Heather McGhee || What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

McGee holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University and a jd from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Her latest book is called The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We can prosper Together. Heather, thanks so much for being on my show today. Hey, good to be with you. I'm a fellow Yelle alumnius ques So I want to talk a little about the development of your thinking about this topic and why you know you're so passionate about it and

what you know kind of trace that development a little bit. So, you spent years working on economic policy for Demos Right, which is a liberal think tank. How did that work relate to what you're doing today. What are some things that you saw, you know, some of the the kind of conversations you had when you worked there that made you

start to go in this direction. Well, I really was lucky to get an entry level job when I was twenty two years old at a startup think tank that was focused on an issue that wasn't really top of mind for a lot of policymakers and media folks at

the time, which was rising inequality. The fact that we were having more and more concentration of wealth, that the quality of jobs for working in middle class families was starting to decline, and the costs for the basics healthcare, housing, childcare, et cetera, was was sort of shooting through the roof. And in previous is in economic policy in the United States, there had been big consensus making efforts to try to address what was beginning to be sort of wide scale problems.

And so we did what you're sort of supposed to do. We brought the research to the policy makers, We testified, we drafted legislation, We pointed out what was going on at the kitchen tables of working families across the country. And yet so often the overwhelming statistical evidence seemed to fall on deaf years, and there was this sort of undercurrent of opposition to doing anything about these big problems

that were keeping families up at night. And oftentimes the issues that I was working on were economic issues and they had racial disparities. You know, for example, healthcare, right it was an issue where employers were shedding healthcare benefits and people were finding it hard to afford health care in the private market, and that's an issue that's sort

of an economic and social policy one. But people of color were more likely to have jobs that where employers didn't offer healthcare benefits, and so we sort of saw race as kind of an add on to this larger issue of inequality. Discrimination and disadvantage compounds the effects of inequality for families of color. But after nearly two decades, I kind of climbed the ranks from an entry level role in the economic program at my organization to becoming president.

I realized that more and more there was a fundamental disconnect between policymakers and working families or across the country, and that our political conversation about what we sort of owed one another and how we should address really widespread problems was really twisted and kind of warped by a lot of stereotypes and degraded ideas about people we're suffering, and a general sort of knee jerk anti government response that seemed just to put the United States as an outlier.

And so I began to ask this question, why is it that we can't seem to have nice things, Scott? Why is it that Americans can't seem to have nice things? And by that I don't mean like drive through espresso. I mean nice things like, you know, affordable healthcare and a well funded public school in every neighborhood, and wages that keep workers out of poverty, and modern world class infrastructure. And on some of these issues, particularly around infrastructure and

good paying jobs, we used to lead the world. So I began to ask what happened? And why do we keep having these policies that make it equality worse? And why is our politics so unresponsive to the needs of working families. So I quit my job, I hit the road. I went on a number of trips across the country, from California and Mississippi and Maine and back again, and I found what seemed to me to be the answer

that I was missing. Yeah, And as I was reading It's your story, I think also your experience with pregnancy and motherhood also had an impact as well. You're thinking about it, Yeah, yeah, sure, I mean I I was pregnant with my first and not only child, but with with you know, for the first time when I made

this decision. I think a little bit of that had to do with the feeling of if I was going to birth the baby of a book and birth a real baby, I needed to not have you know, seventy five other babies which were my staff members that I was raising money for and all that, and was of like,

there's only so much you know, to give here. But also it was a feeling of, you know, if I had spent nearly two decades using the tools of the policy advocacy trade and asking questions that were about statistical analysis and about wages and jobs and benefits and public spending and taxes, and that if I was going to you know, work for the first time, was going to take me away from something I loved right in addition

to being something I love. And I thought, you know what, let me let me just do what I really need to do. Let me let me not keep doing what I've been doing, which has in some ways hit a wall. Let me use my time and use you know, whatever I have as a person to my utmost let me,

let me be of my highest best use. And that's where, and maybe this is really relevant to you, that's where I started to inquire about whole different fields of research around psychology and social science, public opinion, political science, not just economics. And it opened up a whole new world. Yeah. I mean, I think the more perspectives the better, right, you know, trying to kind of integrate them. Yeah, So that's wonder So thanks for that background. You're in your book.

You say that it's an invitation of hope. I love that. First of all. I love that. What is it hope for? Well, it's a hope for in America in which we really see ourselves in one another, in which we are not so divided along lines of race and class and politics, in which we understand that no matter where you come from, what you look like, who you love, we all pretty much want the same things. Right. We want to be able to meet our basic needs. We want to shot

at fulfilling our dreams. We want to be respected and safe and feel valued by our neighbors and by our fellow citizens, and that ultimately the really important things that matter in life. We can't do on our own. You know, we have a very individualistic culture in the United States, and yet the things that really matter, things that are really important, we've got to do together. I can't I can recycle as much as I want. I can't avert

global climate change disasters on my own. You know, I can teach my kid to read, but I can't make sure there's a well funded school in his neighborhood on my own. You know, I can't ensure that none of my neighbors is living in poverty. I can't do that on my own. And those are the things that we

have to do together. And in a multi racial democracy, as our country is, as our country is promised to be, you know, we've got to come together and stop demonizing one another and get the meanness out of our out of our discourse about who one another is, and really be able to trust our communities to know what's best for themselves, and to be able to be responsive as a collective to the needs of our different communities. Here here, here, here,

I couldn't agree with that more. But you know, as the racial composition of America changes, you have a large section of people that are very worried you know that business as usual for them is changing, and they are thinking about it in a zero sum way. As you point out, first of all, you know, I want to

just talk about this zero some idea. First of all, you talk about there's kind of an asymmetry that you've noticed where you think we'll talk if you could talk about that asymmetry among different demographics in terms of the way they think about it as zero sum or not zero sum. Yeah. So this was one of the first sociological insights that really set me off on my journey

and really turned the light bulb on for me. I spoke with a set of academics who had done research on this idea of the zero sum racial competition, the idea that progress for one group has to come at the expense of the other, that a dollar more in

my pocket must mean a dollar less in yours. And that's an idea that leads to a lot of you know, obviously, a lot of divis vision, a lot of self sabotaging behavior because there's this resentment of the people who you see is on the opposing team, right you, You want

more than anything for them not to score points. And it doesn't matter if that means that you want score points, right, and that thinking that for somebody else to gain something, you have to lose is really prominent among white Americans and much less so among black folks. And you know, we don't think that progress for us has to comment white people's expense by and large, and yet it's a

really predominant worldview among white Americans. And when I first read, you know, the sort of the Marquee study on this, this zero sum question, which is really called whites now see race as a zero sum game that they're losing, which was a study done during the Obama era. And then there were a lot more studies that talked about something very similar, which is the sense of group status threat.

That the rising diversity is seen by many white Americans as a threat to their status, that it will end up badly for them, and that in turn changes their

ideas about things that are nominally race neutral. Right. So in these experiments, for example, a white independent voter will be shown a headline that says, you know, people of colored to become the majority in twenty forty two, and they will take, you know, opinion, They will have opinion conversations before and after seeing that headline, and before to after there'll be this major conservative shift on issues like raising the minimum wage and national health insurance and even

things like drilling in the Arctic. And it's a very interesting We've obviously seen that play out in our politics, right, that's become a political strategy of the right wing. But I'm also interested in I know why powerful forces would be selling that story, but I'm interested in why ordinary folks are buying it. Why they see the idea of a truly equal America as oppression for themselves, as opposed to just equality, while at the same time often denying

that they have any privilege. Right, That's the funny jiu jitsu. Right, It's like, there is no racism. I don't have privilege, and yet all of my kind of behaviors and rhetoric would suggest that I'm very afraid of losing something. So what is that something that you're afraid of losing if you don't think you have elevated status. Right, Well, there's a lot in pact there in packet. It's good stuff. Well,

there's large sections of white Americans who are poor. They feel like they're losing they are losing in the system as well, and as you point out, this doesn't have to be zero sum. So recognizing that there's that white people suffer to and black people know is is definitely way forward as opposed to saying that only as one race sufferers and another race never suffers, that's not that's not a way to uniting the country. So they what do they feel The thing is, you know, the whiteness

is is it's a white heterogeneous group. Right, So it seems like when you're saying this, it seems like it's breaking down very much on political lines because you certainly have large swaths of white liberals who at least they'll say, you know that that they don't view it as a seer sum game. So what's the justification for like talking about white people as a as a as as like a group. I'm curious about that. Yeah. So, so there

are two pieces of that. One, white liberals are are the minority of white people and so and this is something that often Wow, I didn't know that. I didn't I didn't know that. No, I mean this is this is this is very interesting thing that because whiteness sort of grows, right, whiteness sort of you know, ends up taking up a lot of space and kind of representation.

You would think if you're in a white liberal enclave, or if you are a white liberal and your friends are white liberals, that sort of you know, liberalism is a project of of of white folks. But in fact, just a few indicators the majority of no Democrat has won the majority of the white vote since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights accent law. That was it. That was the break. Before that, As I talk about in the sum of Us, white Americans were

actually very progressive. Really believe the majority of white Americans two thirds of white Americans believed in the Midnight ten fifties and in nineteen sixty that government ought to guarantee a job for everyone who wanted one who couldn't find one, and that there ought to be a minimum income in the country so no one would fall below a certain threshold and the government should guarantee that. Those are big

liberal ideas, right, that's like a big government vision. And you know, most white people were new deal Democrats, right. They wanted social security, they wanted public jobs and the WPA, and you know, just massive government public works because they had benefited from it and between nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty four, which was really a period of you know, sort of an explosion of civil rights activity and a period when the Democratic Party really associated itself not just

with the New Deal, but with civil rights. You saw the share of white Americans who believed in such a strong role for government, and those two government guarantees, right, a guaranteed job and guaranteed income fall in half from nearly seventy percentineteen sixty to just thirty five percent in nineteen sixty four. And of course, then you know Kennedy, who was really associating the party with civil rights. His successor would be the last Democrat to win the majority

of the white vote. And so, in many ways, the story of what happened to our politics to sort of break the coalition of working in middle class white people who had been in the liberal camp, who had thought that, you know, government should set the rules for what business can and can't do, should provide protections for families, should invest in the future, should tax the wealthy and plow those resources into the common good. That really broke with the civil rights movement and in the some of us.

I have a story that kind of is a memorable way for us to think about that, which is what happened to public swimming pools. We used to have these grand resort style pools in America that were publicly funded and that were you know, could hold thousands of swimmers at a time, and many of them were segregated and for whites only, not just in the South but across

the country. And once integration in the civil rights movement promised to let black families swim, too, many towns across the country drained their public pools rather than integrate them. And so what that meant was that white families also lost out on the pool. So to black families, it meant that what was once a public good then became

a private luxury. Right, if you were rich enough to build a backyard swimming pool, you could still swim, or if you could join a private, fee based membership swimming

club which cropped up all over the country. And I used that story of the drained pool to talk about what happened to a country that had found the formula for middle class prosperity, right high wages, high levels of labor unions and collective bargaining, a minimum wage that reached to peak in nineteen sixty eight, high levels of taxation on the marginal kind of last dollar income of millionaires,

and big public investments like free college. Government used to pick up the tab for college, and all of that had a racial asterisk. It was for whites only. And once integration promised to put people on an even playing field and expand and do for black families what had been done for white families for generation, white folks sort

of left the bargain. And yes, there are, still, of course many white liberals, but they are the minority of the white population, and our politics and inequality that has come has really been shaped by that political factor more than any other. Well, thank you for for educating me about that, because I mean, I'm clearly interested in the truth and not just my own perception. But my own perception was different, you know, in the sense we I mean,

we elected you know Biden one. You know, he's a liberal. We have kam law, you know of African American uh And the majority of white people voted against that, the majority of white people voted for So the statistic the majority of white people voted against Biden, that's the statistic. Yeah, I see what you're saying. You know, and it could also just be this the circles I swim in, of course, and so so it's like it's like I'm taking the water for granted, so to speak of a fish and water,

you know, metaphor. Okay, well, so cool. So I want to I want to learn more. So, uh, the idea of white privilege. You talked about that a second. You said a lot of white people don't want to admit it that they have white pros. I think that that

that term is one of the most misunderstood terms. I would love it if you could actually define what that means, because I think that sometimes some people take a really charactertured version of it, which is not even what a lot of black people mean when they say it, you know, and they say, oh, they think I white privile they think I don't suffer. Ever, now I don't think that's what you're saying, right, So if you could, please, let's

let's got this on the record. Yeah. I think white privilege is the privileges that are afforded to people with white skin in a society with a lot of bias against people who don't have white skin. And that doesn't mean that all white people are rich or all white people have it easy. But it does mean that generally speaking, if a white person is down on his luck, is struggling, is poor, it's not because he's white. And it also means most importantly, and I think this is really a

contribution I'm trying to make with some of us. When racial justice advocates talk about white privilege, we don't want to end white privilege by here, let me put it this way. So white privilege means today that white people as a whole have greater access to affordable healthcare, have better funded schools, are less liable to be discriminated against because of their color or the way their name is spelled, you know, when trying to get a job. And it's not that in the world that we seek, we want

white people. And of course, you know, quite importantly, white people are less likely to have to fear the police. And it's not that in the world we seek we want white people to fear the police, or not have good schools, or not have good jobs, or not have healthcare.

We want them to write. And the only problem should be that should be something that everybody should agree with that it's not fair for in a country where the government explicitly segregated and discriminated and approved of massive thefts of black land and property, and all of that well through the twentieth century. It's not fair that one's skin color and the community that one was born into is

so shaped by racist decisions. That it's not fair that the it's not fair that your outcomes in life are so shaped by racist decisions. And the world we seek is one in which we all have equal opportunity, and nobody's invested in denying the truth of what our country is and has been. And I think it's really important.

The sort of knee jerk I'm not privileged, or the knee jerk opposition to addressing racial justice or even learning about racial injustice, I think really comes from that zero semi right that if the public and the government pays attention to the needs of this community, it's going to cost me somehow, and they're going to stop paying attention to my needs. And that's that's simply not true. Right.

If you look at the proposals right now that would be a massive refilling of the pool of public goods, The American Jobs Plan, the American Families Plan, there's something in there for every family. Right, there's rural broadband which just proportionately would impact you know, white conservative districts. But there's also you know, massive housing and rent subsidies that would help people in high cost urban areas. I mean, we've got to realize that we are on the same

team and that we are not each other's enemy. And in fact, the downward mobility, the laws of good factory jobs that has often kind of animates white grievance, it's not about what brown and black people have done. They're not the ones who shuttered the factories. They're not the ones who you know, had massive tax cuts that have you know, impoverished our communities. They're not the ones who are refusing Medicaid expansion and healthcare which would keep rural

healthcare and hospitals open. Right. It's it's the rich and powerful, and so the blame game that has always been the story has been that the zero sum story is a lie sold by powerful, self interested elites to redirect blame for what's going on away from themselves and towards frankly, usually brown and black people who are struggling even more than the white people who are buying that zero sum story. Awesome.

So this is this is this is a really good launching pad for a discussion between equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. You know, some people have criticized the focus on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, making the case that not every racial disparity is necessarily unjust. Right, I'm sure you would agree with that. So, knowing that case, to what do you think that there can ever be like an assumption that some things are the result of

racism that are actually more multidetermined, like certain inequalities. Have you ever seen that? Well? Yeah, sure, I mean I just think that usually let's start from a recognition that most people of all races, no probably ten to fifteen percent of how much racist policymaking has determined economic opportunity

in America. Right, most people don't know anything about redlining, right, which was the practice that was done by the New Deal Roosevelt government in a massive expansion of home ownership for white working class people who never would have dreamed

that they could own homes. There were massive creation of subsidized housing, the subsidization of a new kind of mortgage that would allow people to pay things, pay off a home over thirty years, and massive down payment assistance so that most people didn't even have to have a down payment.

And that was all done based on maps that the federal government drew in the nineteen thirties and that were used until the nineteen seventies that said black neighborhoods, drew lines around black neighborhoods and said do not lend to these areas. Crazy, So most people don't know that. So when you talk about, okay, well there are inequalities today, and you don't know that basic fact because it's not

taughtner textbooks. It's not part of the general public understanding the same way that you know, lunch counters and Martin Luther King and school segregation are taught. If we're lucky, right, then it seems like, well, why is it that these black neighborhoods are so impoverished. Why don't they have you know, lots of small businesses and stores because there was literally no credit. Credit was denied by government policy from those areas.

And what we do know is that wealth begets wealth right today largely because of that denial of wealth and because we had things like you know, whole black neighborhoods that managed to thrive, nonetheless being destroyed during the nineteen sixties and fifties to make way for highway developments. And then you know, the highways could have gone anywhere, but as policy, they just rated the black neighborhoods lower and said, well, we're going to do emminent domain and destroy thousands of

businesses and homes and scatter these neighborhoods. And that was policy, right. So if you don't know that, then you think, well, there's just something wrong with black people. Why can't they get their neighborhoods together, right, And so we have a racial wealth divide in this country. And wealth not your income, right, the income gap between blacks and whites, despite rampant job discriminations,

has really narrowed, right. But it's wealth. It's where it's whether you have a home that you own and so you have home equity to borrow from to pay for your kids college, to whether you have a pension and a four to one k, whether you have saving some inheritance. You know, it was so funny to me. You know, I went to these great schools and I had all these white friends, and it was when we it was time to go to college. They all just like had all this random money that just like came from nowhere.

It was like an aunt, an uncle, you know, a grandparent's just going to be something that was going to pay for your college. And it just was like, well, I thought we were kind of the same, you know, like we both work as hard. Like, you know, my

parents were professionals. Your parents were professionals, but there was this other sort of hidden benefit that just sort of swooped in and changed their lives, right so that you know, my family all had to borrow to go to college, and then a lot of my white friends went because it was taken care of. And right now, the average black college graduate has less wealth than the average white

high school dropout. So when you tell me there's some reason other than racism for these economic disparities, I think if you really know what our country has done in terms of wealth accumulation, and then you say that that's one thing, But most of the time that comes from just like kind of reading the way neighborhood look and just sort of assuming, you know, sort of like a common sense and in the absence of of real knowledge about what's been done and how history shows up in

your wallets. So I think we have to be more intellectually curious about why it is that there are these group based disparities, because if not, then what it comes down to is maybe there's just something different about these groups of people, and maybe there's something better about white people. Is why they always end up on top. And then you know, that's a slippery soap, that is a slipper slope, and that is a great fear with going too much

into the responsibility line of thinking. Well, you talk about, you know, problems with the responsibility narrative in your book. What's the responsibility narrative? Well that if afric Americans are not succeeding, that the idea is, well, they need to take responsibility for having more personal responsibility. Yeah, personal responsbility. Yeah, got it. Yeah, that is this That is a big slippery slope, right, But at the same time, you also

do want to encourage responsibility. You know, there's probably a lot of cases with people who are not succeeding. It that it's not doesn't come down in racism, So it's it's also tricky. Yeah, I mean sure, but you know there are a lot of white people who are not succeeding true. You know what I mean, I think, I think basically, I mean, then this is what it comes

down to, Scott. You know, I think in general, hard work with all the barriers that you know, Black communities that have been strategically disinvested, have phased the idea that hard work is kind of like absent in those communities. First of all, the majority of black people are not in poverty, right, and we tend to see poverty as a Black problem or think the majority of Black families are impoverished, and that's not the case, right at all.

And the majority of black families are working in middle class folks. They're not a lot of rich black people, but they're you know, most people are working in middle class and work even harder because they have no cushion. Right. You know, the average household wealth of a black woman is around five dollars, So that means every paycheck comes in and goes out, right, it's a constant and even if that paycheck is fifty thousand dollars a year, right,

there's just no cushion. There was nothing that was free, that was handed out at birth or you know, showed up in a trust for them when when their parents died, and and that's I think it's really I think it's really a mistake to assume that the qualities that Yeah, I just think it's a mistake to assume that they're more people of color who are, you know, lazier, not working hard. Then there are white people who are lazier,

not working hard. And I think if you know your history, you know where that trope of lazy black people came from. It was to justify slavery, Right, is what is lazier than you literally not working and owning people who work for free for you? Sure, what's lazier than as many billionaires have done during this pandemic seeing your wealth go

up just because of the stock market. Like, the most work you're doing on your investments is opening the envelope and seeing the dividends and the stock bibex and the twenty five percent returns. It's not because of any more work than you did. That's just gambling, that's just passive income. And yet we value wealth, and the tax code taxes wealth at a lower rate than it taxes work than people who wake up before dawn and go to clean offices and go to stock grocery shells and go to

work in childcare centers. I mean, we have our hierarchy of human value completely upside down in this country, and I think it comes from our original sin of allowing an economic system that was based on stolen land, stolen people, and still in labor fair fair. So I think what's really helpful in this sky thing is just going through more examples like these vivid kind of stories, because I think, like you said, a lot of people aren't even aware

of a lot of this stuff. So did you you talked about the subprime mortgage crisis already and how that was fueled by racism. Yeah, no, we haven't talked about it. It's a chapter we Yeah, sure, Yeah, it's a chapter in my book. It's something that I care a lot about because it was the issue that I sort of cut my teeth on in economic policy. I was working on what was sort of this crisis that was going on in the early two thousands, and nobody really knew about it or cared about it. So crime wasn't a

household name. This was years before the financial crash. But what happened was, you know, because of that redlining that I talked about the ways in which black families were segregated and were, uh, were denied mortgages for so long and had to you know, use alternative finance. And that was even worse. You had about a few years, like a decade when black families, because of things like the Community Reinvestment Act, were able to get the same kind

of loans that white families were. And then you had deregulation and the idea that the financial sector should sort of police itself, and you had these wild, this wild West of new kinds of lenders and brokers that were issuing these new kinds of loans that weren't like a thirty or fixed rate loan. They were loans that were you know, had weird new terms like balloon payments and

prepayment penalties and exploding interest rates. And they were tested out and aggressively marketed first in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, when very few people were paying

attention on black home owning neighborhoods. And so two of the myths that I really wanted to debunk in this part of the book is one the idea which I heard when I was trying to advocate in Washington for regulators to do something about what was going on in these middle class black neighborhoods across the country as they were getting these loans and they were ending up in foreclosure, you know, a lot of the kind of white policymaker impression.

The stereotype was, well, you know, these people shouldn't really have been able to afford homes in the first place, but they had gotten good loans and were homeowners. And then they were got a knock on the door, received, you know, a whole bunch of phone calls saying, would you like to consolidate your debt, would you like to get a lower interest rate, would you like to refinance your loan? Sure, sounds great. And what was done then was that they were then sold loans that stripped the equity.

They had so many fees up front that suddenly their home they had less in their home than they did before they signed the paperwork, and that had exploding interest rates and prepayment penalties and balloon payments, and so they were ending up in foreclosure. But these were homeowners. These were not people. For the most part, the vast majority of subprime loans when to people who were already homeowners, so it was a net negative, not like sort of

the price we pay for loosening the standards. And then second and most importantly, and most importantly, the majority of subprime loans went to people with good credit, and black and brown homeowners with the same credit scores as white homeowners were three times as likely to receive some time loans.

It was simply about aggressive marketing and lenders who knew that they could get away with it in black and brown communities because nobody was going to stop them, because of that stereotype that I just talked about, and because it was communities that had rarely been treated well by

banks in the first place. Right And so in the book, I tell the story of the Tomlins, or this beautiful now elderly black family, and you know, the broker who sold them their predatory refinance loan, you know, said, you know, God must have sent me to you, and you know, just like it was like use car dealership types of tactics, and yet it was ultimately racist and discriminatory lending, and all the major lenders would ultimately be fined for discriminatory lending,

right the you know, the kind of just like old style racist language that was being thrown around in these sort of boiler rooms, just trying to target these families and borrow that they knew they could sort of get away with anything with, and policymakers and regulators turned the other way and excused the levels of foreclosure that you know, were a crisis and black families in nineteen ninety nine, in two thousand and two, and then it wasn't until

Wall Street saw how much money you could make from charging someone ten percent interest on a two hundred thousand dollars loan with three points up front and with a balloon payment that they said, Okay, we love we love this product, and we're going to do basically financial engineering to divide up these loans and spread them across different mortgage backed securities so that there's no big concentration of

risk in any one of these securities. Sort of spread the risk, keep selling it, keep selling it, and it. There became this massive demand from Wall Street for these mortgages, and so that pushed the mortgages out of the black and brown neighborhoods into the why and whier mortgage market.

And then you had, you know what, when everybody started paying attention in two thousand and seven, In two thousand and eight, where it was one of every five mortgages was in this mold, and you know, people were just buying extra houses to flip them because there was a sense that the mortgage market and the housing market would

see no bottom. But it is my firm experience, having been on the front lines of this fight from two thousand and two through the cleanup of the mess, when I was one of the core advocates writing the Wall Street Reform Bill and advocating for its passage in two thousand and nine twenty ten, that if it weren't for racism, both in the discriminatory lending and targeting and the predatory marketing and the racist indifference of people with the power to stop it, we would not have had a financial

crisis in America. That's mind boggling and so important to point out. So you're pretty confident of that, Yeah, I am incredible, incredible, What an eye opening book that you've written. A lot of people need to read it. Another thing that really another thing really gripped me as I was reading your book, is that you met a reformed white supremacist who now preaches anti racism. Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, I met a couple only one ended up in the book.

But so her name was Angela, you know, for for folks who think about sort of the psychology of hate and and and something really really important and powerful that my conversations with white supremacists made really clear to me was this thing of projection, right, this psychological phenomenon where you take the parts of yourself you don't like and you project them onto others and you hate it about

other people. Right, that's a big piece of of what what has you know, how race has been formulated and manufactured because you know, it's it's like the white folks in power as we sort of started creating the racial stereotypes that are still with us today. We're doing that, you know, en mass right, because they had the power to. And so Angela, in her own life, you know, really

hated her own weakness. She became a bully because she was bullied, and so she was in neo Nazi and she became reformed when she was in prison and a black woman became her friend, which you know, I never got to talk to that black woman, but I'm even more interested in her and what was going on with hers.

She went up to the yard to this right, to this woman covered in Nazi tattoos crazy and she realized, you know, Angela just had a change of heart and an awakening, and she taught me a lot about the way that the sort of narrative of white supremacy gets mainstream and that inequalities and disparities are are justified. And there's a certain strong attachment to defending the status quo because of a sense of what are the real truth and the real story would say about about yourself as

a white person? How is this white supremacy you talked to you? How are they how are they preaching anti racism these days? So what are they up to along those lines? You mean, like Angela King and those folks the life So she's part She's one of the co founders of a group called Life After Hate, Okay, which does I think really important work which tries to is a group of former neo Nazis and white supremacists and tries to organize people out of that life and out

of that ideology. And I think it's such important work, right. I mean, the Department of Homeland Security in our National Security Apparatus has named white supremacist extremist as the most quote persistent and legal excuse me, has named white supremacist extremism and terrorism as the most quote persistent and lethal threat to the homeland unquote. Right, So this is not like a fringe issue. This is an important thing that

we have to resource much more widely. And of course, then, you know, a huge part of the problem here is that we've had these white supremacist ideologies growing mainstream on conservative news media, obviously with the former president, and so it's given cover of respect respectability to ideas that if taken to their logical conclusion, right, the idea that white people should fear a more diverse America, that immigrants are making America worse, that black people are all violent and

you have to arm yourself with weapons of war to you know, out of a fear of sort of marauding gangs of black people. You know, this is really scary stuff. And then of course the big lie of the election being stolen it and Scott, you know, you didn't know that the majority of white people voted for Trump, but if you did, then it makes the big lie make a little more sense. Right. The sort of logic is the person who won the majority of the white vote

is the legitimate president. Of America and whatever else happened in those cities by those people who are criminal and did illegal things and stole something that was rightly ours. Right, that's where the racist logic of election fraud and voter fraud and the big lie comes in. And if you know your history, then you know when you heard the right wing talking about election fraud and basically trying to

make illegitimate. A multiracial majority, right racial majority, including many white people, but not the majority of white people, did vote for Biden and Harris, and yet the ideas that wasn't legitimate somehow, And that is a very old not old as an ancient, but it's been around for a long time. Trope that as I described in my book

in the chapter on democracy. You know, I finished writing the book before January sixth, but I describe in great detail something that happened during reconstruction after the Civil War in Louisiana when a white mob was so infuriated about election results that they stormed the courthouse where the election results were going to be certified. A bunch of black people surrounded the courth courthouse to defend it, and the white mom massacred the black people even after they had

surrendered and they burned the courthouse. And for me, that's an example of this white mob that ultimately, you know, would soon come into power, right the party and the faction that they were representing, being so unwilling to submit to a multi racial democracy that they burned the edifice of their own government to the ground. And so the eerie parallels with with January sixth and what could have happened and what did happen to six people who lost

their lives. You know, if you know your history, you could have seen that that's where that rhetoric coming from the White House, and you know right wing disinformation was going to lead. Yeah, you do write in your book how the election of Donald Trump made you realize how most white voters weren't operating in their own rational economic self interest. So these examples are quite right that they're not these individuals not operating and they're even in their

own rational economic self interest. You argued that you believe his populist agenda quote promise to wreak economic, social, and environmental havoc on them along with everyone else. Can you please elaborate that a little bit so Trump's I wouldn't have called it a populist agenda, because I don't think it was called it. So a populist agenda would have been wouldn't have had his one major signature legislative accomplishment be, you know, two trillion dollarsand tax cuts largely to the wealthy.

That and corporations that would then include loopholes that actually raise taxes in the working in middle class. You know, three years down the line. That's not a populist, right. A populist wants to bring big corporations, big polluters, big oils, big big tech, big big concentrated power, the robber barons, and the billionaires. Wants to bring them to heal to ensure that they're not abusing workers and abusing you know, our planet and our air and water. That's not what

he did, right. He loosened the rules on as many industries as he could, right, you know. So you know, I think that the I include in the book a chapter on the relationship between white male identity politics and climate denihilism, which I wasn't intending to write when I set out to write the book because I didn't know that there was a link. I didn't actually think about the fact that you know, the party that is so opposed to taking action on climate change is overwhelmingly white

and male. And that you know, if you look at the public opinion data, the majority of white Americans are in the sort of squishier, skeptical, doubtful, not that alarmed or concerned. I think that it's probably not worth it to make big changes camp And that's very different to your point about the sort of water we swim in.

You know, you think of your typical environmentalists, You think of like a white guy and a Patagonia in vest climbing, you know, like that, you actually think the environmentalism like is sort of a white thing, right, But in fact, there's a big, like twenty to thirty point gulf between black and brown Americans and white Americans on how concerned

we are about climate change and environmental pollution. And that is partially because black and brown Americans are one and a half and twice as likely to live in polluted areas and to drink unclean water and live near places, you know, toxic sites and all of that. And that's because of environmental racism, because the people who are in power get to think, well, we can just sort of you know, shunt the excesses of our industrial economy onto

the kind of other side of the tracks. And yet one of the things that I learned in the course of writing with some of us was if you have that dynamic where people in power, I think that they can sort of just you know, offshore like to the other neighborhood, to a black or brown neighborhood pollution. They tend not to demand that the corporation control the pollution,

right because it's not going to affect them. And so that means that there's more pollution in total than there would have been had there been the sense that, oh, this is going to impact me and people I care about. And so actually more segregated cities have more cancer causing pollution for everyone because the usually white power structure is a sort of operating under that zero sum illusion, right that I can sort of profit from the benefits of this and that the cost can go on the other

side of the human divide. But that is an illusion. And so you know, that study was called is environmental justice good for White folks Too? Write? You know, is linking the you know, sort of racist pollution good for white people too? And that's really the message throughout my book is that racism has a cost for everyone that we've got to know. We've got to all learn the basic facts about our country and our systems because they're distorting.

Because racism and our politics and our policy making is distorting are functioning as a society. It's eroding the things we hold in common. It's draining the pool of public resources. It's giving more and more power to the wealthy and self interested elite. It's making it harder for working in middle class people to thrive of all backgrounds. It's undermining support for government, it's undermining support for collective action and

collective bargaining because of this disdain and this distrust. When you have that division, it's easy for us to be conquered by self interested forces who want to keep the economic and political power exactly as they have it. Why do more people know about this stuff? You know? What do you think is kind of the biggest barrier to miss? You know, there's so much misinformation being spread these days, right, what do you see is the biggest barrier? You know,

this would be my last question. I think the biggest barrier is that in general, our systems, our education system, our media our politics have been dominated by white people, and there's been a campaign to minimize our knowledge of the wounds of our history because there's a desire to keep up the sort of disneyfied story of America, and there's a fear of retribution, there's a fear of loss, there's a fear of guilt and responsibility and blame. But

those are like childish. Those are you know, childish impulses and grown ups kind of face the facts and move forward. And it feels like we're sort of stuck in an

adolescent phase in this country. And what you're seeing now with this right wing desire to stop schools from teaching about race and racism is just another phase of what is known as the sort of lost cause campaign to try to change the story of the Civil War and change the story of Jim Crow to be one that is more sympathetic and that minimizes the extent of the racism.

And so I think we're miseducated by our schools. Less than ten percent of high school seniors surveyed by the Southern Poverty Law Center identified that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. That's just insane, right, We've been robbed of our own history. And so in the absence of that knowledge, and I'm talking, you know, some of the history I'm talking about in my book is from you know, two thousand and nine, right, And even if it is from you know, eighteen twenty one, that's

not so long ago. Other societies, school children are memorizing, you know, thousands of years worth of dynasties, right, and we have a couple hundred years to know the basic facts of And it's that psychological desire to minimize, to project, to deflect that is ultimately robbing us of our collective history. It's keeping us divided from one another and leaving us vulnerable to the exploitation of the powerful self interest in elite.

And I think that, you know, we've got to be smarter, we've got to be stronger, we've got to be tougher, we've got to grow up. We've got to grow up and not accept the easy answers that make us feel better for what's happening in our country, because you know, time is running out. Time is running out for the planet, time is running out on democracy, it's running out on inequality. And we used to have the formula in this country for broadly shared prosperity and for tackling big problems together.

And you know, in my reading, once the right wing really tripled down on racial resentment and the controlling of our democracy and rigging the rules to keep power concentrated. You know, they sort of gave up on problem solving, They gave up on trying to actually make people's lives better and try to sort of steward our common resources.

And the majority of white people are still giving them power every single election cycle, still returning that power to a worldview and ideology a party that is selling the zero sum and bankrupting us as a result. And you are going from zero sum to win win. Yes, I'm all about that. So let's send on the spirit of hope that we started on as well. Was the point

of your book so high? Yeah. I talk about in the book that even though there's this there's this zero sum worldview that's being sold, I met across the country people who rejected the zero sum and who who were willing to fight for what I call the solidarity dividend, which is these gains that we can unlock when we come together across lines of race to work in the public interest and work for the common good, and to

recognize that we've got to refill the pool. We can't let racism keep draining it because it's it's costing us all. And so I do believe that is our future. That is that is what is promised to us. That's to me what a multiracial democracy can can create as a real understanding of our common humanity. Because of the proximity of so much difference in the United States, I think that's where we're going, and I hope that's where we're going.

But you know, everybody who agrees with that has really got to fight on their hands because the forces of disinformation and division have never been more well resourced and had more sophisticated technological tools. So there's no there's no time to be sitting on the sidelines. Right. If you if you think we should be teaching about our history in our schools, you got to talk about it, right. You got to say this is good for my white kids too, right to learn the history of the country

and the and the society that they're born into. If you think that we need to do everything we can to lift the floor for workers in poverty, white, black, and Brown, you got to speak up about it, you know. And the list and list, the list goes on and on. It's so, this is the problem with the culture war is that you have people on the other side's who will say the argument that if you think that it's terrible that that we're teaching critical race theory and schools,

you got to speak up. This is the division of this culture wars, that people are in their echo chambers saying to each other, you know, you need to speak up, and people are speaking up against different things. And man, I've I just I so wish we could unite us all like you are. Like you say in the beginning, we all have the same basic needs, we have the same basic we want the same things. And you make a very very compelling case in your book for why

racism hurts everyone. So look, I just want to be say I'm really grateful for you coming on my podcast today, Heather and talk to my audience. I know you're super busy. I really appreciate your time and much gratitude. Thank you. Thanks for the conversation. Take care of yourself, take care

of each other. Okay, bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I