Fresh Air - Best Of: Mixed Marriage Project / How Racism Costs Everyone

Episode Date: February 14, 2026

Dorothy Roberts’ father was a white anthropologist who studied interracial marriages and her mother was a Black woman from Jamaica. She always assumed her parents' relationship inspired her father��s scholarly focus, but that changed after he died, and she found boxes of interviews he conducted with interracial couples, dating back to the 1930s, decades before he met her mother. Robert's memoir is ‘The Mixed Marriage Project.’We also hear from historian Heather McGhee. Her book, ‘The Sum of Us,’ examines a question at the heart of American life: Why do so many Americans believe that progress for one group means loss for another?Also, David Bianculli talks about some TV shows he’s been catching up on. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from MS Now. On their new podcast, MS Now presents Clockit. Washington Power Players, Simone Sanders Towns, and Eugene Daniels discuss how the latest political news and the caciest cultural moments converge. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. From W.HYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today we talk with scholar Dorothy Roberts. Her father was a white anthropologist who studied interracial men.

marriages, and her mother was a black woman from Jamaica. Roberts always assumed her parents' relationship inspired her father's scholarly focus. But that changed after he died, and she found boxes of interviews he conducted with interracial couples dating back to the 1930s, decades before he met her mother. Now I knew it wasn't that his falling in love with my mother and marrying her motivated him to do this research. It might have been the opposite. We also hear from historian Heather McGee, her book The Sum of Us, examines a question at the heart of American life. Why do so many Americans believe that progress for one group means loss for another?

And David B. and Cooley talks about some TV shows he's been catching up on. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive and up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply.

If you're a super fan of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. W.HYY has launched a Fresh Air Society, a leadership group dedicated to ensuring Fresh Air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists, actors, actors, and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and recognition. Learn more at WHYY.org slash Fresh Air Society.

Over the years at NPR's Fresh Air, we've gotten to talk with a lot of great filmmakers. Now we've made a playlist of some of our favorites, including Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Ava DuVernay, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and others. Find all our new playlists and more at Fresh Air Plus at Plus. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. My first guest today is legal scholar and author, Dorothy Roberts. For decades, Roberts has challenged the idea that institutions like medicine, the law, and child welfare are neutral. Her landmark books, killing the black body and torn apart, helped reshape how we understand the policing of reproduction, parenting, and race in America. Her new book now turned. turns that lens inward. It begins with 25 boxes of her late father's papers. Robert Roberts was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and over the course of 50 years conducted hundreds of interviews with interracial couples across the city, an extraordinary archive

dating back to the 1930s. Her mother, Iris, a black Jamaican immigrant, was his wife, and what Roberts finds inside those boxes challenges the story she'd always believed about her own family. Roberts is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024 MacArthur fellow. The memoir is called The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, race, and family. Dorothy Roberts, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much, Tanya. It's such a pleasure to be on this program. A pleasure to have you. And let's start with these 25 boxes because you tell us right from the start of the book that they were sitting in your basement for almost a decade after your parents died. And the date on the first transcript is February 1937. And this date stopped you in your tracks. You actually described feeling frozen, kind of like you were going to faint as you clutch those papers to your chest. What was it about that date in particular? that undid you?

Well, I always assumed that my father was writing his book on interracial marriage, conducting the interviews that were the basis of this book he was working on in the 1960s while I was growing up. I have very vivid memories of him conducting the interviews and being up in his study on the third floor, writing the book. It really dominated my childhood. And so I assumed because of that that he got interested in interracial marriage and wanted to learn the stories of black, white couples, because he met and fell in love with my mother, which happened in the 1950s. And so now discovering this transcript of an interview from 1937, it just completely upended my understanding of my father's research and its relationship.

to my family. You know, I'm thinking, well, first of all, how in the world did my father even get interested in this topic when he was only 21 years old, having grown up in a segregated white neighborhood in Chicago, being so young. I just, it was a mystery to me, but then in addition to that, it really flipped the relationship. I thought he had with my mother and his research, because now I knew it wasn't that his falling in love with my mother and marrying her motivated him to do this research. It might have been the opposite that he was first interested in interracial marriage and then he married my mother. That made you sit with some really uncomfortable and complicated feelings and grapple with

some things about whether your father was really attracted to your mother for. who she was or if it was because he was looking for a black woman to date and then ultimately marry. And you finally came to some conclusions, which makes the book just so striking, but your father had tried for decades to turn all of this research into a book. He had a deal with Simon & Schuster and another publication. So you went into this thinking as you're opening those pages and reading and discovering that maybe you might finish the work that he had done. But when did you realize that the book you needed to write wasn't exactly his work? Yes, you're right. I first thought I'll finish the book that my father never published

because I found nearly 500 interviews in these boxes and they were absolutely fascinating, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, you know, all the way to couples who were married in the 1960s. And all of the stories were so intriguing. I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the color line, the black belt. All of this could make a fascinating book, I thought. And that was my first plan. But as I immersed myself in the interviews, I began to learn more about my father

because the very questions he asked, his notes in the transcripts, finding out that my mother was involved. You know, all of this created curiosity I had about my family, about their marriage. And then I began to think about how it related to me and my identity as a black girl with a white father. And the more and more I delved into the interviews and thought about the meaning for me and my family and my identity I was just compelled to write a book about that. And so it turned from a kind of sociological or anthropological study of black-white couples in Chicago over several centuries into exploration of my own family and my own identity.

Yeah. I want to, before we get to all of those points, I really want to understand a little bit more about who your father was because he, Here he is training as an anthropologist in the 1930s. But at 16, your father would spend several months in a village in northeast India where he watched cast dictate who could marry whom. And do you think, do you suspect that is where he was able to see more clearly the systems in place in the United States and sort of draw that line? Yes, I think there had to be a connection. He traveled around the world literally with his grandmother on this trip to and from India. And he writes in his diary about making friends with tribal boys in India.

He writes about wearing the clothing that they gave him. All of this without any sense of judgment whatsoever. And then when he gets to college, I find some of his papers where he talks. talks about his white privilege. He's challenging the professors who believe that white, in white superiority. Basically, they believe in inherited traits that determine how capable you are. My father writes, I don't believe that. That's not true. Everyone is just as capable. It's just that I have the benefit of people not discriminating against me because of my Nordic heritage. and when he was 17.

So he was already, for some reason, open to the idea that there was a racial caste system in Chicago, like the one in the South, he writes, and that it could be dismantled. He also had the mission of ending racial caste. He thought it could be done through interracial marriage, but that was his ultimate mission. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dorothy Roberts. She's a legal scholar, MacArthur Fellow, and the author of several books on race in America. Her new memoir, The Mixed Marriage Project, tells the story of her parents' interracial marriage, and the nearly 500 transcripts her white father left behind from decades of interviewing interracial couples in Chicago. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Akela Sherrills remembers the day in 1992 when the Bloods and Crips gangs in his Watts neighborhood agreed to a ceasefire. We had a barbecue. It was like it became a family reunion. I mean, we had a three-decade war. You know, so the release was just extraordinary. Listen to the TED Radio Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. How did this make you grapple with your own thoughts about interracial relationships? Of course, you grew up with, your parents and lots of couples around you who were interracial. And so there is an acceptance there. But, I mean, inherently, as a black woman in America, how did these transcripts kind of make you grapple with your own feelings about it? Oh, I grappled with my own feelings with every single

interview I read in so many multiple levels. There was this visceral. feeling I felt whenever a black man, a black husband would talk about his preference for being with white women. You know, these ideas that interracial intimacy has an extra excitement to it. It has an extra titillation to it. That kind of idea came up in many of the interviews. And I just have a very visceral revulsion at that kind of idea that's sort of a fetishization of interracial intimacy and also of biracial children. The idea that whitening children, you know, makes them more attractive or makes them more intelligent or more appealing, more lovable. And whenever that came up, sometimes I had to just throw the interview down because I couldn't stand that kind of thinking. Do you think that some of your, that visceral reaction and feeling to the black men in the transcripts talking about, they felt kind of like titillated by it, by the idea of dating outside of their race?

it feeling like a rejection of self for you. Yes, it's when the black men would describe their feelings for white women in a way that they couldn't possibly have toward black women because black women are black. You know, for example, Mr. Sussex, whom I suspect was my piano teacher, he said that when he found out he could date white women, they became more attractive to him than black women. He stopped dating black women when he found out he could date white women. It wasn't that finding out he could date white women expanded the range of women he could date. It was that finding out he could date white women expanded the range of women he could date. It was that, it was a rejection of black women. Now, there's also this complexity to it that because black men were punished, lynched, killed for even showing some attention to white women, based on the accusation that they had sex with a white woman, I can see how Mr. Sussex is now saying, all right, my ability to date white women is in defiance of that history. So it seems as if it's something that is challenging white supremacy, whereas the history for black women is sexual exploitation,

rape by white enslavers. And so for many people, when black women love white men or white men, black women. And this came out in the interviews. It seems as if it's just a continuation of white supremacist's patriarchal power of white men. And I don't think that that's necessarily the case. I can see in my own family, my father revered, respected my mother. He loved her. He was committed to her. And throughout reading these interviews, what I always wanted to do and what I felt most strongly about was challenging all the ways that black women have been demeaned, have been vilified, our sexuality, our childbearing, our mothering. You know, that's what my whole career has been about. And I really did have a very strong reaction against every time that kind of. thinking came up in the interviews.

There's a moment in the book I'd love for you to read. You're going through the boxes in your office, and you find a folder, and the folder had a number on it, 224. And can I have you read from there? Inside are four documents. A college paper I submitted for a sociology class, two versions of an essay I wrote, one in longhand, the other typed, and a typed letter my father wrote to me. I feel dizzy as the realization sets in. I am research participant number 224. Daddy had created a file on me and placed it among the folders containing notes and transcripts from his interviews with other children of interracial couples. By now, I know that his fascination with interracial families began long before he started one of his own.

I have long understood that my mother, my sisters, and I were inextricably tied to his scholarly obsession, woven into his lifelong pursuit of interracial intimacy. But discovering that he considered me an actual subject of study, that was a whole new level of entanglement. I begin to wonder, was I born entirely from his love for my mother? Or was I, in some way, an extension of his own. mission to document and popularize mixed marriages. It unsettles me to think that my sisters and I may have been unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment designed to prove the viability

and perhaps even the superiority of interracial unions. Thank you for reading that, and I want to ask you, what did that discovery first off do to you, and what answers did you come to after sitting with that discovery. At first, I was really shocked to find that I was a participant, a research subject in his study now of the children of interracial couples. And I did wonder initially, was I part of an experiment of his trying to prove his theory that biracial children, were well adjusted and weren't tragic mulattoes that we could do well in school and do well in society. But, you know, I was so close to my father. I knew how much he loved me. I was so entangled in his work because he brought it into our family's life and he discussed it with me so much.

And so I knew that his including me in the project was not because he thought of me just as a research subject, but because he thought of me as part of his entire life's work. And I began to realize that that actually made him even closer to me. It meant that I was even closer to him. I was involved in every aspect of his life. You know, there are lots of children who feel separated from their parents and separated from their parents' work and even feel that their parents' work is more important to them, to their parents than they are. I never felt that way about my father. I always felt that I was essential to him. Your father's thesis was that if interracial unions were allowed to flourish, they would prompt demands for social equality. equality, that basically interracial marriage could help dismantle this caste system that he believed

America was under. Do you think that there was something he could not see precisely because of where he stood and something that you could see precisely because of where you stand? Certainly, we had debates throughout even my childhood about whether or not interracial marriage could dismantle racism. And I... Really? Do you remember when was the first time you all had that debate? Well, it began not so much with a debate, but with his trying to persuade me of his views. And that began very early.

I mean, as early as I can remember, my father was trying to persuade me that the answer to America's race problem was interracial marriage. and he told me that over and over and over again. Along with, I have to say, his main message was that all human beings are equal. There's only one human race. And the only reason why black and white people are not moving together for greater racial justice is because of invented divisions between us. So that was his main message.

and that I agree with to this day. But the idea of the power of interracial love by itself was something I began to question. I don't remember exactly when, but I know for a fact that when I read Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, when I was in seventh grade, that I began to have a very different perspective than my father.

And I do believe that beginning at that young age, I recognized the power of structural racism and could not accept his view that interracial love by itself would be strong enough to transcend it or overcome it or dismantle it. And so from that time on, we began to have debates about it. But, you know, my father always respected my opinion. That's something I also learned in the file that I found about me, that he kept this file, even though the file contained wording that adamantly disagreed with him, but he still kept it and he still loved me and he still respected my opinion. Dorothy Roberts, thank you so much for this scholarship for this book and for this conversation. Thank you, Tanya. It's been really a delight and an honor to be able to speak with you. I really truly appreciate it. Dorothy Roberts' new book is called The Mixed Marriage Project, a memoir of love, race, and family.

It's only been a month or so into the new year, and already our TV critic David B. and Cooley feels way behind. So he's going to attempt the TV viewing equivalent of speed dating and cover as much ground as quickly as possible. Here are his reviews. The Pit on HBO Max doesn't need much explanation. It just won an Emmy as Outstanding Drama Series for its first season, and Noah Wiley just won Best Actor in his starring role of Dr. Robbie. New episodes roll out Thursdays through April.

I'm enjoying the second season just as much, for the small moments as well as the big intense ones. In one recent episode, a couple is being treated after being in a road accident, and the husband regains consciousness to learn from Dr. Robbie that his wife is in critical condition. Please don't...

Oh my God, please don't let her die. Please. I can assure you that she is an excellent hand. Is this how it works? How what works? You think things are important, that everything's so important. And then you end up here and see. Yeah, that is how it works.

Health, mental as well as physical, also is at the heart of shrinking, which recently began its third season on Apple TV. One therapist, played by Harrison Ford, has developed Parkinson's and reluctantly visits a specialist. In the waiting room is another patient who strikes up a conversation. The patient is played in where, what turns out to be a very moving guest spot by Michael J. Fox. What are you in for?

Parkinson's. You? Just hair cut. I just have more of a laugh than that. Sorry. I'm just going through it today. You look good. Your voice is firm. You just sound wise. Yeah, I am quite wise. How's your balance?

Not bad. This stupid exercise is help. Me, I fall three times a day. I'm thinking I take it up stunt work. Another show rolling out weekly episodes, at least through the end of February, is the six-episode Game of Thrones prequel shown Sundays on HBO and HBO Max. It's called A Night of the Seven Kingdoms and is set about a hundred years before Game of Thrones. I've seen the whole season and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Peter Claffey plays a wannabe knight, a towering hulk of a man named Sir Duncan the Tall.

Dexter Saul Ansel plays his tiny bald-headed. Squire, a kid nicknamed Egg. And the two of them are a very funny, charming, odd couple indeed. Do you think I'll ever make a night one day? Sure, why not? You're a likely lad. I'm a bit puny. You'll grow. Even for my age. Everyone's always told me so.

Everyone's always told me I was stupid. And? Hmm? What? What? What did he do when people are. People said you were stupid some. What business is that of yours?

My problems are my own. Other recent TV shows are out there in their entirety already, but deserve mention. All eight episodes of Down Cemetery Road, an enjoyable and impressive mystery series starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, are available on Apple TV, and a second season is in the works. Which is great news, because Emma Thompson is playing one of the quirkiest, funniest TV detectives since Peter Fawke starred as Colombo. And Wonder Man, the newest Disney Plus entry in the Marvel Universe, recently dropped all eight episodes at once.

It stars Yaya Abdul Mateen II as Simon Williams, an actor who has some superhuman abilities he's trying to hide while auditioning for the movie role of a superhero. Helping him is Sir Ben Kingsley as Trevor, a veteran washed-up actor who was introduced in an Iron Man movie, as an actor impersonating a villain. Kingsley is so much fun in this expanded look at Trevor, he won me over immediately.

Here he is, taking Simon on a tour of his souvenir-filled apartment, littered with old VHS tapes, scripts, and even a prop skull from his stage days. Simon reacts admiringly to some of the memorabilia. Coronation Street, you play Ron Jenkins, right? Well done. A pint of bitter, please, and one for my friend. Every Brit did their stint.

The producers were thrilled to get me after my runners' leer. Oh, careful with that. There's a tradition in the theatre of handing down your prop to the next generation. This particular skulls had quite the journey. It was used by David Garrick when he played Hamlet. He gave it to Keane, who passed it to Irvin, who passed it to Burton, who left it in a bar, and I nicked it. And I'll end with a shout-out to Sunday Best,

the Netflix documentary about Ed Sullivan that I think everyone should enjoy and be surprised by. I always knew that Sullivan, with his popular CBS variety show, was a longtime champion of minority artists. But until this documentary, I never fully understood why.

I'll close with this story and performance by Harry Belafonte, who in 1950 was in danger of being blacklisted for his support of civil rights and certain communist causes. He wanted to talk to me personally, so he invited me to come to his hotel. He said, I'm told that I can't have you on my show because you are very favorable towards the communist ideology and that you're out there making mischief.

That's not that the best interests of our country. And I said, well, Mr. Sullivan, everything that you have suggested I'm guilty of having done is true. Now tell me something. When the Irish did battle with the British, the rebel mood was considered quite heroic by all the Irish citizens in the world. Explain to me what the difference is

when those of us of color also strike out against the same oppression. The Irish rebels who do that are heroic. Black rebels who do that are not patriotic. thought. This was not about loyalty to the nation. It's about loyalty to the human condition. And humanity was being terribly brutalized. I left the meeting with nothing really resolved. And I couldn't have been back in the office more than an hour or two. Then I got a call for my agent. And he said, I don't know what you said, Ed Sullivan, but you're on the show. Gentlemen, here's the moment we've all been waiting for.

Here is one of the great artists of our country and one of the greatest artists of the world. Here is Harry Belafonte. Good morning, son. Oh, well, it's good morning, Captain, son. Don't you need you'll skinner? David B. Incouli is Fresh Air's TV critic. Coming up, we'll talk with historian Heather McGee

about how racism in America hurts everyone, not just the people it targets. This is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my next guest is author and scholar Heather McGee. Her book The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,

Came out in 2021, but it reads like it was written for this exact moment. The thesis is deceptively simple. Racism doesn't just hurt the people it targets. It hollows out the lives of everyone, including white Americans. McGee traces the history of this country, showing how it is often chosen to destroy public goods rather than share them. Just recently, President Trump told the New York Times that civil rights protections resulted in white people being very badly treated, that he calls it reverse discrimination.

The administration is dismantling diversity programs across government and urging white men to file federal discrimination complaints. It is also removed the MLK holiday and Juneteenth from this year's fee-free days at national parks, a move many see as a direct assault on Dr. King's legacy. In her book, McGee writes about research that shows many white Americans have come to believe anti-white bias is now more prevalent than anti-black bias, despite evidence to the contrary. She set out to understand where this belief comes from,

who profits from it and what it costs all of us. She calls her book both a diagnosis and a way out. Heather McGee is the former president of Demos, a progressive think tank focused on democracy, the economy and racial justice. She is drafted legislation and testified before Congress on policy initiatives including debt-free college and voting rights protections.

She's a contributor to, to NBC's Meet the Press and delivered her 2019 TED Talk called, Racism Has a Cost for Everyone. Her podcast, The Sum of Us, extended the arguments in her book. And Heather McGee, welcome back to Fresh Air. Tanya, thank you so much for having me. Heather, I want to start by playing something for you. It's Andrea Lucas.

She's the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that's the agency created in 1965 to enforce the civil rights. Act. And in this clip, she is making a call out to white men. Let's listen. Are you a white male who's experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the EOC as soon as possible. Time limits are typically strict for filing a claim. The EOC is the federal agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination law against businesses and other private sector employers. The EOC is committed to identifying, attacking, and eliminating all forms

of race and sex discrimination, including against white male applicants and employees. That was Andrea Lucas. She's the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she is calling for white men to also file if they feel discriminated against. I just want to slow down on this call out, because you've looked at this data closely. And I want you to talk about the facts and what they actually show and who has benefited from the Civil Rights Act and actually who's been left behind since 1964. I want to say, first of all, that in a really masterful way,

everything that the Trump administration is doing is both about what it's doing, asking for people to complain to the government about perceived bias, and about driving. an underlying core narrative. And that core narrative is an us versus them zero-sum story. It's a story that says that there can be no mutual progress, that if people of color or women get ahead, if there are more immigrants, then that must come at the expense of white people,

of men, of native-born citizens, right? It's this core zero-sum lie, I call it a lie. I call it a lie because the facts make it very clear. In fact, civil rights have been a benefit to most sectors of the society, that anti-discrimination laws have had beneficiaries from people with disabilities, first-generation college students, white women have been the disproportionate beneficiaries of affirmative action, and that even white men have, because of longstanding, deliberate and explicit bias towards them have actually benefited from companies and institutions that have been more successful because of their diversity. And so we really have to both take the face value of what's happening and also understand that for this new EEOC chair to say,

white men, you are being hurt by this new, as in the last 60 years, regime of civil and equal rights, is really about both soliciting plaintiffs, but more importantly, it's about selling a story, selling a story to white people that says you should fear the progress and even the presence of people of color. This idea of the zero-sum lie, you actually talked to scholars at Harvard who has, studied it. And they found that the thing is a significant percentage of white Americans believe there is a bias against them and that it is now more prevalent than anti-black bias. And I guess that might not be surprising to some, but researchers told you that they were shocked because it's so contrary to the facts. What did you find when you went looking for the source of that belief?

You know, it's funny now because I wrote the sum of us in the era of 2017 to 2021. And I had to do a lot of legwork to find where this zero-sum narrative was coming from, who was selling this idea for their own profit, and of course ultimately what it was costing people to buy this idea that there's no mutual progress, that they should fear their neighbor and their neighbor's success. Of course, now in the year 2026, we hear that zero-sum story everywhere. Us versus them, as the fascism scholar Jason Stanley says, is the core story of fascism. There's a rewriting that is happening all across the federal government, including renaming landmarks, turning Denali back to McKinley, removing a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page, changing enslaved African-Americans.

to enslaved workers. There is a pattern here. Oh, I mean, the list goes on and on. I mean, reading books about, you know, racial history from military libraries. A lot of the military heroes who are women and people of color have been stripped from the Defense Department's, you know, sort of celebrations. I mean, we know what's happening. It's really quite transparent. I do believe it will be temporary. We've seen the polling data that shows time after time that Americans don't want history to be erased. They don't want books to be banned.

Americans of all stripes and all political persuasions don't support the whitewashing of history. So I do believe this is all quite foolish, quite childish, frankly, and quite temporary. Heather, for white Americans who hear your argument, you know, and they think, because they may believe in the zero-sum lie, that this sounds like I'm being asked to give up something, what do you say to them? And for black Americans, too, and others who are skeptical that solidarity will ever be reciprocated, what do you say to them? You know, racial and economic inequality costs our country so much. The economists at city, group found that the black-white economic divide had cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion over the course of 20 years. And it makes sense, right? If you think about it, if you've got so many of your players sidelined due to debt, discrimination, disadvantage, they can't be on the field scoring points for your team. And of course, the zero-sum lie tells folks we're not all on

the same team, but that's just not true. We are in an interconnected economy. Today, the average black college graduate has less household wealth than the average white high school dropout. I'm going to say that again. If you are a white high school dropout, you are likely to have more household wealth, savings, assets, stocks, and bonds, inheritances than a black college graduate. And that's not because of something the black college graduate. It's wrong. That is because of the direct history of redlining and discrimination that has made. that black college graduate sort of inherit debt and wealth poverty instead of inherit wealth.

And so think about our society and what it would be if that black college graduate, instead of spending the first decade of her career trying to get out from a mountain of debt, was actually able to go right into the marketplace and pioneer an invention that would solve a big problem. in our society, would be able to go into public service at a hospital as a physician and be the person who operated on you or your family member, right? Even the very, in some quarters, controversial idea of reparations, which feels like exactly a zero sum to some people, I don't see it as zero-sum. I don't see it as a taking from one group and giving to another. I don't see it as an admission of guilt, by white Americans, I see it as seed capital for the nation that we're becoming. And I think that when

we look at what black Americans have contributed to our society without that cushion of wealth, we have to see that we could all benefit. I also think it's important for our democracy, for us to live in a society where if government harms you, they make it right. If seven people on a city Council vote to take your family's land, and 50 years later, 100 years later, those seven people are no longer alive, that doesn't mean that your descendants will still suffer the consequences of that for all time, and there'll be no apology and no repair. Thankfully, we are in an era, despite this administration, when we're starting to see progress. We're starting to see progress, but then let's talk about the attacks on diversity, equity,

and inclusion. ProPublica even published this blistering investigation about it over the summer of who's being fired with these DEI purges. Nearly 80% are non-white. Most of them are black women. Women who spent decades in public service who took an oath, who built careers, now all gone. When you began to see this pattern, what did you feel? And I want to ask that in particularly because you are still so optimistic. feeling that we are still moving in a direction toward progress, when right now it feels pretty

dire for a significant percentage of the population. I want to be very clear that this administration has been brutal in its attacks on the public good, and specifically its attacks on people of color and public service and disproportionately black women. And you're exactly right. at the same time, this is so obviously folks who are holding on white-knuckled to a tiny idea of we the people. And they're denying the beauty of what we are becoming as we become a country with no dominant racial majority. As we become a country that has owned up to and understood our true history, people don't unsee what they saw in the summer of the uprisings.

in the wake of George Floyd's murder. People don't unsee what they saw when ICE killed Renee Good. This is a country that is in fact, just as it has always been, warring between a faction that wants to keep wealth and power concentrated in its hands and a diverse, striving, agitating, often activist, multiracial population that is trying to figure out

who they are to one another. But I think that the reason why the attacks have been so brutal and overreaching is because we are so close to a place where there is an enduring multiracial governing

governing majority that wants this country to live up to the values that we were taught it was founded on. and is ready to do the work to actually make it so. You know, I hate this question I'm about to ask you, but I also really love it. I mentioned how Dr. King said real change requires an honest diagnosis. If you could sit with him today, what would you tell him about where we are?

I'm sorry, Tanya, you saying that was just very moving because I pictured myself getting a chance to be with him and that's a powerful thing. Dr. King, in his very short time on this planet, gave us so much and was such a prophet. I don't think he would be surprised

about where we are because he was a student of history and he knew that the arc of the moral universe was long and that it been, ends towards justice, but he also knew that it snaps back sometimes. And he also knew that the very narrow, self-interested elite was always going to try to sabotage progress. I think he would be proud of who black people are today and what we've accomplished, what we've contributed to the world.

I think he would be disgusted by the enduring inequality. in our society that have grown so much since his time. But so much of what he spoke about was so prescient. He began in the later part of his activism to really focus on the ills of capitalism and the ills of militarism, racial, and economic inequality. And of course, those ills are very much at the heart of what is plaguing us in our society today, from the takeover of Venezuela with a motivation of controlling oil resources and no care for the people who live there and have been in desperation for so long, to the militarization of our communities,

to the dehumanization of immigrants and people of color in the rhetoric that this regime has, espoused. He wouldn't be surprised by it. He would be inspired by the activism that is happening today. But I do think that for somebody who saw so much progress in such a short time, he would be impatient for us. He would say that the, as he did say in 1967, the beloved community is a realistic vision of an achievable society, one in which problems and conflicts exist but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. I think he would say, why haven't we gotten there? Why are so many people still willing to believe the zero-sum lie? And I think he would have a lot to say to the current White House.

Heather McGee, I really appreciate this conversation in you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tanya. Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful. Heather McGee is the author of The Sum of Us. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Year's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Bosley.