Why Is Our Economy So … White? (with Heather McGhee)

was a little bit suspicious. But we met up in a safe public place and she indeed was my cousin. She had photos I have had vague memories. They definitely weren't doctored. She was on my father's side of the family, people I hadn't seen since his death when I was a very young child. My cousin revealed to me that my father's mother was still alive. That would make her my only living grandparents. I was so used to just

me and my older sister being the whole family. The idea of a few generations separated that was a big deal. So I met up with my grandmother. Of course, I asked a lot of questions about my father, and then I caught myself, and I said, I said, ask this nineties something year old black woman about herself, her journey, her childhood. When were you born? Where did you grow up grandma, nineteen twenties, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Did you go to school? I asked her, Oh, yeah, we went to school.

Where did you live? On my daddy's farm, all six of us kids, And we were proud because he owned his own farm. He wasn't a share cropper. He at really owned his phone. What was that like? And what was school like? And she told me that every year all the kids would have to gather the farm, not just her daddy's farm, but the farms of other white residents in the area. And naive me, I thought, oh, maybe this is like a jobs program. All the kids have to do this. I don't know what life in

the nineteen twenties and thirties was like. But no, that was too simple to naive, to innocent. She and her siblings had to work for free on the farms of white residents in that area because her father needed to get credit extended by shop owners in the main shopping district. They couldn't make everything they needed. You had to buy

stuff and people use credit. But as a condition of extending him credit, those shopkeepers demanded and were able to get, the free labor of his children that I was not prepared for. And it made me angry because not only was my grandmother's labor exploited, her childhood was exploited. She was taken out of school, another cost to be paid by only some people in America. My grandmother had to work for free, had to miss out on literal educational opportunities.

She left Orangeburg with her husband pretty much as soon as she could. It's why I grew up in Washington, d C. Doesn't own that land anymore either. Today's wealth inequality may not look exactly the same as it did in nineteen twenties and nineteen thirty South Carolina, but we still live with it. And it's not a vague thing, Oh wealth inequality from academic doing the study. No, it's it's real, and it exists along racial lines. The rich tend to be wider, the poor tend to be black

or in. That is not a mistake, that's by design. Where does that come from? I wanted to find out. They closed the entire parks and Recreation department, They sold off the animals in the zoo, all to avoid sharing it with black folks. We're spending this entire season looking at the division rooted in wealth inequality in this country, and of course, like we always do what we can do about it, but to do something about it, we've

got to understand it. After the break, my guest Heather McGee breaks down the driving force of American economic exclusion via the swimming pool. Oh M, this is happening. What's up, hi, sweetheart? Is very good to be with you. My guest, Heather McGee is the former president of the anti racist advocacy

organization DEMOS. She traveled all over the United States to see for herself the economic impact racism was having on all Americans and to write her book, The Sum of Us, What Racism cost Everyone and How we can Prosper Together. A simple question, Can you introduce yourself and what you do. My name is Heather McGee. I am the author of the new book The Some of Us, What Racism costs Everyone and how we can prosper together. That's all you need to know about me anymore. I'm just a writer,

you know, That's all I am. I wander the country collecting stories. You know, we have like typing machines now right school? What what were you before you were just a writer? I was a policy wonk for about twenty years. I helped to build and then I was the president of Demos, which advanced and designed solutions to inequality. You know, for me, my ultimate goal was to try to make more economic opportunity for more people and to have more justice for all. Well, how did you first get interested

in the economy? You know, I can't unscramble that egg very well, and I'm really bad at my own origin story. But I was born on South side of Chicago. I remember seeing evictions and plant closures and the various things that were going on. The new figure show unemployment spreading,

leaving nine point nine million Americans without jobs. Alert since laborers out by station wagon to perform hundreds of evictions for the county each year, with members of my family losing job lubs and being foreclosed on and all of that. And and I was raised by a single mother, and I saw the demonization of black, particularly single moms in

the nineties under the welfare reform debate. It just felt like the kind of dominant narrative for why, you know, the sort of deserving no question around the economy, like the bootstraps narrative, the idea that basically people were poor because of bad decisions was really false. It didn't fit. Didn't that up, you know? So I I was always interested in the big why. What is this bootstrap narrative?

It's the idea basically that the people who are doing well economically are doing so because they're simply better than everybody else, and that if you are struggling, if you find yourself broke, it's probably because of some bad decisions that you made. It's a very individualistic way of seeing the world. And I've since learned that narrative is itself

really racialized, right. It's that idea that there's just such a hierarchy of human value and human worth and that other ring that distancing is made very easy by the illusion of racial difference. So you're coming up in the eighties in Chicago and you're hearing this narrative, this bootstrap narrative of deserved nous. But you said it didn't add up? So what was the conflict? What didn't square well? I just felt like the people I knew who worked the

hardest were those single moms. You know, my mom was always working, and she was always working in the community with other usually black single moms, who were you know, making a way out of no way. The more I learned that the things that people often think of as choices. Am I able to continue to going to school to college or do I have to drop out in order to feed my family? Am I able to stay at home with my newborn? Or do I have to go back to work. Am I able to buy a house?

Or am I always going to rent? These are all things that are often interpreted by individuals as individual choices, but the terms of them are really set at the policy level. And so for me, when I first started to really see that and understand that is that there laws and policies and decisions that are made by powerful actors that close or open doors to individuals along the

path of their life, it was a big aha. It was a big like Okay, now now we're talking like this is how we can really make life a little bit sweeter for more people. So you describe this realization and that the choice is available are determined by policies that other people make. Do you remember an early moment where you're like Oh, that policy creates the set of

choices people have to select from. I mean, I think during the welfare form debate, which centered off and around single mothers, there was a lot that was discussed in the politics of it about encouraging work welfare to work. Welfare is not a lifestyle. There's as sound clips of Bill Clinton out there, we don't want to make this a lifestyle. What we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of the welfare system for the

people who are trapped on. From now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be never any cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity of power and the athocate work. Yeah where which you know, when it was clear that if you could find a job, it wasn't actually gonna nothing, none of the options We're gonna pay enough for somebody to actually not be poor anymore. Welfare kept you basically poor. A minimum waves job kept you poor. The ability to work your way into the

middle class had long disappeared. When you say that, the so the pathway to the middle class was closed? When why did that happen? Well, this is the story that I then learned once I started working at Demos when I was twenty two, and I was the first hire other than the director of the program in the Economic Opportunity Program, and this was phenomenal. This was my dream job. So it was then that I really learned kind of the progressive economic orthodoxy, which teaches that there was a

period of dramatic expansion of the middle class. Hunger drove our people to the breadlines. Thankfully, we waited, waited for some sign of better days. Then came the federal government's work program One by Want, where you know, tens of millions of people made different working class into the middle class through this massive economic expansion in insecurity, you know, through the New Deal, through social securities, through the subsidization

of housing. They were guaranteed benefit pensions. We had these state funded colleges in every state where the government picked up the tab for college. Hundreds of homes have been bread from the bondage of poverty, their bread winners buying security and hope in their new jobs. It was just sort of this period of time where everything kind of aligned to make the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. It sounds like the American dream. It sounds

like the American Dream, ding ding ding, You good. That's it. That was it. That was when we had it, you know. But the question is who was the we. So much of what I just described was done from a federal policy level in an explicitly racially exclusive way. Both Social Security and the labor standards excluded the categories that black folks mostly worked in agriculture and domestic work. The g I Bill excluded millions of black veterans because of segregation

in higher education. And so each of these ways that the middle class was subsidized, that we had handouts and free stuff for white people in the early twentieth century created the American Dream and on racially exclusive terms, and then the Civil rights movement basically called the question said okay, are we're going to live up to our ideals? And economically? This is where the story that's at the heart of

my book that some of us comes in. It was in addition to all those great freebees, there was also this building boom of public amenities like parks and libraries and schools and actually swimming pools. And what happened when many of these swimming pools that were segregated for whites only were forced to integrate, and black famili said, hey, those are our tax dollars creating this so called public swimming pool. And they do these grand resort style pools,

like thousands of swimmers. They were desegregated, and black people showed up and white people hung out with them, and they swam together, and they played together, and they lived happily ever after, and they made babies. And that's why there's no there's no race anymore because nineteen fifties the swimming pool created all of these mixed marriages. Well so, so obviously that's more of an American fantasy. We're describing

what actually happened. What actually happened was that in town after town, and it's very important to me to point out not just in the Jim Crow South, but in Ohio and Washington State and New Jersey, the town's drained the public pools rather than integrate them. And you mean literally like took the water out, literally took the water out, backed up trucks of dirt, dumped it in, paved it, over seated it with grass. In Montgomery, Alabama, where I went on the journey to right the some of us,

they closed the entire Parks and Recreation department. They sold off the animals in the zoo, and they kept the Parks and Recreation Department of Montgomery closed for a decade,

all to avoid sharing it with black folks. The idea that what's the saying you would cut off your nose despite your face, that you would not only deny i black people access to the free goodies that everybody's tax dollars are paying for m but that you would I mean, you cancel the public park, you canceled the swimming pool

for all the children and all the families. In your research, did you find any resistance to that, extreme resistance with somebody out there like, um, actually, look, maybe we could just timeshare. I mean, what do we literally have to fill the pool with concrete? That's that's pretty far, Um, there was. I mean, as always throughout history, there have been the race traders, right, there have been white folks who said no, you know, who have stood up and

stood in solidarity with black folks. They're white folks who didn't want to stand in solidarity with black folks, but were just upset because the pool was gone. But what happened, and this has really been very similar to the loss of public benefits throughout our society. Right, like take take public colleges. What is once a public good becomes a private luxury. And so then you get this rat race.

Right then it's like, okay, you have that individualized response. Right, let me take another job, let me mortgage in my house, let me re fi, you know, let me let me figure it out on my own. And that's been the sort of slow, you know, ratcheting down of our expectations of what the public could do for us, and we put it all on our own shoulders. And so literally, with the pool story, what ended up happening is you saw this advent of backyard pools in the Washington, D c. Area.

You had, after pool integration, over a hundred private members only swim clubs that sprang up out of nowhere. And so sure you could pay a few hundred dollars a year for your kid to swim. Used to be free. Okay, all right, we'll keep it moving. I'll make more money. So you're you're privatizing public goods and limiting access to those who can afford it, which is public policy connected

to your economics. Look at you, professor, Okay, So so tell me this though, I'm trying to flash back to this desegregating America, and I'm trying to put my health inside of the mind and body of a white American who's like, the black people are coming. No, we got got shut down these pools. But do they have enough discipline and savvy to explain it in a way that doesn't say we just don't want to share this with black people. You know, the pools are pretty clear. Actually

you saw me. I tried to help him out. I was like, think, come on, they must have had some kind of stories, some some kind of bus sell it. No. I mean so in St. Louis, possibly the largest pool in America at the time, the first day of the integrated swimming there there was a mob of two hundred white folks who came and beat every black person in sight.

I later saw an interview with one of the white guys who ended up in the hospital from the melee, and he later on would say, you know, in his elder years, he would say, you know, we thought we were doing the right thing. You know, they were taught

this is the thing. They were taught by our government, by their church, by all of the rules of society that we were so unclean and unworthy that we should not be allowed to swim with them, go to school with them, drink from the same water fountains them, walk on the sidewalk next to them. I mean, you know, And what do you take from all of that information is that there's something terribly wrong with these people, and so we must guard what is ours from the incursion

of them into it, us and them exactly. Yeah, So you've got this book. It's called The Sum of Us. Tell me more about this book. Ah, So, The Some of Us is my attempt after nearly twenty years working in economic policy, trying to get the right data in the hands of policymakers, and mostly finding it to be far too difficult to convince the people in power to do the thing that was obviously in the economic interest of most people and in the interest of economic growth

in our country. So you say, you're proposing these policies that are obviously in the benefit of most people and economic growth. So that, to me sounds like one of those win win situations. Why was it hard to sell these ideas racism? Dang it? Not again. No, I'm sort of joking, but I'm not really joking. Um, that's what I wanted to find out, right. The first line in my book is have you ever wondered why we can't

seem to have nice things? And by nice things, I really do mean like really universal healthcare, a modern world class or even just reliable infrastructure, a public health system to contain and handle pandemics and save lives. And it was clear that kind of the tools that I had been using, you know, the economic policy research, the legislative drafting and the congressional testimony and all of that was basically falling on deaf years, and inequality was getting wider

and wider every year. I just felt like I needed to spend some time to figure out what was really going on underneath the surface. And what I ended up finding was that the biggest impediment to our progress in America, the reason why we can't have those nice things, is that there's this zero sum worldview, this idea that there's an US and of them, we're not actually all on the same team, and that, in fact, progress for people

of color has to come at white folks expense. And I say that because white people are much more likely to have this zero sum worldview. Black folks don't believe that progress for us has to come at white folks expense.

And it's that zero sum worldview that has led many white folks, in fact, the majority since the Civil Rights Movement too politically sort of cheer the destruction of and resent the provision of public goods that could help them and their families in many instances because it could help the people on the other team. After the break, how this US versus them mentality got started, and how we

can undo it. So, Heather, what I'm hearing from you is that, at least since the Civil Rights Movement, white Americans have been opposing policies that would make life better for them because those same policies would also benefit black people. Is there something unique about this white American response? Or

is that just human nature? Such a good question, and I wanted to know, right because on the one hand, if it if it is just human nature, if it's like, oh, we're we're just tribal, you know, it's who we are. We're competitive by nature. And I was like, Okay, well then I give up. You know, we'll figure out some

other route, you know. Um. But the fact that it was a view held more by white Americans and less by Americans of color, and that white people in dead arn't in France and England and Spain didn't feel the same way, right, they loved their public goods. It felt like, Okay, I gotta get to the to the bottom of this. And that's why the the first thing I did was kind of immersed myself in an unvarnished history of the country through that lens. Okay, where did the zero sum

story come from? And so looking back at our history, the zero sum was an essential foundation for the economic structure of our country at the beginning, where our original economic model was stolen people, stolen land, and stolen labor. And in order to justify that within a Christian society, they had to make those people who were being stolen less than human and therefore they had to create this racial hierarchy, this racial taxonomy, and the model was I profit,

you lose. You don't get to share any of the games of your land, your effort, your labor, nothing. Slavery and settler colonialism is about as zero sung as it comes.

But even then, and this was the real like aha for me, I had to admit that actually that worst possible economic model only truly maximally benefited a narrow elite back then of white people, and so that white slave owning, landowning elite had to convince the far more numerous, landless, indentured white folks who were sitting there in the you know, rocky fields alongside the black folks, that they were better than the person down down the row, and that in fact,

justice or freedom for black folks would be a threat to white folks. Period. The old divide and conquer, Ye old divide and conquer. So that's where it came from, and then it's been reanimated generation after generation. This idea of job competition giving white folks everyday white folks just enough taste of privilege that they could choose their race over their class as pretty convincing story, backed up by

a few centuries now of storytelling. So tell me about the traveling you did while you were researching and writing this book. So I talked to a whole bunch of people. So I went, for example, to Mississippi, where the workers at a car factory had just voted against organizing into

a union with the United Auto Workers. Nisson is unable to provide decent wages at decent working conditions here in Captain, Mississippi, And for me growing up in the Midwest, where those kinds of jobs, those unionized manufacturing jobs were the best jobs, I was like, Okay, why would anybody vote know to

having that kind of power. So I wanted to go down and sit with folks, and so I flew and then I drove to a UM, a kind of nondescript workers center in a strip mall, which was the place where the pro union workers would kind of meet before

their shift and hang out and talking between shifts. And I sat in the lobby with them over a series of days and just talk to them about the conditions of the plant, the lives that they led, what they hoped for, what they had hoped that unionizing would bring them, And race was always the topic of the conversation. So we had far more black workers than white workers who

had been supportive of the union. And they were clear to me that the word union itself was kind of a dog whistle in the South for some that lazy, undeserving black folks needed as this one guy, Joey said to me, white guy with a sleeve of tattoos and cut off sleeve shirt, said the white folks down here. They got their Southern mentality. I am voting for it if the blacks are for it. If the blacks are for it, then I'm against it. Like that is the mentality.

They talked about the way that white folks did have an advantage in the plant as. It was that there was a real ladder of hierarchy, and that the white folks were much more likely to have what they called the cushier jobs. As one guy said, you can tell they pushed because they can leave work and go straight to the happy hour. They don't have to go home and shower, right, And so it was those kinds of

little perks, right, the little advantages of whiteness. And honestly, after the first day, I went back to my hotel room and I was like, well, maybe white folks are right, Maybe this is better for them than having a union with rules that are going to put them on the same level. Right, And then I had to remind myself, right, but nobody has good health care, nobody has job security, nobody has the things that should really matter, things that

could actually transform your life. It's like two people in a cold room. One's got a coat, one doesn't. But if they just sort of joined together and like shouldered, opened the door, then walked out into the sun where

it's seventy degrees. They both be good, you know, but it's the boss that keeps them in the cold room right and keeps that sense of I'm going to have a little bit of advantage over what is generally speaking a crappy system, and I'm going to cling to that advantage rather than opening my hand and joining forces with somebody I've been taught to disdain and distrust, even if

both of our lives will be better. White folks have been taught that if there is a risk in society, they're gonna be protected from it, and burdens are going to fall on the people that the burdens always fall on. Now that is both true when it comes to pollution and environmental degradation and and the vulnerability of when lights go out and the power goes out in the pandemic arise, right, those disparities will exist. It's not like white people are

completely spared. So it is an illusion, just like race is an illusion. Just like this racial hierarchy is an illusion, but it's one that is present enough to have them like hedge in their bats a little bit, but it's the toll is is mounting, right. I mean, before the pandemic unplugged our economy and threw millions of people out of work, nearly half of adult workers were only making ten dollars an hour or eighteen thousand dollars a year

on average, the low wage workers. Right, This, this economy that's sort of where the rules are are rigged to squeeze down and down and down is the economy that black and brown folks have always known. It was the economy that was created for us to live in. And now many more white people are living in it too, because they've so cast their lot with a sense of racial allegiance to a white elite. I want to talk about something that we hear a lot about. Let's talk

about wealth inequality. What is wealth inequality? And why do you care about it? Why should we care about isn't it a feature of society since time and memorial? You got rich people, got poor people. What's the big deal? So wealth, as opposed to income, income is your paycheck, right. Wealth is how much money you have in the bank, no matter what paycheck is coming in or not, it's in your savings. Account. It's about the value of your house. It's about pension or four one k you might have

our inn i ra. It's about the things that don't come and go with how much effort you put in. It's just the ship you have. And that is where history shows up in your wallet. It's was your family there in line with the right color skin at the time, and the government was still handing out houses with no down payment? Right? Was your family in line when they were handing out jobs that were unionized, that had a pension.

Were you in line when they were handing out debt free college or were you born into a family that was excluded from all that by design? So when we talk about wealth inequality, we are talking about the people who make their money by opening an envelope that comes from their stockbroker, versus the people who make money going into a job like that's a whole different level, right, And there are are many people whose money just sits there and makes money and it has nothing to do

with how tired they get in a day. So your money works rather than you're working, thank you, exactly. So the richest one percent owns more than the entire middle class combined today then you look at race, and that's where you start to bring it down to the sort of real brass tax level, where the average family headed by a white high school dropout has more wealth than the average black family headed by a college graduate. So

that doesn't that doesn't sound right. So I'm gonna need you to double check your math on that because that doesn't sound very American. So you just try try one more time. Just all right, let me do a quick calculation. The average household headed by a white high school dropout has about thirty four thousand dollars in average wealth. For a household headed by a black college graduate, the average

wealth is less than thirty dollars. So what that means is that individual myth of the thing that is holding black folks back now is a lack of education, a lack of income, a lack of what the nice economists call human capital is largely false. And it's really about whether or not you were the right at the right place, in the right time and history, with the right skin color to get free stuff that then begets more and

more free stuff. Your money creates money. If you've got house and home equity, then you can borrow against that to pay for college tuition, then your kid doesn't have to go into debt. Then they can graduate and take an unpaid internship or spend six months working at a startup that doesn't pay them. Your biggest takeaways from your journey putting this book together. The thing that my journey to write the book taught me is that race and

racism is always there. It's always there in our politics, in our policy making, even when we don't think it is. And the zero sum racial hierarchy is a tail as old as time, and yet we have come to the moral and productive end of it, and we've got to start replacing it with the solidarity dividend, where we refill the pool of public goods for everyone. But we recognize it because of racist policymaking. We're not all standing at the same depths in that drained pool. So some people

are underwater completely, some people are treading water. And so one size is never gonna fit all, never has, never will, And that we meet each other, we are on the same team. What is the solidarity dividends? Solidarity dividends are the gains that we can unlock, but only if we work together across lines of race. The things that we all need that we simply can't do on our own. Cleaner air, higher wages, better funded schools. But as long

as we're divided, we're not going to do that. What signs are you seeing that we can climb out of this hole? Because as much as I try to be motivational, inspirational and honest, the honest part of me is like, I don't know, man, this racial narrative story, it's it's been on the run. This is the series that always gets renewed and people keep watching. So what's the other story?

What's the other show? So the pessimistic story is January six, right, is we have had at a white supremacists, anti democratic attempt to siege the capital and lynch are elected representatives to throw out the results of an election, something we have not seen since reconstruction, and something in terms of in the national capital we have never seen. That's pretty bad.

That's pretty bad. That's pretty pretty exhibit a of exactly the stakes of this racial narrative, of the desire to burn down the edifice of our democracy rather than have it be a multiracial democracy. But the reason for hope is January five is the day that came before when in Georgia, say it again. In Georgia, a multi racial anti racist coalition got together gott In Formation behind Stacy Abrams and the successor to Martin Luther King's Church and

a nice white Jewish guy. It said, We're march in Washington. Let freedom bring. NBC News Now projecting that John ass Off, the Democrat, will win the Senate runoff in the state of Georgia, projects Raphael Warnock as the winner. Eighty two year old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator. You know what I'm saying, and and you know we are talking right now after President Joe Biden signed a bill that is poised to

cut child poverty in half. Historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country. That is the biggest grant Indigenous communities in our history. That is going to include money for vaccines and reopening schools, and to address homelessness and affordable housing and school lunches and give families three a month to make sure that they don't have to choose between feeding their kids and keeping the lights on.

How do you tell a white person not just to like help we the black people, but like there's something in this for you. This country tells the story how great we are. We went to the moon, we defeated the Nazis, we did we created you know, uh, wet naps. You know, like we've done a lot of a lot of powerful things. And I'm like, guess what we did all that with most of the players, like not on

the field. We might have been to mars by. Now if we let women have their own bank accounts, you know what I mean, we could have created that much more wealth. So when you think about what a healthy economy looks like and the connection to racial equity or equality, how do you think about that story? What is in it for the some of us when we grant access to an opportunity to all of us? That's exactly right.

I mean, that is a case for reparations. Remember, the white high school dropout has more wealth in the black college educated person. We got a wealth issue to work out with here. But we do have to recognize that the conversation about preparations is going to be heard in that zero sum framework, right, It's going to be what's the cost out of my pocket? Why are you giving money to them? What about me? Black lives matter? What

about white lives? But the way I see it is we hit on the formula in the United States for the greatest middle class the world had ever seen, the most prosperous economy of the modern era, and the foundations of that were investing in ordinary folks and giving them the cushion to be able to meet their needs and fulfill their dreams. And then the majority of white folk turned their back on that formula because it was expanded

to black folks. And if we were to actually say that the government that made the policies to strip wealth, to enslave all of that, the government is the one that owes Black America, not white people have to cut a check to their nearest black neighbor, you know, it is the government that needs to give black families something so that there is that cushion in that platform for

them for us to build our dreams. And that you can't look at the thirteen to one racial wealth divide, so much of which is about inherited wealth and not see that if we did reparations, it will be seed capital for the America that is becoming. That's what I see reparations as it's investing in our people, in our future. Again, reparations, it's not a giveaway, it's an investment. Heather McGee, it

has been a pleasure. Thank you so so much. Thank you Mary to thank you for this beautiful, beautiful podcast. As you might be able to tell, I really enjoyed that conversation with Heather. Our economy is based on exclusion, historically speaking and in the present. And this is not an intellectual point. This is this is real stuff here,

It actually matters. And when we think about what the alternative is to build an economy built on inclusion and participation, something more small, d democratic, we have to leave that zero sum mentality that I'm here to take your stuff, or that charitable mentality we've got to help these poor black people get ahead and catch up. No, we've got to help ourselves by benefiting from the contributions When everybody participates. That's how we win, that's how we do better. We

do it together. So how do we get that, How do we build that economy, that participatory, more democratic economy where we benefit from everybody's participation rather than fearing The good news is you know, we're gonna go there. That's what we do here. Next week we're gonna talk to someone for whom inclusion is not a charitable effort, it's just smart business. So many sort of quote unquote social

enterprises are frankly stupid. I don't like this idea that there's one group of customers that you sell to and there's another group of customers that you do charity for. Next week, we talked to Sam Pulp of Every Take. Now for the fun part, where we give you things you can do to citizen better. I want you to think first. That's the first action. Just think, Just try to remember where your family fits into this story. Our history is deeply rooted in this idea that when one

group gains, another group has to lose. Has anyone you know, has anyone in your family expressed those ideas? Where do you think that comes from? Why do you think this person expressed those things? Just think about it. It's that simple. The next thing I want you to do is read Heather McGee's book. Check it out from your local library, take it off the reserve list, or support a local bookshop.

In fact, we've set up bookshop dot org slash how to Citizen with a bunch of books, including Heathers, that we think will help us all in this journey. And finally, I want you to do something a little more public that shows what a solidarity dividend might actually feel like. Let's fight for fifteen. As Heather explained, these solidarity dividends are the gains we get when we work together across

racial divides for the benefit of us all. Fight for fifteen is an international movement for workers rights and a fifteen dollar minimum wage. The website is fight for fifteen dot org and there are several ways for you to get involved. Pick one. If you're taking to these actions, please brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to Citizen and send us general feedback or ideas for the

show to comments at how to citizen dot com. Speaking of that domain name, visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for our newsletter or learn about upcoming events. And if you like the show, spread the word tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with barrettune Day is a production of I Heart Radio podcasts and dust like productions. Our executive producers are Me barrettun Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusa.

Our producers are Stephanie Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen. This episode was produced and sound designed by Stephanie Cone. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio.