Plain English with Derek Thompson - A New Way to Think About Racism in America

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Several years ago, the writer, researcher, and policy advocate Heather McGhee traveled around the country to report on how racism in America holds us back from policies that would benefit everybody. In her book The Sum of Us, she explained how racist fears have made us all worse off. For decades, many voters and politicians have fought against policies that would have gotten them better jobs, better benefits, and more upward mobility—because they were afraid that those policies might also help non-white people, and especially Black people. She made another point that struck me. Progressives sometimes talk about racism in a way that is pretty helpful for their causes. “Progressives often end up talking about race relations through a prism of competition—every advantage for whites, mirrored by a disadvantage for people of color,” she wrote. “The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air, and better-funded schools.” Today’s guest is Heather McGhee. In this episode she talks about her new podcast The Sum of Us; the indelible metaphor of a drained pool in Alabama; how progressives talk about race; and why many laws today that might not seem explicitly racist still sustain racial inequality. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Heather McGhee Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today's episode is about a subject that is core to American history and core to my obsession with progress. But it's also a subject that I haven't recorded a full episode on yet because I think I was waiting for the perfect guest. The subject is racism and inequality. It's on how fears of the other hurt us all.

Several years ago, the writer, researcher, and policy advocate, Heather McGee traveled around the country. to report on how racism in America holds us back from policies that would otherwise benefit everybody. In her book, The Sum of Us, she explained how racist fears have made us all worse off. For decades, she said,

many voters and politicians have fought against policies that would have gotten them better jobs, better benefits, more health care, more upward mobility, because they were afraid. They were afraid. They were afraid.

that those same policies might also help non-white and especially black Americans. She made another point in this book that struck me and stuck with me. It's that progressives sometimes talk about racism in a way that is also pretty unhelpful for our own causes. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to build a new housing development in a mostly white neighborhood. The neighbors were against it, and you want to get these neighbors to change their minds. What do you do? What do you say to those neighbors?

Well, one thing you could definitely do is you could call them a bunch of selfish races. You could do this. You could tell them they're only against new housing and new construction because they're afraid it will reduce their housing values and allow people who don't look like them to move into their neighborhood.

By the way, you might be right at some of them if you chose this path. You could tell yourself, hey, I'm just calling it like it is. But there's another approach that's available to you. Without ignoring race entirely, you could try to explain to them how more housing might make everybody better off. More local demand might mean more stores, more restaurants. Their favorite coffee shop might not exist without this new development. It's more economic activity.

It's more local workers for their schools, their construction projects. their bathroom renovation, their health care. The first approach focuses on what the neighbors have that they won't give up, their privilege. The second approach focuses on how the neighbors could benefit if they just say yes. Not the risk of losing, but the opportunity of building. quote, progressives often end up talking about race relations through a prism of competition, every advantage for whites mirrored by a disadvantage for people of color, Heather wrote. The task ahead then is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity

and replace it with what I've come to call solidarity dividends, gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air, and better funded schools. End quote. Today's guest is Heather McGee. In this episode, we talk about her new podcast, also called The Sum of Us, her indelible metaphor of a drained pool in Alabama, how progressives and conservatives talk about race,

and why many laws today that might not seem explicitly racist, still sustain racial inequality. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Heather, welcome to the podcast. So good to be with you, Derek. I want to start with the metaphor at the center of your book, which is the story of the drained pool.

Tell me that story and what you think it should teach us. So I ended up in Montgomery, Alabama, on this journey that I took across-country. to write the book, The Sum of Us. And I find myself walking the grounds of this big, beautiful park, like a central park, but of a smaller city. And there's just this huge, flat, expansive grass in the middle of this park. And there are about a handful of people at this otherwise, like, beautiful park that you

would think maybe might have a few more visitors. And it turns out that 10 feet underneath the ground that I'm walking on is the kind of carcass of what used to be a thousand-plus person, public works progress administration, New Deal era swimming pool. And there used to be about 2,000 of those pools in the country. They were built in a building boom in the 1930s and 40s of public goods, right? Roads, bridges, schools, libraries, parks, and pools. And they were a reflection of a deeper ethos in the country, right, this idea that was born out of the crucible, the Great Depression, and maybe the lessons of the first gilded age of inequality that we've now surpassed, which said, you know, government has a right and a responsibility to ensure a decent standard of living for its people. So we're going to invest in these public goods. And for me, you know, my work is an economic policy. So I cared a little less at first about the swimming pools than the other public goods that came out of this era like Social Security for the elderly, a massive investment in housing that workers could have afford, you know, the idea of mass home ownership that would be created by this government

backed and regulated and insured financial instrument. The GI Bill, which put a generation of college for free and no-bound employment home ownership, right? All these things that helped to build the Great American Middle Class. And the thing is, virtually everything I just described was in one way or another, whites only, segregated, exclusionary, racially. Whether we're talking about explicitly, like in the housing market, which I'm sure your listeners know, was based on a never-substantiated assumption that black people would be too big of a credit risk to allow them to be part of the financial market. So black neighborhoods were explicitly and deliberately redlined and excluded from financial investment through commercial and

residential mortgages and loans. The Social Security Act excluded black workers by carving out the two job categories that most black workers were in, right? The domestic work and agricultural work and a compromise with the Southern delegation to Congress. The GI Bill was race neutral on its face, right? But it was the benefits were in housing and education to very segregated sectors. And so, you know, basically you had this sort of whites-only public goods social contract that worked for those who got access and shut out everybody else. And so too were these swimming pools, not just in Montgomery, Alabama, but all over the country, either explicitly like in Montgomery, right, or just by custom and enforced through intimidation and violence in the Midwest and the West and the North.

And when the civil rights movement empowered black families to be able to say, you know, hey, that's actually been our tax dollars funding those public goods all along as well. and in the case of the swimming pools, we want our kids to swim too. Towns and cities across the country did what Montgomery, Alabama did. They drained their public pools rather than integrate them. They literally drained out the water

and backed up truckloads of dirt and gravel and buried them, destroyed them out of a sense that it was better to destroy a public good than open it up to all of the public, including people in the public, they believed not to be good. It's a really, it's an indelible metaphor that we drain the pool in order to preserve this

feeling of segregation. It reminds me of one of my favorite economic papers that I've written about by the late economist Alberto Alessina. He did all sorts of work looking at why the U.S. is more optimistic about upward mobility than Europe, but ironically, has less upward mobility than Europe. So, like, the American dream is more alive in Denmark than it is for most. Native-born Americans. And the money quote from this paper is this, quote, the presence of more minorities and immigrants in a commuting zone is significantly correlated with less support for

redistribution, especially among right-wing respondents. It may be that they believe redistribution will mostly help immigrants or minorities, which they may not want, end quote. So again, you have diversity creating this zero-sum mentality that cuts against equality and hurts everybody. It's the drained pool effect. You're reporting also found the opposite. It also found that there's pockets of the country where people do come together across race. Can you tell me one of those stories? Yeah.

So, I mean, I was really, I was like a class person, right? My whole career had been an economic policy. I am a black woman. I don't know if your listeners can tell, but I am a black woman. But I felt like if we can get these economic policies right, because people of color, you know, disproportionately struggle in a broken economy and struggle from discrimination and disadvantage and debt,

you know, we can solve the problem that way. And I was kind of, I don't know, maybe like many people of my age, resistant to kind of racialized thinking going in. And my journey was both like a physical one, like logging real miles and going all over the country, but also an intellectual one. One of the most important experiences that I had, other than walking the grounds of Oak Park

and realizing that there was a pool buried under there, was when I got to know some workers in Kansas City, including some white workers who were organized in a, you know, there were poverty wage fast food workers who were organized in what would become the fast food, the fight for 15. But it was a local organization first called Stand Up KC for Kansas City. And I talked to white workers there. That organization explicitly was organizing the lowest paid, you know, workers.

some of the lowest paid workers in our economy, the biggest inequality of any industry, fast food, 1,000 to 1 CEO to worker pay gap. And like the most derided, right? It's sort of like, you don't want to end up flipping burgers. Like, you know? And it was really interesting for me to talk to white people who had those jobs who were really embodying, you know,

what I had read about the wages of whiteness from W.B. De Bois. right, this idea that it was like, I'm still a real American. I'm still worth something. I'm still have some status because I'm white, even though I'm very poor and I'm at the bottom. I feel like I'm looked down upon by everyone in society. And the answer to my economic problem might actually require me doing what every worker in history has done to make their crappy job into a good job, which is organizing, right? But that would

require me to link arms across race. And that would require me to see myself in a worker who's black, who's Latino, right? Because this is, you know, service sector work. And so it was kind of, you know, this workforce was sort of split a third, a third, a third in Kansas City. And I got to know, particularly this one worker named Bridget, you know, been into her home and really got to know her. and she really had a transformation where she went from thinking, this is sort of my individual fault. Like, I had to drop out of school

because I had to take care of my mom, but I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, you know. And it was an, it was an, it was organizers who were explicit about the, I mean, they didn't call it the wages of whiteness, but they were explicit about the way that workers were going to have to come together across race. And that poverty was affecting all of them,

and that the only person who could change it was the boss, and that the boss wanted to keep them apart, really actually engaging in the way, the organizing that was rooted in a race-conscious attempt to inoculate white workers against racist, you know, sort of zero-sum thinking. And it worked. And we had this like explicitly multiracial labor movement,

which, you know, moved for a, you know, a bill in locally to raise the minimum wage, you know, which ended up getting sort of absorbed and amplified into the fight for 15. So that's just one story of talking to someone who said, you know, I used to think it was us versus them. That's what Bridget said to me. She said, but now I know that for us to come up, they've got to come up too. Because as long as we're divided, we're conquered. The flip side of the drain pool effect is, what you're describing right now, this realization that with a sort of cross-racial solidarity,

you can have full pools, you can have anti-poverty programs, you can have universal health care programs, you can have unions. You call this the solidarity dividend. Tell me a little bit about what you mean by solidarity dividend and why it's such an important antidote to the drained pool. So I love this word solidarity. It's like not, it's not hip, it's not fashionable. It's not, it's not part of our, you know, sort of, it's not a well-known, well-used word in American culture. But I love it, right? It's really well used in labor movements and has been for generations, right? It's this idea that your fight is my fight and that as I, there's a chapter in the book

about labor called No One Fights Alone, which is, which I got from the back of a t-shirt, right, a labor t-shirt. And it's just this idea. I mean, we have such an individualized view of ourselves, of the economy, of mobility, of success, right? It's like, my fight is me against my bills, like at the kitchen table, late at night after the kids go to bed. It's like, I need to take on another shift.

I need to go back to school, right? I need to ask my boss for a raise. Like, you know, good luck, right? But it's so a historical, it's such a false consciousness that we could ever have had the great American middle class without collective action. And most of the things that really matter in life take collective action.

And in the U.S. and in diverse societies, that's got to be collective action across race, right? So this idea of the solidarity dividend is the idea that we can unlock these gains, but only through multiracial collective action. That, ideally, in terms of the organizing of how to get those solidarity dividends, what I've learned is that, you know,

it takes explicit relationship-building across race. It takes self-awareness, right? You can't like skirt around it, you know. You can't only emphasize on race and identity, right? Because that does make people see themselves as different and not recognize their common interests, but you can't ignore it either. Have the last few years between when you reported for this book and started this podcast, changed your mind at all about these things? To be honest, you know, the book came out in January, 2021 and, you know, I've been going around the country talking about the book. And people ask me, the most common question has been, how are you still hopeful? And how do we create this solidarity

divined in? Like, love it. How does it work? You know, how in today's politics? Everyone's so divided. You know, I was like, A, I'm not as hopeful as I was when I finished writing the book in November of 2020, right, on the heels of this, you know, huge social movement and right after this election was certified for Biden, you know, January 6th happened and the attack on our children's freedom to learn and, like, all these things. And I was just like, oh, goodness, you know, progress is not promised. So I wasn't as hopeful, frankly. And I realized that I did need to get back on the road, both to reconnect to the hope that I had when I was on the journey to write the book and to ask deeper, more probing questions about what it really took and to find more

stories, to be like, are the handful of stories that were in the book the only ones? And so that's why I ended up going back on the road for the last nine months to do this podcast. And it includes eight, it's nine episodes, eight of them are all new stories. The only one that carried over is Bridget and her co-worker Terrence. And of course, cross-racial coalitions. And it's like a really hopeful series. It's not uncomplicated. But I personally, selfishly, am a lot more hopeful about our country than I was when I began the journey. This is a really interesting theme that I've picked up from other people. Jim Fallows, for example, a longtime Atlantic writer who's now publishing a newsletter on Substack, has made this point to me over and over,

that if you live in Washington, D.C., as I do, and write about America from the vantage point of Washington, D.C., as I do, it's very easy to see our politics as being hopeless, as being utterly manician. There is purely us versus them. There is no solidarity that exists in the vast expanse of America. It's just all petty negative polarization. But if you go outside of the 202,

If you go to these cities and you talk to people about their friends and their local politics and their business partners and their lives, solidarity seems to trickle up from these kind of conversations. As someone who's sort of seen it from both sides here, right? You've sat in my chair and you've been on the road for the last few months. Why do you think it is that polarization screams so loudly as a national story from Washington, D.C., but that traveling across the country reveals more solidarity than someone like. like me would expect. Well, let's be clear. Politicians in Washington are paid to be Republicans. They're paid to be Democrats, right? Like, that's their job.

Their job is to be on a team, right? It is not, when you go to Kansas City and to rural Maine and rural Nevada and Dallas and and Albuquerque, as I've been going for the Some of Us podcast, I was with people whose job was to be a, you know, stay-at-home mom, a farmer. I'm just like ticking through them, right? And an assistant, like, basically a secretary, a, um, uh, an avid mountain biker, a poet. Like, you know, people whose job is not to read or write the news.

Their job is to keep the lights on and pack their kids lunches and send them off to school, right? Like, and so ultimately there is a sense that, like, can you help me do that, right? Can you, my neighbor, like, help me do my job? which is to have a decent life. And, you know, could I trust you to tell me if my kid, you know, took a wrong turn on his walk to school? Can I trust you? Can you help me run the school?

Can you help me save my family farm, right? An episode in Maine. Can you help me as the episode that's out right now in Memphis? Can you help me protect my land because a huge company wants to come and use eminent domain to seize it to run a, pipeline through it. Like, that is really important. And can you help me do that?

So I think that's why. But then it's also, it's in each of the episodes, the stories of progress and struggle and change that we were able to tell was really impacted by the summer of 2020. You know, like in everyone's story, there was sort of like a quiet moment of like, you know, when they first saw the video of George Floyd. how they were radicalized by

Ahmad Aubrey's death. Like what, you know, like it just, it's sort of like this thing in the background that it's like, oh, that is in some ways a but for this kind of cross-racial organizing. And that's really hopeful for me. I was very hopeful to see that. And I'm really excited to share it with people

because a lot of people are like, well, you know, there are no more protests in the street. So what happened to all that energy? And I really think it's sort of settled in the fibers of people and communities and sort of people have. haven't really gone back in terms of their willingness to be honest about race, their ability

to just talk about it and be fluent in it, even a little bit. I wonder what you think of as the longer term effect of the summer of 2020 and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. Because on the one hand, it's clear to me that there was an extended moment of racial awakening, not only in the US, but really across the world. I mean, it is really stunning. how global that moment truly was. At the same time, even though I feel like America learned and

has learned a new vocabulary of racial awareness, when you look at public policies, especially at the national level that I'm more familiar with, there might be a zillion policies that are past the state level. But at the national level, it's like, it's a little bit harder to point to what the legacy has been. So, for example, I'm a huge fan of Senator Cory Booker's plan to give give babies $10,000, something called baby bonds, which is a policy that would disproportionately help non-white Americans because non-white Americans are poorer overall than white Americans in this country. And so it would reduce the wealth gap. But policies like that just don't seem to be discussed as much as I might have predicted they might be in the summer of 2020 when we were all thinking

about these issues. So being on the road, but also thinking about it from the lens of federal policy, what do you see as the legacy of the George Floyd protests? Yeah, I'm really torn about this. I mean, I'm not torn about what's happened. I'm torn about the significance of it, right? I think there has been a massive consciousness shift in this country. You know, all over the country, particularly at the local level, you know, there are new coalitions of people who are, you know,

started out on a Facebook mom's group and are now trying to change the way the local schools are funded to be more equitable. Right? So that's happening. And I think it's happening more around the country than you see and here in the national news. But I can't disagree with you that, you know, this administration came out of the gate, you know, really, you know, saying that there were these four imperatives and one was racial equity. I mean, I nearly fell off my chair. Like the first speech that Biden made on race, he talked about the zero sum and, you know, which is another big theme. book and, you know, basically made the point that racism's bad for all of us and it holds our economy back. And I was like, oh, here we go. Like, we are doing this, you know. And so many of the initiatives, which, you know, always is where you look, right? Like, what's happening at the

agencies, you know, at the administrative state initiatives like addressing the racism and in highways, which is like this huge underappreciated story of how black wealth and thriving Black main streets and businesses got destroyed deliberately in the 20th century. You know, you heard Pete Buttigieg talking about it, and there's this like pilot program and initiative, and it's like, just sort of faded away, right? We had, you know, another huge Black wealth story, which is what the absolutely racist attacks on black farmers from the USDA over the course of the past 150 years. and there was like a little program to address that.

And, you know, white conservatives sued and it was stopped, right? Like these, so it is clear that not as much has been done about statutes as has been done about statues, right? I think culturally there's been more done to own up to our powerful racist symbols and our history and to, to, you know, do not whitewash them. But would I like to see some baby bonds? Yes. Am I annoyed that, you know, the buildback better, American families, American jobs plans,

like all the different versions of the name has now become some mansion bill that completely left behind, as did the infrastructure bill, the things that are really disproportionately impact women and women of color, right? Like all the care provisions, right? The idea that we would have universal

child care and universal elder care and, you know, thousands of new, hundreds of thousands of new well-paid home care jobs, like that, that quite racialized and gendered part of what we need to rebuild our, you know, human infrastructure as well as our heart infrastructure, you know, is I'm like cutting room floor. Right. I guess there's sort of three ways to look at it. Like, number one, the optimistic way is that the shift we've seen in American country, consciousness toward race is a necessary precondition to the shifts that we may later see in legislation. The slightly less optimistic way is to say that right now we're just at a frustrating point where the statues are toppling faster than the statutes are being written,

that it's proven a little bit easier to change names and pull down statues than generate new laws that help the poor or even disproportionately help non-white Americans. And then maybe the pessimistic way, and not even representing this is the thing that I I think is most likely, but the pessimistic way is to say that, well, there's a lot of people that are using the language of racial reawakening in order to cover up the fact that they have no actual deep intent to pass these policies. And they're trying to slip by and avoid criticism by talking to talk, even though they have no inclination or capacity to walk the walk. So, I mean, I think you did a good job of helping me see those three potential paths. And I just want to,

name them. It makes me think that a lot of the zero-sum thinking that you describe toward racial equality in the country has been centered on the right and clearly still is centered on the right. I wonder if you also see elements of this zero-sum thinking on the left as well. So the book, The Sum of Us, the subtitle is what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. And it's making a real, you know, somewhat radical, but like, it's making an intervention, right? It's saying, actually, I think that we are intellectually not rigorous and we are strategically not smart when we only emphasize the benefits of racism to white people. because that's like selling something to them.

That's being like racism, like makes you wealthier, healthier, makes you avoid contact with the police. Like, you know, now give it up. And that's, you know, I mean, both in the podcast and in the book, I really try to be just deeply empathetic. And in that exercise of deep empathy

that I was, that I've been trying to do with the book, and the podcast, I thought, okay, if I'm saying, if my message as a racial justice advocate or progressive in general is white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, aren't I just selling this? And if I don't finish the sentence that says, in the world I seek to build, what happens to you? It's not that we want white people to have more contact with the police and worse health care and, you know, be poorer. Like, it's laughable, right?

You're like, chuckling. But, like, that's what the right is saying. And that's what the zero-sum mental framework, which is predominant among white voters, sets them up to think. And so it's like, we have to actually finish the sentence and say that we have, we want everyone to have great decent lies. And actually, only by coming together, can we get that? And racism is bad ultimately because it causes us to drain the pool.

It's a lie that in any system built on a lie becomes dysfunctional. It stops us from taking collective action. So it has a cost for everyone. It's not equal, but it has a cost for everyone ultimately. It is the underlying, unifying factor behind most of our most vexing public problems from our unwillingness to act on climate change to our lack of a family policy to all of these nice things that we don't have. And therefore, there's a mutual interest in addressing it.

I want to take the powerful metaphor of the drain swimming pool on a road tour for a second, applying it to some real-world problems that I've been obsessing about. One of them is housing and the issue of nimbism, that is people who are against the construction of housing in and around their neighborhood because they think it's going to make them poorer, create more traffic. But so often, we know that housing and equestrian, and housing on affordability and scarcity is an issue for the lower middle classes, and therefore is an issue for disproportionately non-white populations.

So when you talk to people about an issue like housing, and they say things like, well, look, more housing is not better for me. The more is more phenomenon doesn't work here. More housing means more traffic. It means worse construction noise. It means declining housing values. How do you get them to think about the world? through the lens of this solidarity dividend?

You know, I think that what I've seen activists, right? Again, like, you know, this has been a topic for lots of cross-racial coalitions across the country. What I've seen them try to do is elevating the fact that the system right now is the result of bad policy choices. And therefore, sort of like unsettling people a little bit in their, comfort with the status quo. And then bringing in, you know, the same way that neighbors for more neighbors did, a sense of like a real moral and economic vision of a more thriving, diverse community, where it is not clear that property values will go down.

It is clear that more housing units, 80, you know, accessory dwelling units, the ability to, you know, just sort of have something other than a single family home. And 75% of the most of the metropolitan areas in our country might actually be helpful for all kinds of families, all kinds of young adults starting out. And that that brings a lot to neighborhoods as well. You know, it is tough because both the housing market and the stock, market are free money that mostly white people disproportionately benefit from, that there is zero moral quandary about in the white imagination, right? It's like, yeah, can you put that differently?

Is it to say what you mean by that? So, wealth, from housing, the idea that I can buy, house for $200,000 and then suddenly with all these tax-advantaged ways, I'm writing off all this stuff. And then it's $400,000 two years later. And I can do, you know, put my kid to college and go on more vacations and borrow against it. That's not seen as like a handout that's not seen as unearned money. That's just like what happens to good people. And that's a problem, right? That's a problem because it creates this entitlement mentality around unearned money. And the stock market is another huge example of this, right?

It's just it's unbelievable that we never, we don't even talk about it as gambling, as a casino, as anything. It's like just smart people make smart decisions that's important to keep our economy going. It's like, what are we talking about here? Like, people are just opening envelopes, you know? Like, it's not work. It's not work. And yet we have this moral finger wagging around poor people getting $300 a month to help raise their children. You know, and I'm talking about a child tax credit that wasn't just for poor people, right?

But, you know, so it's just, you know, we've let actual cash welfare dwindle to, you know, positively, you know, nothing in so many places in the country out of this idea that everyone has to work for. for every dollar that comes into their household, but it's just bullshit. It's funny. In the earliest days of my writing for the Atlantic, I was basically a tax reporter. I just found taxes totally fascinating, and my friends would be like,

why do you find taxes interesting? And I was like, it's a representation of the values of a country. If you want to know what a country values, look at the tax code. We have tax benefits for carried interest. We have tax benefits for capital gains that are long term.

We have tax benefits for mortgage interest, right? What are we saying? We value investment bankers, investors, and people who buy huge houses with lots of debt. What don't we value? Well, we don't have a universal child tax benefit. We don't, we have all these debates about increasing the earned income tax benefit. So it's status quo that we value big houses and investment. And it's not status quo for some reason that we have value for young children, being a parent, or being a low-wage worker who is under a threshold where EITC would kick in. And so, I mean, on this point, we are absolutely aligned. I think it is, it's pretty remarkable how some tax benefits are just seen as, well, that person is just doing a good job, raising a family,

and other tax benefits are like, you can't give a handout to someone. What will they do? They'll stop working. It'll ruin their American entrepreneurial spirit. And it is, it's very interesting how that particular argument is so selectively employed. There's one more question. Well, it's racialized, though, Derek. Like, that's my point, right? Is that if we, so I worked in tax policy and economic policy for so long. And I was, and we were all subtly disincentivized from actually talking about the racial

politics of that cognitive dissonance, right? There was a sense of, you know, it's a head scratcher. It's so crazy. Why do we value, you know, things that are disproportionately what white men have gotten for, you know, free? And why do we have all this moral finger wagging at, like, poor women and women of color? And particularly, this is where it's been so helpful to, you know, link in history and sociology and things because, you know, the idea that black people are lazy, right, which is so much a part of our welfare politics, right? and so that anything free would disincentivize black people from working was a story that was created to justify slavery, right?

Like, you have to chain and torture these people into working because they, unlike us, wouldn't like to work. And how much of a moral inversion and projection was that? For the plantation class, that literally didn't lift a finger in the enterprise of their plantation, which was farming. Like, they weren't farmers. They were, you know, getting iced tea poured for them on the porch, right? And not paying people for it.

And so it's, I feel like without understanding that the way in which the elite, the, the creation as a justification for an unfair economic system of racial stereotypes and the deployment of them and the updating of them generation after generation, You don't really understand why we can't have nice things in America. You don't really understand the things that just go without questioning and the things that are always scrutinized. If you don't like open, take the blinders off about the racism and our politics and our policymaking. Very, very last point. There are some people, especially, you know, conservatives that I sometimes listen to who will say, well, you know, there's no more de jure racism. There's no more legal racism. We pass a Civil Rights Act.

We have affirmative action in our colleges. Legal racism is gone. And I think a really important point that you're making is that we are still living in a house whose walls and foundations are built by assumptions that are fundamentally racist. Even if the people living in that house aren't actually racist themselves,

they can't see why those planks were set. They can't see why the house is built the way that it is. But in fact, the blueprint comes from designs that are de Jure racist. That's right. I think that's very well said. And it's also where when you think about wealth and property values and housing,

and it's all so clear, right? Because we're talking about wealth. Wealth accumulates, right? From explicitly racist policies that said, do not lend Negro's hazardous area to today, the fact that a black college graduate has less wealth on average than a white high school dropout. Like we can't, you know, it's, we're wrapping up here, and I could get way into it.

But read the book, The Some of Us is a whole chapter about this, the ways in which wealth particularly is a way to understand that systemic racism, you know, and that not addressing the wealth gap allows current quote unquote race-mental policies from our student debt system to the way we fund schools to be. like wildly racist. Heather McGee, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Derek Thompson. That was plain English. Thanks very much to our producer, Devin Manzi.

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