Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Economic Cost of Racism with Heather McGhee

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

In this episode, Sharon is joined by economic policy expert and author Heather McGhee. McGhee began her career as an economist but when she took a trip across the country and back, she began to ask herself, “Why can’t we have nice things?” We’re not talking about robot maids, but rather, the social stability of programs like affordable healthcare and well-funded public schools. While puzzling out the answer to this question, McGhee realized that racism was a major driver of stagnant economics for ALL Americans, not just for Brown and Black Americans. Listen in to find out why, and how we must rethink our zero sum mindset–my progress over yours–to gain the most amount of prosperity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So delighted that you're joining me today. I have a question for you. What does racism cost us? What does it cost us as a country? That's the question we're going to be exploring with Heather McGee, who is the author of a fantastic book and the host of a podcast called The Sum of Us. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Heather, I am delighted to have you with me here today. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. It is a pleasure. I read your book with great interest and was just thrilled that you were able to make time in your schedule to join

us today. I know people are very much going to benefit from hearing from you, enjoy hearing from you. Can you give us a little bit of just a brief overview of who you are, how you got started, and what made you interested in this topic? Well, Sharon, I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the early 1980s at a time that I really consider kind of the birth of the era of inequality, when it was really clear to me, even as a little kid, that things were changing, right? That the neighborhood was becoming less safe, that the schools and playgrounds that we depended on were sort of falling into disrepair, while on the other side of the city, business was booming. And that sort of curiosity and frustration about the way things were kind of grew up

in me and made me seek out a job in trying to solve big problems. So I spent 20 years as an adult helping to build and then ultimately running a nonprofit organization that focused on solutions to American inequality, tackling issues like jobs that don't pay enough, the costs of climate change, student debt, housing, and the financial crisis, all these kinds of problems that feel like we should be able to tackle them and we should be able to do better. And after nearly 20 years testifying in Congress, drafting legislation, going on shows like Meet the Press, I felt like we were missing something. Like there was some part of the puzzle of studying economic problems and then crafting evidence-based solutions and advocating for decision makers to make better decisions that

just like wasn't adding up. And so, Sharon, I made this really kind of, for me and my friends and my family at the time, kind of crazy decision to leave my dream job in 2017 and pack up and hit the road. And I crisscrossed this country. I went from California to Maine and back again, multiple times. And what I was in search of in many ways was the answer to a question that you might have asked yourself at some point, which is why does it seem like Americans can't have nice things? Right. And, and by nice things, I don't mean like, you know, self-driving cars and laundry that does itself, which would be nice.

Why can't it be the Jetsons, Heather? You know, we were promised the hovercraft backpacks. Why don't we have the hovercraft backpacks? Where is my robot maid? Exactly. As a working mom, where is my robot maid? No, but, you know, by nice things, I really mean nice things like universal child care and truly affordable health care and a well-funded public school in every neighborhood and paid family leave.

These things that other countries with a fraction of our wealth are able to provide for their people. And yet we somehow still really struggle to be able to win those nice things for our families. You know, 1% of the population has more wealth than the entire middle class today. And less than half of adult workers can meet their basic needs, like for things like housing and food without having to go into debt. And so it was really that question that set me off on this journey. And what I ended up finding was that as, you know, I was an economics person, right? Like that was my background. I saw the world in dollars and cents. And ultimately it was more, almost like deeper questions of who we are as Americans and who we are to one another that often fell along lines of race and

had to do with our beliefs about different racial groups that was holding us back. And so what I came to realize is that racism in our politics and in our policymaking ultimately has a cost for everyone. So I would love to hear more about how you arrived at the conclusion that the reason we can't have nice things, and the numbers show that most Americans support many of these ideas that you are talking about. They want quality schools for their children. Most Americans believe in having some kind of paid family leave. We want high quality, affordable health care. These are things that Americans, if you ask them, they're like, yeah, we want that. What led you to the conclusion that one of the biggest issues at the heart of these, you know, this question, why can't we have nice things has to do with race. What led you to

that conclusion? So I want to say that, first of all, Sharon, for those who aren't looking at us, I'm a Black woman, right? I'm the descendant of enslaved people on both sides of my family. And yet my career was not about race, right? My career was about economics. And I really felt like if we get these problems right, if we tweak the public policies, if businesses pay working class people more, if we have more programs and grow the GDP, race's the economy, jobs, the same thing that white Americans often say. And so I didn't really see the world with this racial lens. But ultimately, it was sort of like I didn't put on a racial lens. It was like I took off blinders that were stopping me from seeing what was right in front of my face. And one of the things that I did was I really decided to just sort of put aside a lot of the economic kind of dogma and orthodoxy that I had been educated with and look at things like sociology and psychology. One of the first bodies of research that I came across in my journey, and I ended up visiting the scholars who were behind this work, was this idea that we're kind of trapped in a zero-sum game, that

many people in America, it's a predominant worldview, believe that there's sort of a fixed pie of well-being. And if I get a bigger slice, Sharon, you get a smaller slice, right? A dollar more in my pocket is a dollar less in yours. And as a person with an economics background, that's not the kind of mental model we use. We don't think of a zero-sum game where it's like one point here means one less point for the other team. We think of it like a normal sports game. We want everybody in our society, all of our players to be on the field scoring points for our team. That's how the economy

flourishes. And we don't want anyone sidelined due to debt, discrimination, disadvantage. Economists have calculated that the black-white economic divide has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion over the last 20 years in foregone economic growth, right? So, it isn't a zero-sum game. And yet, the zero-sum story tells many people we're not on the same team. And so, we should be rooting against each other and suspicious of one another's progress. And interestingly, in the U.S., that zero-sum worldview is a racialized one. It's a racialized one because, A, the racial and ethnic groups are who is seen as being on

opposite teams and competing with one another for dominance and status. And then, interestingly, white Americans are far more likely in the data to see the world through this zero-sum prism. Like, basically, most folks of color don't think that our progress has to come at white folks' expense, but the reverse is not true. So, when I came upon this and related kind of areas of research like group status threat and last place aversion, right? This idea that there's sort of a hierarchy of human value and you better climb your way up to a higher rung, right? And kick anybody below you lest you fall, right? It felt like, aha, like that doesn't make the economic sense, but I do recognize that

sentiment in our politics and in our conversations about things and about sort of who we are to one another and what every family deserves. You have a fantastic book called The Sum of Us. And one of the things that I noted when I was reading it was exactly what you were just talking about. I pulled out this little section and you're referencing a researcher. And I found that fascinating that there is a difference in viewpoint. The data demonstrates a difference in viewpoint amongst people of different racial groups about what progress means to them. Yeah. And I think, you know, for me, Sharon, when I read that and when I heard the professor sort of really reiterate it, I took a breath, right? And I said, okay,

this entire journey for me was really an exercise in empathy, really deep empathy and questioning a lot of things that were sort of, that I knew that were received wisdom. So I said, you know, let's ask why, right? Why are white Americans more likely to view the world through this zero-sum lens? There's no correlation between the melanin content and your skin and your likelihood to see progress as a zero-sum game, right? This isn't natural. It's not biology. Everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. And so, I wanted to ask the question, well, who's telling white folks this story, right? Who's maybe selling this story? How are they profiting from selling this story economically, politically? What do they have to

gain? Why would white folks feel, many white folks feel like desperate enough to buy this story? And that, Sharon, led me towards a path of really looking at the unvarnished history of this country's foundations. And I'm not an historian. The book is often on like the history shelves in bookstores, which just is wild to me. But I did feel like in order to figure out who we are now, where we're standing, we have to figure out the paths that we took to get here. And this zero sum idea has always been used in our history by people who are benefiting financially from a pretty rigged economic system from the days of slavery to our current inequality in order to gain economically and politically. offered up to say to many white Americans, side with your color instead of your class. Don't join forces across lines of race, as was done many times in the early history of this country to try to change the economic system. Stay in your place as long as that place makes you feel better

than people below you. That's really the secret, right? The secret to working class, middle-class people being able to win nice things is by coming together, right? We're never going to, on our own, be able to have universal healthcare. We're never going to, on our own, be able to get our employer to raise all the wages in our company. And in the book, The Sum of Us, I really do talk about these different forms of collective action, right? Through government, through unions, through negotiating collectively. That is how we've made progress in society, right? The jobs that we think of as good American factory jobs weren't good jobs. They were terrible sweatshop jobs. And then people joined together

and they linked up arms and they said, we're not going to stand for it anymore. And so it's really that thing, that idea of collective action that is a big threat to people who want to keep the economic status quo the way it is. And so what is a great weapon to get a group of people who are struggling similarly to fight each other instead of fighting the people with the power to change things? Racism. So in Montgomery, Alabama, I went and visited a park, the central park of the city. It's called Oak Park. And in the middle of the park, there's this big, wide open, flat expanse of grass. And I found out that buried 10 feet under my feet was a carcass of what used to be a thousand plus person public swimming pool.

And the story of what happened to the Montgomery pool and many other public swimming pools across the country was the big aha for how we went from an economy that was kind of shaped like a football, right, with a big, broad middle class in the middle and narrower bands of low and high-income households on the ends to being squeezed like a bow tie with a squeezed middle class and bulging ends of high and low-income households. And so, what happened to the public pool in Montgomery is that it was one of nearly 2,000 lavishly funded grand resort style public swimming pools that was built in a building boom of public goods in the 30s and 40s. Things like roads and

bridges and schools and libraries and parks and these pools. And these weren't like neighborhood pools. These were huge institutions, right? And they were part of an ethos. It was really coming out of the Great Depression and the first Gilded Age. It said, you know what? Government has a responsibility and a right to ensure a decent standard of living for people. So this is what we're going to do together. We're going to raise revenue and we're going to plow it back into things to make Americans' quality of life better. And it was things that are arguably more significant, Sharon, than swimming pools. I'm not like a recreation expert, right? So when I think of the public goods era in the New Deal, the 30s and 40s, I think of things like Social Security, right? For the elderly, I think about a massive investment in housing that workers could

afford. And on top of that, something really unprecedented, which was mass home ownership, right? The idea, think about that, like a factory worker and a domestic worker could have a little bit of money and pay off over time a government-backed and regulated and insured financial instrument that let them build intergenerational wealth. This was really unprecedented. It was a huge public good. The GI Bill, which put a generation to college for free and into no down payment home ownership rate, all of this worked. They were public goods that worked, and the result was the greatest middle class the world had ever seen, the American dream. And yet,

and Sharon, truly, this is something that I did not know the extent of until I went on this journey to write The Sum of Us, everything I just described was in one way or another racially exclusionary. Whether it was explicitly, like in the housing market, where the New Deal government had this huge commitment to affordable housing and new homes and mortgages and home ownership, it based that on a never-substantiated assumption that Black people would be too much of a credit risk. And so, the New Deal government commissioned maps of the entire country that surveyed block to block in the biggest metro areas for the racial makeup of the community and designated in what are called redlining maps,

areas where lenders were basically not allowed to lend. They were rated hazardous. And so, it shut out almost all Black neighborhoods in the country from the mortgage system and commercial lending. That was really explicit, right? It literally said high Negro concentration do not lend. But as well, there were things that were less racially explicit and where there's sort of a hidden history, like the fact that Social Security excluded the two job categories that most Black workers were in, in a compromise with the South in Congress, domestic work and agricultural work. Or the GI Bill, which was race neutral on its face, but those benefits were filtered through mostly racially segregated education and housing sectors,

right? So, so many returning GIs had to miss out if they were Black. For me, this really says that we had created this really robust system of public goods, like these lavishly funded public pools, but it had an asterisk, right? It was a whites-only sign on the fence to the public pools. Or it was just these public pools were segregated by custom and really enforced through intimidation and violence. and really enforced through intimidation and violence. And so, when the civil rights movement finally empowered Black families to be able to sue and say, you know what? Hey, it's our tax dollars that have been funding those public goods too. And in the case of the swimming pools, we want our kids to swim. Many towns and cities drained their public pools rather than integrate them. They literally drained out the water,

right? And they backed up truckloads of dirt and gravel. I talked to someone, a Black man from Mississippi who remembers swimming one day and coming back the next day and seeing the trucks, right? And how white children were standing at the fence crying and like, what is happening? And it happened not just in the South. It happened in Washington State, New Jersey, California, Ohio, right? This is so important, this hidden history of what happened when we drained the public pools. Because for me, it really represents the willingness that some people in power had to destroy a public good rather than share it, right? And who bore the cost of that, right? So, Black kids and brown kids couldn't, you know,

swim at all. White kids, if they weren't rich enough to build a backyard pool or join a membership-only private swim club, couldn't swim, right? It created this cost of racism for everyone. And it particularly represents a moment in time when white Americans who had been taught for generations that there was something wrong with people of color were then asked to share something good with people of color and instead said, I'd rather not have it at all. That really gives me a lot to think about rather than share people said, then nobody can have it. It's like if that was, if you were in a relationship, that's like a domestic violence situation. Like if I can't have you, nobody can. Do you know what I mean? Like that's the kind of person or mindset that we're like run away. Yeah That's toxic. The idea that if we have to share it,

no one will get it. And you see that in many places. I'm thinking about like Prince Edward County, Virginia, in which when they were being told, listen, you have to integrate schools, they're like, forget it. Close them all. Close them for five years. We will pay for the white kids to go to private school. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me?

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Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. This phenomenon, right, of basically the country turning its back on a formula that had built the great American middle class, right? It was public goods, the ones I just described that really made life secure for white families. And then it was this sudden shift. You see a huge swing in the public opinion polling around the civil rights movement, not just about race, but about the economy. And this is where it all came in and clicked for me. So in 1956 and 1960, two-thirds of white Americans polled in this big study said they supported a government job guarantee. Like if you couldn't find a job that paid enough in the private sector, you could get a job doing good works for the

government. And two-thirds of white Americans polled supported the idea of like a universal basic income, right? No family should fall below this income floor. Almost 70% of white people supporting those two pretty radical in today's politics ideas. That was in 56 and 60. By 64, support among white people had plummeted for those two economic guarantees from about 70% to just 35%. Sharon, as a researcher, when I see that big of a swing and that short of a time, I have to look beyond the spreadsheet. I have to say, okay, what happened between 60 and 64? And as it turns out, things like, I don't know, the March on Washington, which was in 1963, and where, which was for jobs and freedom, and where a federal job guarantee and a national

living wage were actually two of the really small core set of demands, but it was seen as Black activists who wanted to be a part of this economic vision too. And 1963 was also the year that President Kennedy went on a media blitz around civil rights, then associating, I think in the white imagination, the party of the New Deal with civil rights. And we know that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, would, after signing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act into law, become the last Democrat running for president to win the majority of white voters to this day. voters to this day. Now, I say that not for partisan reasons at all, but just to show there was just like a big swing away from the party of public goods, the idea of public goods, of big government benefits and investments and unions and collective bargaining, when the public expanded to include everyone who had contributed to the nation's prosperity, not just white

Americans, when the public included people whom white folks had been taught were not good. Where was this messaging coming from and why was it being so successful? That's such a good question, Sharon. I really do always try to ask myself that question, like who is selling the story and why, right? What is the story justifying? Where is it coming from? And I think we've got to do that as citizens in this country. We've got to say, you know, who's telling us this story? Because everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. And so I think there was an underlying messages that white Americans were receiving everywhere, right?

Even from that same government that suddenly went to being on the side of civil rights, that same government had printed the signs and made the laws and done the segregation, right? And so I think there was a pre-existing message, a story that said that there's a racial hierarchy. Some groups of people are better than others. Some groups of people are lazy. Some groups of people are unclean. And that was church leaders, parents, government officials, politicians who were opposed to the New Deal, they were opposed to a strong will for government. They wanted to see taxes be slashed. They wanted to see a small government, big business. They wanted corporations to be unencumbered by regulations,

by corporate taxation. They wanted the back of labor to be broken. And they said, wow, this is a way that we can get white folks on our side, right? Because the majority of white Americans were like, we don't want big business to pollute our rivers and lakes and air, and we don't want them to pay us too little to make ends meet. And then there was a big shift. And you saw, ideologically, the majority of white voters sort of move over into the camp of, well, government must be bad. Because government betrayed us, the real Americans, by siding with these other people. Now, of course, as I'm talking about that, your eyes must light up, right? Because you're thinking, okay, we hear that now in our politics, right?

It's this marrying of an anti-government idea about government shouldn't address climate change, government shouldn't raise taxes, government shouldn't fund things like universal childcare and healthcare and paid family leave. Government shouldn't provide for free college like we used to. family leave. Government shouldn't provide for free college like we used to. And there's these sort of notes that are kind of played on a piano, right, where they're really about Black and white so often. They're really about, well, not everybody deserves a good life because some people are just not good people and they don't work hard enough. They don't try hard enough. And so, we should all do this on our own. And we've tried that, right? We've tried that for 50 years, right? The era of inequality

has really tried to say, let's have college costs borne by families. I really see this phenomenon of drained pool politics showing up in issues like the cost of college, right? This is a big head scratcher. Why? When our country kind of set the model and had one of the highest educational attainments in the world in the middle of the last century through this big system of colleges and universities that was virtually free for collegegoers. And it wasn't free because it didn't cost anything. It was free because government picked up the tab, right? States funded their state colleges. Federal government kicked in with grants, not loans. And it wasn't seen as charity. It was seen as a smart investment. And it was.

And then we walked away from that, right? States started cutting the investment in public colleges, federal government shifted from grants to loans that had to be repaid back. And it just is a head scratcher because you think, why would we have done that at the same time that we made it so that getting a college degree was a ticket to the middle class? Like, you can't have a middle-class job now without a college degree, and yet we've priced it out of reach for the working class. This is one of those issues where you see racism in the sense that you see this big racial disparity, right? That Black students, for example, because of the racial wealth divide, the racial wealth divide is where Black families have on average less than 15 cents on the dollar for every dollar

held by the average white family. And that really is about that exclusion from home ownership, intergenerational property ownership that I talked about earlier. That's where that racial wealth divide today is traced back. So if you don't have a lot of equity sitting around, if you don't have an aunt or an uncle who had some GM stock because they were in a union, then you can't draw on that to do something big like pay tuition. And so you do have to go into debt. And so for me, the debt for diploma system is one where you clearly see racial inequities. Eight out of 10 Black students have to borrow and in the highest amounts to go to college. And yet, it's not good for anyone. Six out of 10 white students have to borrow now too, right? Because

we've so drained the pool of public resources around college, right, per-pupil funding. And so, all of these stories of places where our unwillingness to work together across lines of race, to see that the most important things in life, we can't do on our own. I can recycle all I want. I can't address global climate change on my own. I can read to my son. I can't make sure his neighborhood school is a well-funded one on my own. We've got to do it through collective action. That's been like the real way that racism and this distrust and these old beliefs about each other's inherent worth has really stopped us from solving big problems together. I would love to hear you address, and I'm sure these are questions you've been asked many times or you have heard many times, address a couple of issues. The first one being that, listen, we're in a lot of debt and we just don't have the money

to pay for these things anymore. We have massive amounts of deficit spending every year. National debt is soon going to become untenable. And yet we also want to have the nice things. But we have all the debt. What, in your mind, is the solution to that? I mean, it's interesting that the claims about the national debt and the deficit only seem to really be loud when we're talking about helping families and investing in our future and not when

we're talking about giving some of the richest corporations and people on the planet more tax handouts and more tax breaks. But as a person with an economics background, I think our job is to grow the economy and make sure that all of our families can thrive. And one benefit of those kinds of investments that I'm talking about in nice things, making college truly affordable the way it used to be, paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, investing in our public goods, our infrastructure, all of this is that it grows the economy and it ends up shrinking the deficit because we've seen this, right? I mean, over the past two years, there's been record deficit reduction and that makes no sense, right? We spent all this money on the pandemic.

We had student loan payments not coming in. We had a child tax credit of $300 a kid per month. in. We had a child tax credit of $300 a kid per month. We had all of these big, huge spending bills, and yet somehow our deficit keeps coming down. That's because we've had enormous economic growth and job growth. It's pretty simple. When you have more revenue coming in, it helps to get your fiscal house in order. The flip answer is that we can afford to invest in the future of this country. We can't afford not to. And one of the things that holds us back from investing in the future of this country is fear that the Americans of the future won't look like the Americans of the past. but that's no reason to drain your own pool.

You know, this is a common sentiment among many Americans. And that sentiment is, we have done what we can to fix racist policies. I'm thinking specifically about things like school segregation, redlining, you know, those kinds of things. We've done what we can. We fixed the laws. It's now illegal to discriminate. Schools cannot discriminate on the basis of race. You know, we've done what we can to fix the laws and any ongoing repercussions, any people who are still racist. Well, we can't fix the fact that you're still racist with loss. This is a common sentiment that I sometimes hear that we've done what we can with laws. The rest is up to, the rest is up to God, you know, like that kind of mindset. Like can't fix what you think. I have fixed the laws.

What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, I understand that perspective. I really do. And even Dr. King knew that it was about the absence of legal discrimination and the presence of a positive value of believing in the brotherhood of man, right? And we have not gotten all of that right when our leaders have hidden the truth from us about our history and have acted like we can't handle the truth about the history of this great country. But here's just one example. Let's take something that's so vivid for parents, which is, you know, neighborhoods and schools and houses, right? In a chapter in my book, The Sum of Us, called Living Apart, I tackle the flight to good schools, right? We want good schools. And not every school is a good school. And in fact, it's really clear that schools in richer neighborhoods are better, quote unquote, schools. They have more funding. They have more resources. They get better trained teachers than schools in neighborhoods that don't have as much money.

Right. First of all, in the chapter, I talk about how that actually costs white parents who are trying to flee what this history has done to our schools, where they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars more for aations will be determined by the wealth of houses that was determined by generations of explicitly racist policy. Right? So, majority of color school districts have $23 billion less than majority white school districts. And so, yes, there are not still laws being enforced on the books that make that the case. But because we don't realize the way wealth accumulates over time, the way history shows up in your wallet, but if we aren't willing to change the funding formulas to make sure every school is a great school and de-link property values from our children's education, then we're going to keep seeing these disparities. And then we'll keep using excuses to justify the disparities and basically blaming it on an achievement gap. an achievement gap. I have long advocated as a public school teacher, long time public school teacher advocated for the decoupling of property taxes and school funding. And there are some places in the country that actually do a great job of that, where they pool all of their county's

resources. Everything goes into a pool. The schools are then all funded just based on the size of the school, how many children are attending the school. But it is looked at with a much larger systemic bird's eye view of how can we make these educational opportunities equitable for all of this county's children instead of basing it on, well, you live across the street from the border of the city. And so your schools over there, we all know that like your schools are not good. And that's why we live on this side of the street. You know what I mean? I know. Yeah. And my argument throughout the book is that if we fix the system to make it more equitable, to make sure that every child has a shot at being a great player on the field for us, that actually benefits everyone. It's not a zero sum. We do have to see that so many of the inventions, the ingenuity, the innovation that has come from this country has been from investing in our people. And every time we don't do that,

every time we let a mind go to waste, we are making it harder for us to do what I think is a great definition of the economy, which is how we solve problems together. And boy, do we have big problems we've got to solve. So I don't want the person who's going to figure out how to completely transform us to renewable energy and save inhabitable life on this planet to not be able to do that because his grandparents couldn't own a house. That is one of the things that I was most interested in, in your book, Some of Us, and you also have a podcast in which you explore and continue a lot of the ideas that are talked about in this book. But one of the things that I think is such an important point for all Americans to hear is that, yeah, I mean, if you

did a poll, most people would be like, yeah, racism is bad. It's bad. Most people would say that. But what I think many Americans do not realize is that racism is not just bad for people of color. Racism is bad for everyone. It is bad for the entire country at large for a myriad of reasons, the most visible of which is economic opportunity, economic growth. That's even setting aside any of the moral issues. But when you're talking about things as simple or as foundational, I should say, I'm talking about things as foundational as education, those then have direct relationships with crime rates. And if you want safe communities, the foundations of safe communities are economic opportunities and educational opportunities. And as long as people are being denied educational

and economic opportunities, if you want to address violent crime, yes, removing dangerous predators from the streets, like nobody thinks we should have rapists going free. No one thinks that. But if you want to address the systems that create criminals, you have to address education and economic opportunity. And that affects the country at large. These issues affect all Americans and not just the people who are affected by racism. That's right. I mean, I feel like this message that it's not a zero sum, that when we come together, when we link arms across lines of race, we can win big things. It's been so important for me personally to understand the past number of years. And I published The Sum of Us last year in January. And it was a more hopeful time, I will say. And as I've been on the road talking about the book with people, as people have read it and reached me on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all that. One of the biggest questions I get is how do you stay hopeful? And how do we create this kind of cross-racial solidarity that you say is the answer?

I coined this term in the book called the solidarity dividend. And it's this idea that we can have these gains that we can unlock, but only when we link arms across lines of race and remember our collective power, right? And so right now, I just finished another journey, which took me all around the country again, but it was explicitly just to focus, but it was just to focus on this idea of cross-racial solidarity, to find places and tell stories to the American people through a podcast that's out now, places and tell stories to the American people through a podcast that's out now, also called The Sum of Us. And it's really exclusively focused on hopeful, positive stories of people coming together across lines of race to improve their communities. And so every episode is a different place. It includes a story of a small town farmers in Maine, right? The whitest state in the nation

who are really struggling to hold on to a way of life. And it looks like what's going to fix it, at least for this one community, is a more communal sort of co-op farm approach, right? Because it's just too expensive for a single family to have a farm these days. And who's doing it? Somali, Bantu, African refugees and immigrants, right, are partnering with these white organic farmers to make this happen and save this dairy farm in Maine. And so these kinds of stories, I think just personally, Sharon, for me, selfishly, I needed to tell them.

I needed to hear them. I needed to meet these people to realize that a multiracial America can survive and thrive and that all over the country, it's not in the news, but people are doing the right thing. They're learning, they're growing, they're trusting each other, and they're able to win through cross-racial solidarity. I love that. We could keep talking for hours. This is such a fantastic, needed, necessary conversation. I'm so grateful for your time. Your book is called The Sum of Us, and you also have a fantastic podcast. You can get it

on Spotify until September 21st. Is that right? That's exactly right. Yeah. And then after that, it's available wherever podcasts are. They're not really sold usually, but wherever they're not really sold usually, but wherever our streams. Wherever they're downloaded. Yes. Yes. Wherever you like to get your podcasts, you can find The Sum of Us. Heather, thank you so much for your important work and for joining me today. Thank you, Sharon. I really appreciate everything you do.

Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast, or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.

I'll see you next time.