Teaching Kids About the Costs of Racism

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In 2021, one of our guests on the show was Heather McGhee, board chair for the advocacy group Color of Change and former president of the economics Think Tank Demos. Heather had written a book called The Sum of Us: How Racism costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. The premise of The Sum of Us is that the economy is not a zero-sum game and fostering real economic equality would basically have only more winners, not new losers. Today, Heather is back because The Sum of Us is back in a new adaptation specifically for young readers.

It's a good conversation, therefore, for this week off from school for you students and teachers who might be listening and for everyone else too and we'll continue the conversation we were having with another guest earlier in the month about ways of closing the racial wealth gap in this country, which has only been getting worse from generation to generation.

Despite the civil rights laws, it's up to around nine to one the average assets that white families have compared to Black families in this country. Something's not working in our economic system, but it can be made to work. Heather, always good to have you. Congratulations on the new edition and welcome back to WNYC.

Heather McGhee: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Who's your target audience for the Young Readers Edition and how is it different from the original?

Heather McGhee: Well, it's middle school students and high school students. It's parents, librarians, and educators. This is really a book that I hope helps young people make sense of the world they've inherited and be able to turn to one another in that most diverse generation in American history for the kinds of solutions we desperately need.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get you to revisit the subtitle of the book, How Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Are you arguing that anti-Black racism costs white people too?

Heather McGhee: I am. In the central metaphor, the heart of The Sum of Us is the story of the drained public pool. What happened when towns that had segregated public swimming pools in the North, Midwest, southwest, all over the country in the first half of the 20th century faced desegregation orders and decided to drain their public pools, literally drain out the water, pour in concrete, dirt, gravel in order to avoid sharing a public resource across the colored line. For me, obviously, I'm not a recreation expert, I'm an economics expert and the drained pool stood in as a metaphor for how we went from an economy that was really guided by an ethos of new deal investments in the public good.

The GI Bill, social security, strong wage and labor laws to the inequality era where all of that changed and really, the fulcrum was the Civil Rights movement when the majority of white Americans went from supporting the idea of public goods and the economic benefits that came from that when they were for whites only to being really skeptical of government, skeptical of collective solutions, once the government went from being the enforcer of the racial hierarchy to the up ender of the racial hierarchy, that is drained pool politics and ultimately, it hurts almost all of us except for the very wealthy and powerful.

Brian Lehrer: In economic terms, you're talking about programs like the GI Bill to help people with college and with housing and those were largely whites-only programs back in the day. They were, of course, extremely popular. You want to focus, we talked about this last time you were on for the book. You want us to think big in federal economic programs terms to really address this wealth and income gap. Things like a federal jobs guarantee. Lay that out for us a little bit. Where would you start on the policy level?

Heather McGhee: When we think about the next generation, which I think is ultimately what the book, obviously, the new version the youth book is for and why I do the work I do, I want to make sure that every child in America has the little bit of cushion of wealth that can turn hard work into real success because today, a Black college graduate has less household wealth on average than a white high school dropout, that shouldn't be.

That seems completely wrong morally, economically, and that Black college graduate has done everything they can except for go back in time and make sure that her grandparents and parents weren't redlined out of home ownership. When we look at the need to close the racial wealth gap, which will have rebound and stimulative effects across the economy, we need to look at home ownership, Black, home ownership has never recovered from the financial crisis.

There's a chapter about the financial crisis. In the book, The Sum of Us we need to look at canceling student debt because Black students are far more likely to have to borrow because they don't have that intergenerational wealth cushion because of explicitly racist exclusion from home ownership in the first half of the 20th century and we do need to look at fundamentally making it possible for work to pay, making sure that we have higher rates of collective bargaining particularly in the service sector and a rebirth of American manufacturing and an investment in the care economy. The real piece that was missing that we didn't get done in the Inflation Reduction Act

Brian Lehrer: Is reparations the right way to think about this, according to you? As you know, the topic was struck from the AP Black history curriculum, thanks to pressure by Ron DeSantis and others. It's a divisive word, but California is officially studying reparations under a law they pass to devise scenarios for that toward racial income and wealth equality. To what degree do you like to approach the economic equality question through that lens?

Heather McGhee: I write in The Sum of Us that reparations is not a zero-sum, it's not taking money from white people and giving it to Black people. It's saying that we all benefit when a government that has harmed a community is ultimately accountable for those decisions and that there's no statute of limitations for mass atrocities. Ultimately, I see reparations in economic terms as seed capital for the nation we're becoming. When that Black college graduate I referenced before has enough wealth, $40,000.

I'm not talking about becoming a billionaire overnight, but a little bit of money to be able to start a business, own a home, take a big risk. That means great things for our future economy. When we are basically having young people today who are the descendants of enslaved people, the descendants of the 20th-century exclusion from the New Deal, public goods that helped create the great American middle class, still have to basically be paying for their parents and grandparents' exclusion from that because of intergenerational debt instead of intergenerational wealth, we are stealing from our own collective future.

Brian Lehrer: How do you do it? Is it checks to individuals? Is it the kinds of programs that you started talking about? Again, people don't realize-- We had a racial justice commentator just after Obamacare was passed. That long ago who said something to the effect of and I don't recall the exact words, but it was something to the effect of this is maybe the biggest civil rights or racial justice laws since the 1960s because the uninsured rates in this country were so desperate by race. When you talk about student loan forgiveness, when you talk about housing programs in those terms, is that reparations or is it direct checks? Is it baby bonds? What is it?

Heather McGhee: Reparations is reparations and all of those things, universal healthcare, paid family leave, cancellation of student debt are the kind of targeted universalist policies that we should be having to be a high-functioning country. White, Black, and brown students alike benefit from canceling student debt.

White Americans are the largest group of the uninsured and so there are disproportionate benefits because there's disproportionate need, but those are really universal programs and I really think that they're essential, but in some ways, the deeper moral and economic question around reparations, which just gets a little bit of focus in my book but is definitely consonant with my ideas is about what this country needs to do to make it right. What we all need to do to understand that this country can remake itself and hold itself accountable for mass atrocities.

Yes, I do think as-- There's a great scholar Sandy Darity who co-wrote a book called From Here to Equality, which really goes into much more depth on reparations than I do, but there are very easy ways for us to figure out to whom reparations are owed and ways to make sure that we have wealth security among families who were simply not in line when the free stuff that helped to make the Great American Middle class was being handed out in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Brian Lehrer: On these universal programs, of course, we're seeing, since the State of the Union address, more focus on social security and Medicare universal programs for senior citizens. They're so overwhelmingly popular that they are a political third rail for the Republicans as they've been for so long. President Biden came into office trying to be the new LBJ as he saw it with the universal programs and the Build Back Better Bill, which largely failed in Congress, but a universal childcare system. Caps on insulin cost for all patients, not just those on Medicare, expansion of the home health aid program. 12 weeks of paid family leave to care for kids or elders. How much was he on the right track for you versus how timid was that compared to what you really envisioned?

Heather McGhee: I worked in public policy for nearly 20 years trying to push Democrats to be bolder. When The Build Back Better Bill was announced, I nearly fell off my chair. It was so much of what advocates and communities had been fighting for for so long. I really applauded someone who came into the White House as a centrist, putting forward a vision of what any high-functioning society should be doing for its people. It's the minimum. Yet it had been out of the bounds of polite conversation in the [unintelligible 00:11:25] for 40 years for the whole neoliberal era. Those programs remain really popular. I think of that whole agenda as what I call in the book, solidarity dividends, the kinds of gains that we can unlock through multiracial coalitions.

The multiracial coalition that put Biden and the Democrats into office and said, you know what? We have common problems and they should have common solutions. There's something that we can do together to deal with what keeps working families up at night. That's what racism in our politics stops us from being able to achieve.

That's why the Right-wing is so increasingly focused on this divide and conquer strategy to try to pit white, Black, and brown families against one another because they know that those multiracial coalitions end up being the backbone for a kind of economic program that is breaking the grip of the wealthy and the powerful, the people that put them in office. I think young people today need to understand why it is that they don't have free college, why it is that they don't have universal healthcare, why we haven't done enough on climate change. Ultimately, it comes down to that drained pool politics and racism in our politics, in our policy-making, in ways that hurt everyone.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your questions and your ideas for Heather McGee, chair of Color of Change and author now of the young readers' edition of The Sum of Us: How Racism costs All of Us and How We Can Prosper Together. Listeners, how can we prosper together or ask Heather a question, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Since your edition is for young readers and as chair of a Racial Justice Organization, I imagine you follow some of these education debates. I pulled two clips of Republican presidential hopeful, Nikki Haley from her first campaign speech last week. The first one is short, about her vision of how to achieve better equity in education. Listen.

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Nikki Haley: In the America, I see every child gets a world-class education because every parent gets to pick their child's school [applause] and no politician will be able to close those schools ever again. [applause]

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I imagine any Republican who's a nominee next year is going to run on something like that, in part, and I don't know her whole plan, but it sounds like some a different universal system, like a universal voucher system where parents get to use consumer power as she sees it to shop for schools rather than the unequal, worse schools and lower income areas that many would say we have now. Any reaction to the idea she's getting at there?

Heather McGhee: Listen, it's a great applause line. If there were a great well-funded school in every single neighborhood, that sounds fabulous, but the reality is, majority white school districts have $23 billion on average more than majority of color school districts. That's also about history showing up in families' wallets about the fact that and Republicans love this policy, that richer neighborhoods have higher property values that then are used to fund local school districts and so wealthier neighborhoods have wealthier schools.

I'm sure that Nikki Haley, a Republican candidate, is not trying to change the way the wealthy fund their own school districts. I don't think it's realistic. I think it's the thing that is not getting at the root of the problem. In fact, the rest of the agenda around cutting taxes on the wealthy, defunding the public goods that we have not pursuing equitable funding strategies for low-income school districts, that'll make that platitude completely useless in practice.

Brian Lehrer: Another Nikki Haley clip from her campaign speech now, that also goes to education and outcomes. This goes to what she sees as a more effective way to achieve what you say you want in your book title, "A Country Where People Prosper Together". Listen.

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Nikki Haley: On Biden and Harris's watch, a self-loathing has swept our country. It's in the classroom, the boardroom, and the backrooms of government. Every day we're told America is flawed, rotten, and full of hate. Joe and Kamala even say America's racist. Nothing could be further from the truth. [applause] The American people know better. My immigrant parents know better and take it from me, the first minority female governor in history, America is not a racist country. [applause] This self-loathing is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.

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Heather McGhee: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Your reaction to that, and you're laughing, she seems to say focusing on racism as much as advocates like yourself might do, makes it harder to prosper together because it emphasizes differences, not commonality. Your reaction.

Heather McGhee: Sorry, I was laughing from shock because she said it was more dangerous than a pandemic that's killed over a million Americans. I really was not actually expecting that. Let me answer not from me, a Black woman racial justice advocate, but from a white suburban mom that I talked to last summer, who's from Oklahoma. Her name is Rachel. She'd grown up in Oklahoma public schools her whole life through, her graduate degree.

She hadn't actually learned of the Tulsa race massacre, the destruction of the Greenwood neighborhood, the Black Wall Street at all in her school until the Watchmen came out, the HBO show, and it became part of the zeitgeist. She was outraged. She felt like she'd been lied to by her state, by her education system. She recalled going through that neighborhood as a kid and asking her dad why the neighborhood seemed so poor.

He didn't tell her it was because it was firebombed or because 50 years later, it was built back up and then there was a highway cited through it that destroyed Black wealth yet again, he just shrugged. That gave her a long-standing stereotype that said, well, the Black people just are poor. There's just something wrong with Black people. She was outraged because she felt like her own history of her own state, her own city had been denied to her and in its place had been an anti-Black stereotype.

I bring up Rachel because I do think that what the DeSantis and Haleys are trying to do by trying to ban books and trying to rob us of our shared history, trying to deny the extent of racism in American society, past and present, is to cut off that court of empathy. Because now Rachel says she's far more empathetic towards her Black neighbors in Tulsa. She's fighting and supporting reparations for that community, and she is looking for ways to be involved.

That's exactly what scares, frankly, Right-wing politicians who don't want a multiracial coalition because it's been the majority of White voters voting for Republicans since Landon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act that has kept them at all competitive. Ultimately, this question of America's history, the way in which we see the real truth is one of us owning up to our shared history, finding new heroes.

You can look to our history and understand how terrible it was, and then say, I want to be like John Brown. I want to be a white person who actually stands up against injustice and if you are duped into believing the myths of American innocence that is robbed from you as well, that opportunity to choose better today.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes with Heather McGhee who's the board chair of the racial justice advocacy group Color of Change and the author now of her young readers' edition of The Sum of Us: How Racism costs All of Us and How We Can Prosper Together. Beverly in Savannah, Georgia, you're on WNYC. Thanks so much for calling in, Beverly. Hi there.

Beverly: Thanks for taking my call, Brian, and thanks for appearing on the show with Nikki. I just wanted to say how sad it makes me every time I hear and I know it's a well-meaning tendency to want to get to the root of the problem or to get to the low-hanging fruit of solving the economic disparities. We really can't afford to keep conflating economic reforms with reparations.

Economic reforms are overall for everyone and reparations are more to addressing the atrocities. If we don't pay the reparations checks to the victims, we're not acknowledging as a culture that those harms actually happened. Or even worse yet, we're saying without words, that Black people don't matter as much as everyone else who gets a court judgment or settlement for harms done.

Brian Lehrer: I think we're all agreeing with that. Heather?

Heather McGhee: Yes, it's really beautifully said. I did a podcast, so to spin-off of The Sum Of Us, telling stories across racial solidarity. I went to Manhattan Beach, California, where there's a case of reparations for land taken by eminent domain from one of the founding Black families in the 1920s, this beautiful Surfside town in California. As I was reflecting on that struggle to win those reparations, and speaking to family members, it occurred to me that we all will sleep easier knowing that we're living in a country of law and justice, that we can't have, as Beverly said, atrocities that go unrecognized, unatoned for, uncompensated for.

I want to live in that society, I would hope my white brothers would want to live in a society where the most powerful force in society and it really was the government who created the slave codes and the Black codes and who created the segregation, and therefore, the government that should be accountable. That actually is a way that I think we should all feel better about living in a society with that sense of justice.

Brian Lehrer: As we come to the end of our time, what's your optimism-pessimism scale point now? It seems to so many people in so many ways that for a bunch of years now, we've been going in the wrong direction. How do you turn the page? Is it generational? What do you say?

Heather McGhee: I'm really optimistic. If you did a word cloud, about what people say about The Sum Of Us hopeful is right in the center of the biggest one, the book is hopeful. It's forward-looking because ultimately, I know that public policy decisions made the world that we have today, and better decisions can make a better world. The economy is not the weather.

There's nothing inherently subordinate about people of color or inherently superior about white people. Ultimately, we all want the same things and I do believe that a better future is fully within our grasp. The book, The Sum Of Us, is full of hopeful stories of people coming together across lines of race, to take on powerful interests and win in our collective interest.

Brian Lehrer: Heather McGee's book, The Sum of Us: How Racism costs All of Us and How We Can Prosper Together, is now out in a young readers' edition. Thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about it.

Heather McGhee: Thank you, Brian.

 

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