Heather McGhee: National Book Festival 2021

sponsored by the james madison council and the institute of museum and library services and the national endowment for the humanities good evening everybody and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i'm erin haynes editor-at-large at the 19th and this evening i am thrilled to be with the incomparable heather mcgee to talk about her amazing book the sum of us what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together heather welcome to this conversation i'm so happy to be sharing a screen with you this evening and to talk about what i feel like could not be a more urgent topic thank you so much aaron it's a pleasure to be with you and thank you to the library of congress for inviting us into this conversation absolutely and also for giving me an excuse to congratulate you on being a national book award longlister which was made official i think what yesterday yeah thank you so much it's uh i'm kind of in shock and super excited the list is full of some of the most profound and impactful books that i read this year so i just feel really honored to be included well profoundly impactful is how i would also describe your book so you absolutely belong on that list and i am uh thrilled that people uh agree uh so i you know i want to start by asking about asking you a larger question the theme of the national book festival is open a book open the world so i want to ask how books open the world for you how didn't they i mean i was i was a book nerd right i mean i was um sort of hard to believe now because i think i'm pretty officially an extrovert now but i was a very introverted kid and i would i always had a book in my hand you know i remember being in the back seat of the car at night coming home you know reading from like the street light as it passed you know it would sort of scan like a xerox over the page um i was always really into speculative fiction you know sword and sorceress science fiction fantasy all of these worlds that i could go to to sort of imagine a different world um and i think that really shaped you know the horizon of what i thought was possible as i grew up and became an activist and and really still believe in the power of the imagination and the power of books to create empathy the power of books to open your eyes and make you see things in a different way and that's what i hoped to do with the some of us and that's why you know it wasn't the same as running a think tank which i used to do and lobbying and trying to craft legislation i felt like i wanted to write a book and do for readers what i had experienced so often which was really be transported yeah yeah and certainly uh your book is a testament to the transformative power of books i i would say uh and as somebody who uh had a librarian as a best friend growing up too i can certainly certainly relate uh so look let's talk about the some of us uh because i feel like uh you know when you wrote the book uh so many things in this country uh had not yet happened although a lot of things uh that that uh that you touch on in the book uh certainly are on kind of the continuum uh that i think that you have laid out so well uh in this story uh i think that we've learned by now that we were not a post-racial society after 2016 people like you certainly knew this all along but i guess start by talking about kind of what else we missed about what was brewing kind of during and after that election and if that uh was something that kind of led as you alluded to just now uh to you wanting to do uh something substantive like a book to get into some of these issues well i had spent nearly 20 years helping to build and then running a think tank that was dedicated to advancing policy to address inequality in our economy in our democracy and erin the tools of the think tank trade are statistical research white papers legislative drafting and testimony in front of congress lobbying trying to basically study problems craft evidence-based solutions and then get them in front of policymakers and hope that they'll make the right decision and for my particular field of the economy i just kept doing the work as so many people did and seeing policy makers make the wrong decision over and over and over again and by wrong i mean make decisions that would worsen and exacerbate inequality and it felt like you know the data is just not doing the trick there's something deeper going on here in our country some subterranean story that is shaping the way people in power believe we should order the economy and that story is not about dollars and cents it's about who's in and who's out who's on top who belongs who deserves what's right and wrong and it felt like i needed to do something other than what i'd done before to get my mind around it and then to tell a story that might be a way for us to bridge those divides and create a better future together so i quit my job uh in 2017 i handed over the reins at deimos and i set out on a journey that would take me across the culture country multiple times and really that was the journey that began became the sum of us yeah yeah uh you know your book really does so much of what you've done when when i have called you to help make me sound smarter as a reporter uh which is to focus on the legacy of past harms in a way that doesn't just correct the record but really i think serves as the foundation for a way forward for all of us together why is that your approach and why does that approach matter yeah you know so i i'm not an historian and you know i care much more about the future in the present than i do about the past right this that is not my sort of inclination but so many of the most important factors in determining economic success for example are determined by the interest either being collected or paid on explicitly racist decisions made often long before we were born right things like wealth whether or not depending on what your paycheck is you have a cushion in the bank you have home equity to draw on you have retirement savings that's wealth and wealth is where history shows up in your wallet where the racist history of subsidizing white homeownership white pensions through collective bargaining that were often exclusionary racist racially exclusionary while the federal government basically barring banks and developers from lending to and selling to black families for most of the 20th century means that today a black college graduate has less household wealth on average than a white high school dropout let me say that again if you are a white high school dropout you are most likely to have a higher average wealth home equity savings in the bank than a black college graduate so that's why history matters and the lies that we have been told about our history and the omissions of our history are why we often see disparities today and substitute stereotypes as the reason instead of recognizing that structures and public policy created the racial economic divide and policy better policy can get us out of it and if we do that it will be great for our overall economy right the racial economic divide is costing the u.s economy over a trillion dollars a year in growth that we are not having all of our best players are not on the field scoring points so many are sidelined due to debt and discrimination and disadvantage so the some of us talks about the past it talks about how we got to the present and then it says that we can do better together for the future now what you're talking about you're laying down facts here but these are facts that make a lot of people uncomfortable right these are facts that that really um uh people have a lot of feelings about uh especially i feel like in this in this current context um you talk in the book about the the idea of uh the zero-sum uh paradigm and how you know that is a way in which racism has really hurt white people as well in a way that they may not realize talk a little bit about what you mean by that and explain the zero thumb some theory to people who don't understand uh or who haven't heard about what that means you haven't read the book well so this was a really helpful kind of aha moment from for me when i came across in my journey a whole body of research that explained that basically there's a world view a dominant world view in united states culture that is a world view that is held more commonly by white folks than it is by people of color that sees kind of well-being as a fixed pie right so if we get a bigger slice they must get a smaller one a dollar more in my pocket must mean a dollar less in yours that kind of logic which basically is created and i talk about this in the book by a very old story that was used by the colonial plantation elite and really in many ways you know the the current sort of ideological errors to the colonial plantation elite and the very far right wing um use that zero-sum story to convince the majority of white americans that they are not on the same team as people who may be economically similarly situated who are also working for a living working for a paycheck and that they should resent and fear the idea the presence or progress of people of color and so it's that myth that progress for people of color has to come at white folks expense which helps to explain why it is that we always often seem so at odds in society and why we can't sort of row in the same direction why we don't have as i say in the opening of the book nice things in this country and by nice things i'm not talking about self-driving cars i'm talking about really universal health care and child care in a well-funded school in every neighborhood why we have this anti-government ethos which by all measures is really self-sabotaging and yet there is this anti-government ideology which only really took root in the majority of white americans consciousness after the civil rights movement and that's where i talk about the sort of the zero-sum being manifested in its sort of maximal expression being to actually destroy something rather than share it and that's the story of the the drained public pools the way that racism ended up draining public pools across the country and that is a metaphor it actually happened but it's also a metaphor for what happened to the sort of robust system of public goods that created the greatest middle class the world had ever seen in the 1930s 40s and 50s and then that sort of social contract fell apart during integration and when there was a sense that public goods had to be shared with people whom white americans had been taught were not good they really began to turn away from the very idea of the public and we saw things be privatized we saw more of a market neoliberal ideology come in and that has drained the pool with a cost for everyone brought in the inequality era instead of an era of a sort of robust middle class that of course ironically is a source of a great deal of nostalgia on the right yeah you know the draining of the pool metaphor was really that was a moment that was really clarifying for me reading uh your book uh because it really does uh make so much sense uh you know in terms of of uh explaining and understanding how uh you know racism harms uh it cannot it can harm the oppressed as well as as those who are either oppressing or benefiting from that oppression right um before we keep going i want to just give a couple of cues to the audience here we are definitely going to leave some time for you to ask questions of our fantastic author and so you should submit those if you have them and then also if you are enjoying this conversation and want to share it on social media there is a hashtag it is hashtag natbookfest so please use that hashtag to share this conversation if uh heather is uh dropping as many gyms for you as she is for me uh i want to talk uh you know because this is all on a continuum heather which is something that you lay out so well uh i want to tie what you're talking about to last summer's racial reckoning which really was so diverse and and was sustained but i want to ask you where you think we are a year later and how much of the country you think is really still willing to do the work of dismantling institutional inequality that's such a big question um i will try i will try to tackle it aaron you know i think that we are absolutely still in the midst of the largest social uh movement in american history consciousness has shifted a sense of urgency is still there among uh you know the american people 90 percent of the black lives matter rallies last summer when majority white communities you drive the rural areas of vermont and new hampshire the most common uh some of the white states in the country the most common lawn sign for you know that's political at all is still black lives matter right so i think we are still there i think that we are dealing with a sclerotic democracy where so much of what people want whether it's the american jobs plan and american families plan and all of the proposals that i see as things that would refill the pool of public goods for everyone and put an end to the inequality era nice things for all americans get super majority support and yet are stuck because of gerrymandering because of a narrowly drawn senate because of the resistance of one or two senators who should be going along with what their own constituents want to see in the country and the same is really true for racial justice right if you look at the sort of main planks of the criminal justice reform that and the police reform that was you know absolutely what people were out in the streets for it was about accountability it was things like ending qualified immunity for abusive cops like derek chovin right and that still gets super majority support and yet it has not happened um so i think in many ways what we are seeing is still a desire among the typical american community for a much more just and responsive uh government and for people in power to be held accountable for excesses um and whether that's you know the members of of congress who voted along with the sedition the members of the sedition caucus who voted to do what the mob wanted on january 6 right people want accountability for them people want accountability for abusive cops people want more money to go into public welfare than to criminal justice reform that is majority support everything i just mentioned and yet we are unfortunately because of i think some of the structures that were created in order to not fully have the most representative democracy because that was never really the founder's intended intention and because of rigging of the system by a very partisan elite that has used every single trick in the book to try to maintain power we are not seeing the kinds of results coming out of congress that the american people want well i mean heather that makes me that brings me to another question because i mean i have to say it it does also seem like we are in the midst of a separate racial reckoning in this country right i mean you you brought up the january 6 insurrection we're seeing what's happening with voter suppression i mean we are not operating here with a shared set of facts how does that kind of work against um your idea of people being able to come together and move forward how encouraged are you that the country is capable of working towards the democracy that you envision in this book if you know we we don't even have that shared set of facts yet yeah well we've got about a third of the country that is living in an alternate reality right that believes the big lie that the election was stolen that is enthrall to disinformation disinformation that is the most technologically sophisticated and the most well-funded you know ever in our history that is completely blanketing people in certain uh parts of the country in certain uh you know races and genders uh and religion basically mostly white evangelicals more male than female blanketing them in alternate facts right and that is um an existential threat to our democracy right i don't want to soft pedal that um i also though because we are i think those of us in the in the media ecosystem are so addicted to the outrage into the scandal of the outrageous big lie of the uh backlash and the fury and the conflict i think we do tend to overstate how prevalent that is among the american public you know broadly um the backlash is well funded it's well coordinated this is a very sort of partisan playbook that is happening right now for example with the 11 plus states that have passed these attacks on honest education these history bans these laws telling teachers and students that they can't talk about facts from our history that might cause white students to have anguish literally the laws say in many of these states that lessons are inadmissible and can have financial penalties or career penalties for teachers if they could cause guilt or anguish among students based on actions taken by a member of their race in the past so we're talking about tennessee for example a right-wing activist mother trying to get a teacher fired for teaching a book about ruby bridges in an elementary school now ruby bridges was six years old and she had the courage and the guts to face down death threats on a daily basis to integrate a louisiana school in 1960 and yet today according to these laws white students are too fragile to be able to even read about a six-year-old's courage so this is the state of affairs it is terrifying there is a very clear line from charlottesville to january 6th to these history bands and these attacks on honest education we know what kind of people ban books we know what kind of people are terrified of the truth there has always been that thread in american society the lost cause that that rewrote history so that less than ten percent of american high school seniors according to the southern poverty law center in 2018 can accurately say that slavery was the primary cause of the civil war right we have always been living in a society where a faction has wanted to deny us the truth has wanted to rob us of our shared history both the beauty and the struggle the struggle and the resilience and the goal there really is about the same phenomenon that i write about in the sum of us it's to keep us ignorant and divided from one another keep us pointing fingers at each other instead of holding accountable the people powerful enough to shape the rules that affect our lives because if you keep people ignorant and not knowing their history then you flood this then what happens is people flood the zone with stereotypes and that's what we see is we have this racist animosity that is able to brew when we don't know our history and we don't know that for example racist stereotypes are the same as they've been throughout history right we don't the same that they that justified slavery are still operative today and people who know their history can spot the lies but people who don't know their history are just vulnerable to those lies again and again absolutely true well listen one more question before we we throw it out to the audience tonight continue to encourage all of you to submit your questions if you have uh questions and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can uh you know heather the work that you're doing really does uh seem to be in in a long tradition of of uh black women who have been truth tellers who have tried to uh really perfect this union and and be um you know the shapers of of this democracy and and to shine a light and and and attempts to uh you know help us to get to our better selves as a society and as a country right um i guess how do you how do you see yourself as a black woman um in that tradition why do you think that it is black women who are are the ones who are either called to this work or or just uh continuously committed to this work and you know despite being the disparities impacting them in such a huge way how do you how do you explain that yeah well it's a big question aaron but i think um you know i do dedicate the book to my mother um a black woman who who showed me how uh to live right who showed me what it means to to be a person on this planet and what you have to do right and that is to heal and that is to make things better i mean that's just what else is there to do right it was sort of never another option for me um growing up but to see that we give the gifts that we've been given by the creator back to this place before we are done um so that's that's just a long tradition i would also say that there is a way in which people whose identity uh puts them on the lower ends of the constructed social hierarchy we tend to be able to because of where we have been situated see the whole system clearly right see how it fails and who it fails and see what would really need to be done to fix it and that's what intersectionality is all about the sense that um when you have these inter-connected and sort of cascading hierarchies there is a uniqueness about the situation that you are put in not that you know it's not essential to your being right it's not actually about black girl magic but it's about your social position to where you see how one size doesn't fit all how it how it is that rules can be made that can work for some but not for all but this is where angela gover backwell another black woman's wonderful phrase the curb cut effect i think is so useful to remind us that if you fix a problem for those who have uh the the biggest barriers to opportunity that often benefits everyone but if you only fix the problem for people who are the least burdened you know that won't benefit everyone so that's the way we need to reorient and that's the kind of wisdom that people not just black women but you know i mean i i have certain privileges that others don't i am a native-born citizen and i am acutely aware of that privilege right and so i would say that when we look at a lot of the systems including the pandemic relief you need to be asking undocumented essential workers how to make the system work so that's really kind of the spirit that i bring to the work got you well let's see if we can get to a couple of audience questions here uh we have a question from robert mccoy who wants to know how should we dialogue with our children when they see everywhere around them problems with race on the news and everywhere they look what do we tell them yeah you know it's a really um compassionate question and i appreciate it um you know i'm in the midst right now of adapting to some of us for young readers and it it is a question that's very much on my heart um i believe that we need to tell young people and remind ourselves stories of overcoming enough triumph right now because there's there's so much constant information and because the information economy feeds on conflict and outrage we don't see the full story of what's going on and it's really important when we teach history as well as this current moment to teach how it has always been people coming together across lines of race who have made all the progress this country has ever seen on issues of race and other issues and so we can't sort of get too caught up in the us versus them in the doomsday news in the um sensationalism and forget that people can change that in every corner of the country there are people who are doing the right thing and trying to make society better um it's it's in the telling of those stories the stories um that i devote sort of the last half of the book to the idea of the solidarity dividend um that i think we need to to find hope and remember we tell children stories that we want them to replicate in their lives right so that i think is extremely important uh we've got another one here uh this is a twofer from adam kade who wants to know first how do you respond to white people who want to be the drivers of a movement when they're also perpetuating inequality by their biases and the system how can they be better allies without us as people of color coddling them okay um you know i think that i think two things one i do think that that cross-racial organizing is extremely important um i think it's important for us to experience the desired state right what we want is a world in which we are together and we find common solutions to our common needs and we we feel that you know one group's fight is another group's fight and no one fights alone that's what we want so let's create that even in our neighborhoods in our communities and in our organizations at the same time there is a a phenomenon in which people who particularly those who've been sort of awakened in this this moment of mass mobilization um haven't done the work right um on their own programming and the unlearning that they need to do to not perpetuate interpersonal harm and to really know how to do the work better externally and so for them i would say you know there's an expression like get your cousin which basically means you know do the work in your own community and don't just try to show up and um you know be where the cool kids are if that's the way you're thinking about this but actually do the harder work that may require sort of you know it's a tougher conversation it often will conf you know if you are really organizing your family in your neighborhood or your church you are going to interact with the same lies and stories and distortions and biases that you probably were programmed with in your own growing up so that's why it's often very important to start where you are and in your own community as a white ally um before sort of or not before but you know emphasize that rather than jumping into maybe more sort of morally comfortable places um in cross-racial spaces so it's it's complicated um but i also think that you know we also need to give each other um give each other some compassion all across the board the the four years of the last administration were extraordinarily difficult this past year the pandemic everything is just there's so much stress that we are all carrying so i really do think that um you know we need to all around the table give each other as much compassion as possible absolutely and keep going right because uh this is not easy we will make mistakes along the way but yes having compassion for others as they can continue to remain committed to the process is how we can all move forward together well heather do you have a final thought before i let you go of course we could talk about this all day but unfortunately we have uh time flies when you are uh you know having a robust such a robust and engaging conversation what are your final thoughts on this before we have to go you know i would just say to the audience if you have not spoken up in defense of honest education in your community please do write your uh you know your elected officials write your school board go to a school board meeting recognize that this people who love books should be outraged by what's going on in the name of attacks on critical race theory and this is a really important time for people of good conscience not to be silent that would be my my last message to this book loving audience a good note to end on thank you so much heather thank you so much to the library of congress and thanks so much to our audience for your attention and for your thoughtful questions have a good evening [Music] you

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 31min 56sec (1916 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021