all the landfills, et cetera,everything ends up and in poor communities, but that it travels. The pollution travels obviously. And that this is stunning, the Yale project and climate change communication: Fewer than 25% of white people said they were willing to join a campaign to convince government, to act on climate change, whereas 70% of the Latin X population, 57% of Black people are either alarmed or concerned. You talk a lot about this, but like, there's also sort of the, I don't know how to describe it. The racism of like so many of these social initiatives are led by white people, right. Who, and I don't want to call out like the people who are working on environmental justice, because thank you to all of them for their work. But there's, we're like missing this huge part of the story, which is like white people are not on board. Like what is happening?

HEATHER:

Yeah. This is something that I, when I set out and kind of outlined what I wanted to write about and research in the book, I hadn't actually intended to include a chapter on climate change in the environment, but it felt like once I began to see this phenomenon and this pattern, I was like, well, I mean, if you think about like, what are some of the nice things that we can't seem to have in this country? It's like clean air and water and like a rational, aggressive response to the existential threat that is climate change. Like, why are we not doing this? You know, like America's supposed to be Superman. Why are we not seeing a meteor coming towards the planet and like running into the bone group, getting changed.

ELISE:

Yeah, meanwhile, we're on fire, literally. It's wild.

HEATHER:

And so I'm like, okay, well, let's see, like, let's see where the evidence takes us. And, and as you said, it turns out that there's actually a significant gap in concern and alarm about environmental degradation and climate change that is racial. And I wanted to dig in and like, why is that, that doesn't necessarily make the same kind of common sense that some of the other sort of racialized views of politics did to me. And I ended up having to go to a whole body of research by these people in the Scandinavian countries who've really looked at the correlation between kind of the worldview, like the deeper worldview that comes with being kind of at the top of a social and racial and economic hierarchy, which is like risk averse, like downplaying risk, common sense. Like you don't experience it as much. And so you're not as sensitive to it.

The idea that sort of, if people are struggling, if misfortune happens, it's probably because of something they did. And so there's a sense that like, well, you know, climate change is probably going to be bad for poor people for poor countries, but that's just sort of like the way the world works, right? Like that's just, you know, if they worked harder or were better, you know, they would be safer. And of course, you know, that is like the most costly fallacy in the world. Right. You know, climate change is coming for us all. There are of course, massive disparities in how immediately people will be hurt and how easy it will be for people to recover. But like, it is just an extremely costly illusion to think that we don't have to act in the collective interest of our planet because, you know, we're generally the winners in society.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, there's clearly no escape as we've come to understand. Before I let you go curious if there are a few, this is not rapid fire, but like three books, three, four, however many, that you wish everyone would read or that you've loved lately. It could be podcasts.

HEATHER:

I have a lot of great books these days. There's a podcast called “Flood Lines.” That's like, uh, you know, I'm not the only person to, to recognize that it's just an extraordinary feat. It's an Atlantic podcast about New Orleans and Katrina. And it's sort of like be like seminal, investigative, very human focused story of what went wrong and how that was so much of a man-made disaster and continues to be. There's a book called Four Hundred Souls, which I have one tiny chapter in, but it's a really cool particularly now at this time, when history is under attack from a very organized right wing sort of donor class. It's a compendium of short pieces of history from 1619 to the present. And it's just amazing. Like, it's just like, there's just so much history that you would never have had the education to know in the way that we're, we've all been educated and it's fascinating and it's great. Cause it's like, you can just like have it at your bedside and like read, you know, a couple at a time and just learn about parts of what they call a community history of African America. And then I'm in the middle of the N.K. Jemisin book, The City We Became. And I really like speculative fiction in summers when I kind of indulge more fiction. So I'm really enjoying that as well.

ELISE:

Wow. Well, thank you for joining our conversation today. I feel like we just scratched the surface of The Sum of Us, which is such an education. I like many of you, um, am doing my best to sort of get educated embarrassingly. I feel like I'm not alone in feeling like I never really understood or, or got a full or accurate view of the history of this country. And it has been quite a reckoning, as I know it has been for the rest of you. And also a reckoning in how we address this and move forward. And one of the most important, impactful things we can do obviously is one to vote, two, to participate in our local communities, and our local governments, because that's where so many of these decisions are passed down. There are so many incredible moments in the book, for example, where Heather talks about how states, more conservative states, despite what the people of that state might want across racial lines would refuse government assistance like expanded Medicaid.

Rick Perry was like, I essentially don't want this money from the federal government, which would insure tens of thousands of Texans, many white people as well, who make more than $4,000. The other thing that we didn't get to, which is so important, particularly in the context of voting is the ways in which, which people have been sort of including white people, again, she gives some sort of stories of people who went to vote and because they had can't remember which state has these laws now, where they'd been taken off the voting rolls because they had missed two elections in a row. And this particular man, this white man was like, I don't understand. So you're saying that just because I haven't used my right to protest, means that I no longer have access to free speech. That just because I haven't bought a gun, would mean that I don't have access to the second amendment anymore. Like voting as a constitutional right. That's now being denied to many people because they don't want people to vote. But there's collateral damage on every sort of part of society. And Heather writes too, about how women are finding themselves struggling to vote, because some states require that their exact name matches across forms of identification. So they're going to vote and maybe their maiden name hasn't been changed across the board. Mine certainly hasn't and they can't vote. And that's terrifying because we're responsible for our government and yet being denied from participating in it, which means it's not a Democracy. And then I think that there's also, which we touched on a little bit, but I think that this continues for so many of us, particularly in this time, this pandemic, George Floyd, this incredible reckoning on every single level around our values, whether that's, how do we spend our time?

What are we buying? How are we choosing to engage with our families. All of these questions. What it means to be alive right now. And part of that is contending with the past and with sort of this incredible oppressoin of feeling like you're an oppressor and not knowing how to fix that, or change that, which is I think really devastating in a way that's hard to reckon with, but it's certainly something that I think holds true for so many people that…for myself or so many people who have stopped. It's just a huge moral cost of racism, to quote Heather McGhee, and tofinish this ramble with another part of the book where she, she quotes course that incredible observer of life, James Baldwin, and he's writing about sort of white people and racism, but this holds for so many things, this holds for climate change. This holds for so many systems or moments in our collective history where we, we feel powerless in the face of things that we wish we could change, where we feel sort of responsible.

So much I think what also happens is these government policies are put on us somehow, even though we might not have wanted them. So he writes: “‘What they see as a disastrous, continuing present condition, which menaces them and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition they would rather not be reminded of it.’ Baldwin went on to observe that white Americans are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves as mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it. And they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.” That feels like my experience, but I feel better off for having read Heather's book. It's, it's also full of really, really hopeful and wonderful stories of people rallying around our common humanity and letting go of the ways in which we've been divided to create really good to essentially unionize.

You know, I don't know as much about the unions as I wish that I did. And she does a fair amount of exploration around unions and, and sort of the gains that they've met. But that's how you know, so many of us have benefited. That's how we got paid time off collectively, regardless of, of industry. That's how we got healthcare, which theoretically should not be tied to employment status, but it was a win. It’s how we got paid overtime, all so many wins via the union that permeated the whole economy. This is a quote from Heather's book. She writes, “Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979 weekly wages for men, not in a union would be 5% higher. For non-college educated men, 8% higher. If that bumps sounds small, compare that to the fact that since 1979 wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3% a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1% has risen by 190%.” Anyway, staggering. So much to think about.

 

Elise Fissmer
Previous

Carissa Schumacher: A Channel for Yeshua
Next

Anna Lembke, M.D.: Navigating an Addictive Culture