Strict Scrutiny - Drained Pool Politics

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Kate & Melissa host Heather McGhee to discuss her new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky

And now my child is here to introduce some noise to all of this. I'm going to mute. Wait, is the puppy making an appearance? He's talking to the puppy. He's telling the puppy that he loves him. He loves him more than anyone in his real family. All the things, really, that warm your heart as a parent. Look, we've all been isolated for a long time.

Like, these things happen. Welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. We're your hosts today. I'm Melissa Murray. And I'm Kate Shaw. And we are thrilled to welcome to the podcast today, friend of the show and brilliant thinker, writer, commentator, organizer, policy expert, and now book author, Heather McGee. Heather, welcome to Strict Scrutiny. Oh, it's so good to be with you both. Many of you have probably encountered Heather because she is a prominent commentator on television and in print. She's the former president of the progressive think tank Demos. She's the current chair of the board of Color of Change, and she's also an NBC contributor. And listeners, you've definitely come across her if you've spent any time in progressive political or policy circles in the past decade or two. Something you may not

know about Heather, however, is that she's also a graduate of Berkeley Law School, where she was a member of the student committee that interviewed then baby law professor Melissa Murray for a position on the faculty of Berkeley Law. We, generations of law students, listeners of Strict Scrutiny, are very glad it worked out. Heather, we are obviously going to get to your book, but I just have to ask you first, what was a young, like a younger Melissa Murray, like as a candidate, younger, I said, and a law professor? Oh, she was so great. I mean, let's be very clear here. There were not very many younger women, women of color at all on the interview slate for candidates. So, you know, the Black women for sure on the committee were excited about this possibility.

But there was also a little bit of sense of like, it's really important that you be uber excellent because we don't want to be in a position of championing someone who's going to be attacked by like, you know, the sort of status quo kind of elite. And this is even at Berkeley, right? There was sort of like, we're gonna, we're gonna champion you if we think you're smart and brilliant, but we're gonna put you through the paces of this interview because we've been put through the paces here. And, you know, we, all of us are

always as women of color put through the paces. So I very much remember that tension of like, she's gotta be great. She's gotta be great. And then going into the interview and having her be phenomenal and being so relieved. And we were just going back and forth about whether or not I was ever in her class, but no, it was actually just like having you be in it at the school and just like this amazing kind of bright light on the faculty. And then one of my very dear friends took your family law class and then like went on to practice at the same kind of law. So that is actually the first time I've ever heard the backstory of this. I can confirm, Kate, that that was a grueling interview. Yeah. I feel like that was like an intense

interview. Was it? Do you remember it? It was incredibly intense. I remember coming back to my husband. I'm like, these kids may hate me. Like they had so many, I mean, they were really incisive and driving questions. And, you know, I hadn't realized that there was a sort of backstory, but of course there was, you know, I think all faculty politics are local, but they all sort of share particular features. And often I think there's this really profound fear that when you get behind a candidate, you really need that candidate, especially if the candidate's a person of color or a woman of color, to really be exemplary when they get to the full faculty. So it's really interesting to hear that perspective. So thank

you for endorsing me. I had such a great time on the faculty of Berkeley. You really made it a wonderful start to what has been a terrific and amazing career for me. So the occasion for Heather's appearance, in addition to reminiscing with Melissa, is her recent publication of the book titled The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone, and How We Can Prosper Together. So Heather, I thought we might start off by having you talk a little bit about Palmer v. Thompson, which is a really important and infamous Supreme Court case that some of our listeners may not be familiar with and that also supplies really the central metaphor of the book.

So can we start by talking about Palmer? Yeah, sure. So first of all, I'm so glad to be on. I love you guys. I love this podcast. And I am a totally lapsed lawyer, right? Like I went to law school, I sat for the bar, I passed the bar, and then I went right back into the career that I had already started before I went to law school, which is public policy. So I am going to not be, you know, sort of embarrassed by the degree to which this kind of talk used to be all I did and has not been all that I do for the past, I don't know, what has it been? Almost 12 years now.

So I'm just going to say that from the outset. But I love pretending to be a lawyer with you guys now on this conversation. So I'm really excited for it. So I wrote The Sum of Us in many ways to answer the question for myself and for so many of the advocates that I had spent nearly 20 years in the field of progressive advocacy with, which is the question of why can't we have nice things? And why is it so hard for this country to get its act together and provide for the basics of a decent standard of living for its people? Why are we so singularly stingy to ourselves? Why do we, you know, at the time of the writing, we spent, invested less per capita

in government services for our people than nearly all the OECD countries. We don't have universal childcare, paid family leave, or healthcare, or, you know, our infrastructure is somewhere between a C- and a D- from the American Society of Civil Engineers. It's the society that, you know, built the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system, right? All of these things that are sort of puzzling to people who want a better country. And in many ways, the answer that I discovered on this journey was that racism is the underlying driving force behind most of the dysfunction of our country's most vexing public problems. And the central metaphor for the book grew to be the story of the drained public pool. And as you said, Kate, there's this court case, Palmer v. Thompson, 1971, Justice Black in the majority, which was really, in many ways, part of an era of the capstone of post-Brown triumphalism towards integration. There are other cases that

are more emblematic of that moment when the court was like, yeah, we're done with this. But in many ways, I think this story, which was so common across the country, ended up being just a really powerful metaphor in my mind for what had happened to the New Deal era, to the bipartisan consensus that government had a role in maintaining and, in fact, increasing the standard of living of most Americans after the Civil Rights Movement, what happened to that consensus? What happened to the Democratic Party after it moved from being the party of the New Deal to the party of civil rights and then lost the majority of white voters? So here's a story of what happened. It

happened in Jackson, Mississippi. That's where the court case came from. But of course, it happened all over the country. In the book, I tell the story of Montgomery, Alabama's Oak Park pool. But there are stories in Washington State, in New Jersey, in Ohio, in West Virginia. Like, this is not just a sort of typical Jim Crow, Southern segregated story, but the story is basic, right? In the 1930s and 40s, we go through on this building boom in the United States of publicly funded amenities, libraries, parks, schools, and pools. And we used to have nearly 2000 of these grand resort style pools that are like hard for me to even picture, but they used to

hold thousands of swimmers at a time. And it was kind of this like, you know, cherry on top of this sort of general government ethos of the New Deal era that included massive subsidies of housing and the affordability of mortgages and the New Deal protections around labor through the GI Bill, all of that subsidization of college and home ownership. And virtually all that I just described was segregated or for whites only, either explicitly, like in the mortgage market and the housing subsidies, or because it was, you know, race neutral on its face, like the GI Bill, but went through a very segregated and exclusionary housing and higher education market.

And so these pools that I described, these grand resort pools across the country were often segregated or for whites only as well, as was the one in Jackson, Mississippi that gave rise to Palmer. And there was this wave of post-Brown local advocacy by Black families in the late 1950s and early 60s saying, hey, those are our tax dollars. We think that our kids should be able to swim too. And all across the country, the result of this push for integration and the threat of legal action was for cities to drain their public pools rather than integrate them. There were a lot of hijinks. One sort of classic step, and this is something that should be part of the story of the YMCA, and as institutions begin to sort of reckon with their racial open a pool in the wake of pool integration and the closure of public pools. And so what was once a public good then became a private luxury, right?

So you could become a member of the YMCA, which was a pretty modest fee, but a fee nonetheless, and that they could segregate the Young Men's Christian Association. And then a lot of cities and towns across the country created, you know, just brand new membership clubs that could then segregate. So the plaintiffs in Palmer v. Thompson sued, basically saying that this is violating the Equal Protection Clause. protection clause. And the court, I mean, you know, just in the annals of just dumb court decisions, held that the closing of the pool to all persons, now, mind you, it was like all of its public parks and swimming pools. Jackson did the, you know, the classic thing of like, if it can't be just ours, the white leaders in Jackson, we will have no public things whatsoever. Closing of the pools did not constitute a denial of equal protection of the laws. And then something that I think is very telling for the future of, you know, our understanding of what it means when white policymakers refuse something for racist reasons that nonetheless hurt white citizens as well, right, which is really in many ways the main thrust of my book, they basically said that

because the closing of the pools was not a state of action that affected Negroes differently from white, the Equal Protection Clause was not violated. Basically, it's okay if you destroy something that will impact Black and white people equally. That's not racist, even if you do it for a racist reason. And even if, like, if you look one step further and notice that, you know, the private membership only club is only open to white people, you will obviously find not only a racist intent, but a racist impact. But that was the holding in 1971. So the case is really fascinating. I will note for listeners that Randall Kennedy just did a Supreme Court review treatment of Palmer versus Thompson, I think in the 2020 volume of the Supreme Court

review, and he goes into a lot of these dynamics, the court's finding specifically that there is no state obligation to have a public pool, which is a big part of the decision, but also these really weird sexual politics around pools and black people. And again, I think it sort of reiterates some of the sort of lurking, but sub rosa concerns around Brown versus Board of Education that the real threat to the South was not necessarily in the prospect

of integrated classrooms, but that integrated classrooms would make black and white students so familiar with each other that it would in time lead to integrated bedrooms. And this was a big part of the logic of the resistance to Brown, and you see it in Palmer versus Thompson as well. But this phenomenon that you refer to in the book as drain pool politics permeates your entire discussion of what's happening in American policy and politics. And the United

States, as you note, has a weaker commitment to public goods and to the public good than any comparable wealthy nation. And this is on display anywhere, anywhere that you can think of in American society, infrastructure, education, housing, care policies around the family. And you actually name it. Lots of people, I think, talk about this. They have talked about this, certainly in the 2016 election. Why were individuals voting against their economic interests? Well, there was this whole discussion about how Hillary Clinton failed to appeal to white male working class voters. But then there was always this lurking dynamic that some people

would raise, like, actually, it was about race. It was about racism. And you actually name it here. Like you say, it's not about economic anxiety. It's not about any of these other things. It's about race all the way down. And that is something I think that gets at a problem that is not idiosyncratic or individual, but deeply structural and systemic. So can you walk us through how this plays out in your discussion in the book, this idea that racism is actually undergirding all of these decisions to limit our understanding of what public goods are and for whom the public good exists? Yeah. Well, I came at it really from an economic standpoint, right? So in some ways, like my bona fides for it maybe was economic anxiety or strong, right?

Like I believe there is a massive amount of economic insecurity and inequality. And I believe that policymakers have failed to deliver, you know, economic mobility to millions of people and that working class people of all races have a serious bone to pick with the establishment. of status, of worth, of belonging in the United States political and social culture always turn on questions of race. And they always have. Like, it's impossible for us to think about how a white voter would conceptualize their interest without thinking about, as Du Bois called, the wages of whiteness, right? Without thinking about the ways in which someone may just be making $7.25 an hour, and yet they are afforded safety from, you know, a sense that the police could kill you at any moment, right? They are afforded access to the esteem of their culture. They get to look up and see that most of the culture that's

happening, the popular culture, most of the politicians, most of the bankers, the executives look like them. And when they walk down the street, they are given a certain modicum of respect, even if they're only making minimum wage, right? There is a sense that this actual psychological wage of this status is something that Donald Trump and Trumpism was absolutely playing to. Yes, he was saying, you too could crap on a toilet made of gold, because I am on your side, right? Like, he was literally trying to say, I am a big, wealthy millionaire whose like luck has only turned up for me in my whole life and I am smarter than everybody and I am a winner

and I am on your side, other people who look like me. And I will protect you from people who are trying to take your status away. And I may not give you a wage increase. I may not be on the side of your unions. I may not give you health care. In fact, I may take it away. Right. But I am to go back earlier to where this idea, this core idea of seeing the world through a zero-sum prism, the idea that there's an us and a them and progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people. Sort of where did that come from? Everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. And all of the stories we have are told by some people for a certain purpose. And so I wanted to go back and look at our history.

And really, it became totally clear to me that the zero-sum story was a justification for the original economic model in this country of stolen land and stolen people and stolen labor. And it was a way for the white elite to convince the masses of white people that they should choose to side with their rulers, right? That scores of indentured servants and people without land, without education, without opportunity for work in a plantation economy in the South, right? It's like your labor is not even necessary. They should nonetheless uphold this plantation system because it gave them these other benefits around race. And so they should choose their race and not their class. And that

time and time again, a very self-interested, narrow white elite has continued to sell that zero-sum story. Obviously, you turn on Fox News, Tucker Carlson, you know, before him, it was Rush Limbaugh. There's just always been this right-wing thread of white people fear and resent people of color for coming for your status. It requires white people to, at least on an unconscious level, but increasingly not, think that Black and brown people are less than, that in the same situation, they would do differently and better, right, to justify the disparities they see neighborhood to neighborhood by personal choices. The majority of white moderates and conservative believe that Black people take more than we give from society. And all of these other kinds of negative views around

just basically racial resentment, that Black people are sort of the special favorites of the government, and therefore the government has betrayed white people. So that's where you start to see this anti-government ethos come in. That's where you start to see between the late 1950s and 1964, this massive shift away from the Democratic Party, away from the sort of New Deal ethos that government is going to be on the side of working people. And just a real public opinion shift that is inexplicable if you don't plop the civil rights movement into your understanding of what happened to change the way white people viewed government.

Actually, also labor unions later on, about a decade and a half later, you started to really see that shift away from anything, any of these institutions that would bring white people into collective action with people of color, suddenly those institutions become more suspicious, even though those were the institutions, government and labor unions, that created the white middle class. And as I pull the thread through, the result of white people, the majority of white voters turning their backs on

those institutions politically, has been the hollowing out of the middle class for everyone, has been more than any other single factor explaining what happened to move us from the society with the largest middle class and the most secure middle class on the planet to the most unequal developed nation in the world. I mean, it's like this kind of incredible sort of Rosetta Stone or skeleton key or something of an insight that I feel like just does has this incredible like explanatory power across all of these different domains. these kind of tangible material consequences of having been sold and then bought this story about how a gain for people of color, or even a gain for everyone, including people of color, definitionally means less for or injures the interest of white people as a group. So materially, I think that just comes across all these different areas and all these different stories that you tell. One thing I also thought was so rich and brilliant in the book was the way you talked about the psychological and kind of moral as opposed to or in addition to material consequences of this kind of thinking.

And I think one passage that I thought really captured it was this description of Brown versus Board of Education, right? And the part of the – so there's a part of the appendix in Brown versus Board of Education, right? And the part of the, so there's a part of the appendix in Brown versus Board that you talk about. So the opinion in Brown versus Board of Education actually did cite some of the appendix that involved research by this husband-wife psychologist team, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, who conducted these studies that showed and were referenced in the opinion, the way that black children had come to learn to prefer white dolls to black dolls right when shown them in these studies or when shown the dolls in these experiments. So even though the court cited that research, it did not

cite other research that was in the appendix submitted to the court in Brown about the impact of segregation not just on Black children, but also on white children. And I just found all that so moving. Can you talk a little bit about what that research was and what it showed? Yeah, absolutely. And all credit here goes to Sherrilyn Ifill, who in giving the Derrick Bell lecture, I don't know, maybe it was like six or seven years ago, I was sitting in the audience, first told the story of the sort of unheralded part of the social scientist's appendix to Brown. And of course, for me, as I was starting, already starting to formulate the idea of this book, I was like, oh, that is so great. That is exactly where I need to sort of dig in and see all of these places where there was a wisdom and an insight that we've

kind of left behind. And so the appendix, you know, as you said, everybody remembers the Dahl case and the unanimous decision relied on the idea, right, that Black children learn that they are inferior by being excluded from white schools, right? Like that's sort of the logic. And yet there was this whole other part of the story, which was that majority children, as they were called in the reference report, also had the psychological impacts of living in a segregated society and learning the messages of segregation. And they actually, it's quite deep and worth kind of looking at the whole appendix. It's 26 pages long and the section on majority children is a few pages. But it says that children who learn the prejudices of our society are also being taught to gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive

way. When comparing themselves to members of the minority group, they're not required to evaluate themselves in terms of the more basic standards of actual personal ability and achievement. I'm thinking of the book Mediocre right now, obviously comes to mind. So they often develop patterns of guilt feelings, rationalizations, and other mechanisms which they must use in an attempt to protect themselves from recognizing the essential injustice of their unrealistic fears and hatreds of minority groups, right? And it goes on to talk about confusion and conflict and moral cynicism, even disrespect for authority, or going the whole other sort of direction and reaction to learning the values

of equality and fairness and justice, and then seeing such injustice all around, often from the same authority figures, is that you create an authoritarian impulse, which of course is something that we see very much on the rise in the Trump era and very much on the rise among white conservatives, where you begin to despise the weak while they obsequiously and unquestioningly conform to the demands of white conservatives, where you begin to despise the weak while they obsequiously and unquestioningly conform to the demands of the strong, whom they also paradoxically subconsciously hate, right? Like it's really deep. But, you know, this was 50 plus years ago. And yet I can't say that even without the explicit message of state-sponsored segregation,

that the manifest inequalities and separation that we are imposing upon our children when they grow up and see, as those of us who are in New York City schools, they see the differences in schools. They see, they overhear the conversations about, you know, all of the white parents trying to figure out where they should send their kids. And these messages are still coming through. And in the book, I talk to a number of parents who, you know, are consciously choosing integration and what that meant for them and what that meant for their kids and basically saying that there is a cost of segregation to us all. And it's not just about these superior white spaces excluding people of

color, but that there is something lost for white people as well, who are actually the most segregated racial and ethnic group in the country, right? They're the ones who are most likely to be only with white people. And that if we don't attack the logic of white supremacy at its heart, the logic of division, of superiority, then we're going to find ourselves recreating it. And that's in many ways why I wrote a book in addition to wanting to move public policy is I think we have to deal with the story level, right? If the story that white parents have about the inferiority of Black and brown children does not change over generations, it's now supported by different kinds of justifications, right? It's supported by test scores or just, you know, like whatever the language is about why it is that it is not in the interest of a white parent's children to go to school with their fellow Americans, right? Then we are not really getting at the root and we will recreate these segregated and

unequal structures. So Heather, it's such an important point to underscore and to note that this discourse was available to the Supreme Court in 1954 when it was deciding Brown. Why do you think the court failed to surface this in its opinion, even as it chose to highlight the Clark-Dahl study? You know, I think in many ways, right, that that bench knew what they knew, right? And they knew that their stuff was better. And they just doing something out of a sense of noblesse oblige to help the poor brown and black children, but rather were doing something that would fundamentally improve the life of white children as well, was just, it may have been hard for them to contend with or hard for nine to contend with, right? So, you know, I can't get inside their heads about it, but it does seem like in many ways that the extent of racism in our society and the idea that even white people can't sidestep its harms is a pretty, as I've experienced from the reaction

to my book, right, it's a pretty unsettling truth. It feels like in many ways for a lot of white folks, it goes deeper, is more unsettling than the, well, there are good guys and bad guys. And I'm on the side of the good guy and I've sort of organized my life around doing the right thing. And this doesn't touch me. And the harms of this can be cordoned off to people of color. And it's not as pervasive as we think. It's not as distorting a factor. And it hasn't shaped me, my life, my way of seeing the world to the extent that a real reckoning with the extent of racism and white supremacy would suggest. It's a really interesting point. And I think it for me, some of the anxiety I feel when people talk about being allies, because being an ally suggests that, you know, you're sort of coming in from behind to

reinforce, but you don't really have skin in the game. Like this doesn't impact you in the same way. And I think what you're saying is, no, like you're being impacted by it. You just don't know how it's impacting you. Although I will say that I think the trial of Derek Chauvin may have begun to unearth kind of the residual impact of, you know, whether it's systemic racism or idiosyncratic racist episodes might have on individuals. You know, I think one of the things that was most striking to me about the trial was hearing from white bystanders about how utterly traumatized they were by what they had witnessed. And, you know, they could not imagine something like this being done in their names. And, you know, you can debate whether you want to call it racism or something else. But the impact of what happened to George Floyd was not isolated on George Floyd and those who look like him. And I thought that was incredibly interesting. And perhaps maybe the first time we'd actually seen

that surfaced in a very thick way in our discourse. Shifting gears, one of the pillars in the book that you really focus on, in addition to pools and segregated schools, is housing. And chapter four is a beautifully documented story of a couple, the Tomlinses from North Carolina, who you describe as canaries in the coal mine. They were targeted for a predatory home refinancing in the late 1990s. And their experience was a harbinger of things to come, what eventually led to the spate of subprime mortgages and eventually from that to the financial crisis of 2008. Can you tell us a little bit about this couple and what happened to them? Yeah. So this, I'm glad you're asking me about this because this chapter is the one that I love the most. That's the nearest to

my heart. That was the nearest to my heart. That was the hardest for me to write. There were like 20 versions of this littered across my computer. Because this is the issue that I worked on. This really shaped my public policy career. I worked on it starting in 2002, leading up to the financial crisis, and then worked on Dodd-Frank

in the wake of the financial crisis. And it was just this searing and for me quite emotional example of an obviously racist system being sort of tested out on the people that are the least protected and the least respected by the financial sector, by policymakers. And then once the machinery of racism and greed gets perfected, it then sort of rolls over the rest of the society in a way that makes the fates of Black communities and Brown communities inextricably linked with everybody else's. And what's so frustrating to me is that that's not the dominant narrative of what happened

with the subprime crisis, right? The dominant narrative is that, is what you heard from Mike Bloomberg, for example, right? Which was just, you know, who has made his money on financial information and yet still doesn't know some of the basic facts about the subprime crisis, right? And it's this idea that Black and Brown people sort of got into houses they couldn't afford. And that's what happened when the vast majority of these subprime loans were refinances of existing homeowners. And that the majority of the loans before the peak, right, before mid-2007, went to people who had great credit and could have had a prime mortgage. That what was going on was that the loan was risky. It wasn't the borrowers were risky. It was that the terms were

unaffordable and predatory. And so the Tomlins were this beautiful couple, a former school teacher and auto mechanic in Wilmington, North Carolina, who bought their dream home and were targeted for a subprime loan that back in 1999, you know, had all of the characteristics of these sort of early predatory loans. And their loan and loans like them were sort of making their way through Black kind of equity-rich communities across the country. And nobody cared, right? Nobody with the power to stop it was able to replace their stereotype that, uh-oh, you know, here are Black people for whom mortgages were basically illegal for most of the 20th century because the federal government, based on no data or evidence, had decided that Black people were too risky credit risks for the federal

government to backstop the issuance of mortgages to them. That, again, this idea that Black people were just bad with money and bad credit risks. And so when you saw these massive rates of foreclosure in these, you know, homeowning middle class communities that were Black, so many decision makers just sort of chalked it up to blaming the victim. And that meant that they weren't able to see that there was a new, totally new kind of mortgage product that was fundamentally unsustainable. And that was itself a ticking time bomb. It wasn't about the borrower, it was about the loan. And so for me, the story of the Tomlins, the story of the communities like the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Cleveland, which I tell the story of going to visit in 2007 when virtually all of

the houses in a multi-block area had been lost to foreclosure because of this kind of predatory mortgage targeting, is really one of the most striking and just heartbreaking stories of racism having a cost for everyone. And so the chapter also includes the story of a number of white people who then lost their homes and their jobs and everything, you know, in the wake of the financial crisis. And I do believe that if it weren't for racism, we would not have had the financial crisis.

And 8 million jobs and $19 trillion in household wealth could have been saved. Likewise, you also note in Chapter 5, it's not just in housing markets or in lending, but even in situations where all members of the working class could actually benefit from collective action, racism may actually divide individuals. And you focus specifically on the effort to organize a Nissan factory in Mississippi. And the vote to unionize is unsuccessful. And as you chronicle, race plays a central role in its lack of success. And you contrast that with some of the early successes in the Fight for 15 movement to organize fast food workers for better labor conditions. What explains the differing results in these circumstances?

You know, it's such an interesting question, Melissa. You know, I can't say that I know everything about the story, but it was clear to me as someone who dug pretty deeply into just talking to the workers and the organizers, that you had an anti-union vote in Mississippi, where the rhetoric and the way that the workers viewed the union was really racialized. It was like the union is this Northern entity that is coming in to tell us that we all have to be on equal footing, right? That's what a union is to them. And you had mostly Black people in the leadership of the workers who were organizing. You had some contrarian type white people who just kind of didn't want to go along with the other white workers. And you had a lot of dog whistles, but you also had this sense that the union was part

of the civil rights movement, right? Which it was, like the UAW was the main fiscal sponsor of the March on Washington from the labor community, right? Like it's true, right, that that was an alliance and the UAW and the workers did sort of harken back to that and talk about union rights as civil rights. That didn't go over that well with the white workers, right? Like, it was just very clear. And, you know, I have some really choice quotes from white workers who talk about, you know, really seeing it in terms of the zero sum, right? If the blacks are voting for it, I'm against it, that type of thing. And different, a totally different context in terms of the language and the sort of strategy was in Kansas City for the Fight for 15. And these were minimum wage fast food workers. And for a lot of different reasons, the organizers really stressed this view that racism was dividing workers from each other. And so racism was like a tool of the boss, right? And that there was pretty radical. Like the other way to do it, which unions often do, is not do what they did in Mississippi, which is really lean into civil rights or union rights, but rather just only talk about the money, only talk about the benefits. Don't mention race at all. Right. You don't have to. Right. The idea is like everybody at the plant or everybody, you know, in the shop is being paid the same crappy wages. And so let's just talk about wages

and healthcare. Let's not mention race because that could divide the workers. And yet in Kansas City, the approach was, it is really clear that as long as we are divided, we're conquered. And so as Bridget, this white fast food worker told me, she said, kind of the whole point of this movement, by that she meant the 515, is to show white workers that racism is bad for them too, because it keeps them divided from their brown and black brothers and sisters. That's what she said, right? And I think, I don't think that's the whole point of the movement, but I think it was a core strategy to put what you can't avoid, which is race. You can't talk about the minimum wage and fast food and see who's on the picket line and who's flipping burgers and ignore race. The public's acceptance of asking someone to leave their family and work all day and then

come home and still be in poverty and come home and still not have enough to feed that family has so much to do with the sense of a hierarchy of human value, so much to do with the idea that some people's labor is worth like exactly zero, right? And now we're at 725. You can't disaggregate, we can't disconnect our tolerance for people working in poverty and working for next to nothing with the original economic model of this society.

And I think that the Fight for 15 understood that on a very strategic level is that you've got to raise the public esteem. First of all, the self-esteem of these workers and the public esteem of these workers. And you can't get there without contending directly with racism. I was especially interested in some of the parts of the book about Chicago. So we haven't really mentioned this, but there's a lot of really memoir-like material woven throughout the book. It's kind of actually a little genre-defying. Like it's obviously got a lot of analysis and a lot of theory, but also a lot of personal kind of

memoir quality. So I loved that. And as you know, Heather, like you, I grew up in Chicago and it's just such an incredible and maddening place, right? It has so much beauty. It has so much potential. It has such like dense, beautiful communities, and yet it is so segregated and it has been so terribly governed. And so, A, I just want to shout out the Chicago material. I loved it. But there was also, like, you know, you grow up in Chicago, and you have a sense that, like, A, obviously, it's wrong that the city is as segregated as it is. But the idea that there would be costs associated with it is something I think, actually, I had, when you wrote about attempting to actually distill the cost in the dollars that a couple of organizations in Chicago have done, my jaw was on the floor at the figure. If I can read from the book here.

So Chicago is much more segregated than other comparable cities. And so both the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute basically did an analysis of the cost of segregation to Chicago. And so they analyzed all these quality of life indicators that were correlated with segregation in, you know, the hundred biggest cities in the country, compared those to Chicago, found that higher black-white segregation is correlated with something like $4.4 billion of lost income. The area's gross domestic product suffers to the cost of something like $8 billion. I mean, these numbers are really staggering. So reducing segregation, not only, you know, would be this economic boon to the city, it has a huge connection to the city's high homicide rate. So I'm trying to figure out what the question I want to ask you is. A, I just want to shout out the data. That's crazy.

Right? So in retrospect, was growing up in Chicago and your dawning awareness of the phenomenon and the cost, you know, monetary and human cost of segregation, a force you think in kind of shaping your consciousness around the impact of race and racism. It's so interesting that you asked that. I just this week did a talk virtually in Chicago with the Chicago Humanities Foundation, and we like Chicago'd it up for a while. And I don't think I've, even though I totally contend with it, right, in that chapter, the living apart, which is the chapter on segregation, I go kind of personally into my grandparents who, for me, kind of epitomized the Black Chicago of the South Side. And now we think of it as like Michelle Obama's South Side, right? But that was the South Side I was born into. That is so the McGee's and I have so much extended

family who's still there. And it's just like a character of Blackness that is so different from the character of Blackness on the East Coast, where I ended up going for school. You know, it's about the Great Migration. It's, you know, it's totally informed by history. It's totally informed by the segregation and yet the extent of the manufacturing sector and the public sector, which gave good jobs, right? Like there's just, there's a lot, right? There's really a lot. And I think that in many ways, my navigation of being born, you know, in a totally Black, over 90% Black neighborhood, and yet we moved around every year. And because I was a precocious kid,

my mom was sort of always like chasing around different possibilities for school for me, like Catholic school. Heather, at one point, I love when you casually drop like being a third grader, but having to take eighth grade class. And I was like, oh, they skipped her five grades. I like that. For reading. And that was something about like that, the school that I was going to at the time, you know, the third graders were not reading at my level. And that was, you know, like it was, there was a lot to it. And I feel like in many ways, I still have not fully processed the way that Chicago, and I went back and lived there two falls ago as a fellow at the University of Chicago, which was just tremendous. And I hope to live there again someday. But the way that experiencing both the thick Black community of Chicago Southside, the deeply integrated Hyde Park area where we lived for a while, then Oak Park and Evanston,

which were two of the most integrated suburbs in the country, shaped my thinking about what was possible and what we are to one another. And yet also just the maddening, I mean, seeing what has happened to the South Side, you know, in my adult years and as is just so maddening and infuriating and depressing. So like many cities, I mean, I think St. Louis is another one of these where it's like it's all there, like the entire story of the country is like wrapped up in these Midwestern cities that have, you know, really dealt with the promise and the failures of integration. And I don't just mean like living side by side, but like fully integrating the American dream, fully integrating and sharing power, fully integrating our economy and our

sense of citizenship. I know that we should be talking about the book, but Heather, I think a lot of what you've talked about today actually has repercussions, not just in our discussion of Supreme Court culture or legal culture, but pop culture as well. And as I read this, I really like sort of was thinking a lot of what you were talking about could relate to the circumstances that Meghan Markle experienced during her very brief time as a working member of the British royal family, like being alone, being sort of isolated in an institution that has been marked by the residue of colonialism and imperialism, being incredibly good at her job, constantly being

sort of torn down by the press, maybe even by those within the institution, perhaps even being compared unfavorably to those who might not have been on her level. I'll just put it that way. No shade, all truth. Yeah. So I think this is an appropriate moment to sort of pivot to the Sussex Squad portion of this podcast. So I love this so much. You know, we hadn't been in touch since law school, yet I'd seen, you know, you started to be on NBC and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, always rooting for you. And then suddenly, you appeared in my timeline as like, varsity team Sussex. And I was like, how did I not notice that? So I, you know, I am totally on Team Sussex for a number of reasons. And I did, I tweeted this. I said, you know, this is really the departure

of Harry and Meghan from England and the royal family is totally a cost of racism to the UK, right? They were unable to see how this could have been, you know, much like the American story, right? Like our diversity is our superpower, the ability to actually contend with the sins of our founding and to fully integrate and reject the lies of our founding, right? You know, England has never done what it needs to do about the transatlantic slave trade or about colonialism and has always tried to sort of have it both ways. And this could really have been an opportunity for them to firmly have like a modern member of the royal family that connected with a whole new generation

of like Black Britons and of Black people in the Commonwealth. And they just like racismed it up, right? They just couldn't handle it, right? The culture of white supremacy of, you know, believing that they were, you know, anointed by God to rule over the entire planet. Maybe that, in fact, is something that is a story that they had been told for a long time, that they were just sort of unwilling to finally let go of on this profound level. And of course, watching the Oprah interview just gave us so many glimpses into the self-defeating logic of racism. Well, I think part of what made her so profoundly discordant for them is that, you know, if you have this story about the divine right of kings and you are divinely ordained to lead this country as its

monarch, suddenly this random black woman from Los Angeles, who's an actress comes in and it turns out she's as good as the job as you are. And like, what does that say about you? I mean, that really is kind of, again, what if we included the appendix that showed like that, in fact, we are hurting ourselves by not exposing ourselves to a wider set of viewpoints. All of that, I think, is part of it and part of, I think, the quite shabby treatment she experienced during her time there.

But you know what, England? You keep doing it. Keep doing it because do you? I am happy to have her back here. I am happy to stay on Twitter defending her. Like, bring it. Bring it. Like, come at me, bro. I'm ready. I think probably a good note to end on. So good. So good. Okay. She ready.

She ready. Melissa Murray's ready. I'm ready, too. Get in formation. This is the squad. For all of us who have been impacted by racism from the royal family. Black princesses matter. Thank you both so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much to you, our fabulous guest, Heather McGee. All of our listeners, please check out her new book, The Sum of Us. It's fantastic. Thanks also to our producer, Melody Rowell, to Eddie Cooper for our music, and thanks to all our supporters. We will see you next time.