++A conversation with Heather McGhee about the costs of America’s racial bargain. +
++Black Americans are typically cast as the victims of racism. And indeed, they are victims of America’s long history of racial oppression. +
++But according to Heather McGhee, that fact can obscure an important truth: White Americans also pay a tremendous price for the country’s racial hierarchy — and many don’t even realize it. It’s a self-inflicted wound that will never heal unless Americans change the way they think about race and the national project. +
++McGhee is the former president of the think tank Demos and the author of a terrific new book called The Sum of Us. The story McGhee tells orbits around a depressing metaphor: the drained swimming pool. For a good chunk of the 20th century, American towns offered grand community swimming pools as symbols of leisure and civic pride. They were testaments to public investment. +
++But then desegregation happened and the pools had to be integrated. Rather than open them up to everyone, town after town simply shut them down. And not only did they close the pools, they nuked their parks departments and effectively abandoned public investment altogether. So in the end, Black Americans didn’t get to enjoy the pools, but neither did white people who were motivated by self-destructive racial ideologies. +
++This, McGhee argues, is the story of American politics in microcosm. The entire country is now one giant drained pool. Too many Americans have too easily accepted the lie animating so much of our history, namely that politics is a zero-sum contest in which one group’s gain must be another group’s loss. +
++I wanted to talk through the consequences of all this with McGhee. If she’s right that “We can’t have nice things” because of this lie at the center of our shared story, then how do we transcend that lie? What story must replace it? And how can the left do a better job at persuading the white victims of this lie to let it go? +
++You can hear our entire conversation in the week’s episode of Vox Conversations. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows. +
++Subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. +
++
+Sean Illing +
++How did you come to write this book? +
++Heather McGhee +
++One of the first stops on my book journey to write The Sum of Us was Montgomery, Alabama, which is one of many places where there is a beautiful central park in the city. I walked the grounds, this big, wide flat expanse that used to have one of the nearly 2,000 publicly funded grand-resort-style swimming pools in America. And this was something that was a big feature of American life under the New Deal in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s. It was just one of the many examples of a commitment to the public good by our government that was really supported by white public opinion at the time. +
++But like so much of the New Deal, so much of that public commitment to public goods, there was an asterisk. Public pools in many parts of the country were segregated or for whites only. Certainly this one in Montgomery, Alabama, was. And so in the 1950s and ’60s, when Black families began to win court cases saying, “Hey, those are our tax dollars too. Our families should be able to swim too,” instead of integrating the pools, many cities across the country drained their public pools rather than integrate them. +
++That’s what happened in Montgomery, Alabama. In fact, they drained the pool, filled it with dirt, and closed Oak Park. They sold off the animals in the zoo, shut down the entire parks and recreation department of the city, and kept it closed for a decade. They were almost to 1970 before the good people of Montgomery even got to enjoy a public park again, all because of racism. +
++And to me, that’s such an example of the zero-sum thinking creating costs for everyone, turning what was a public good into a private luxury, expressing the limits of white support for public goods once those public goods were extended and available to people that they did not perceive to be good, that they had been taught for generations to disdain and distrust. +
++In many ways, that’s what’s happened to our entire economy, as the majority of white voters went from supporting a job guarantee and a minimum income in the country in the late ’50s and early ’60s, to that support cratering once the civil rights movement made clear that those kinds of economic guarantees would go to Black people as well. +
++Sean Illing +
++That’s got to be one of the greatest and most consequential political tantrums in history. +
++Heather McGhee +
++It is. But throughout the book, I really try to put myself in the shoes of people who might, because of the stories they’d been told, because of what they believe, fit that into their moral understanding. And the more you do that, the more you recognize that in many ways, we’re still there. +
++Those beliefs about the inherent goodness or deservingness of people at the bottom of the economic ladder are still pretty stubborn. And they’re reflected in the majority of white people’s opinions about what a minimum-wage worker should be paid, for example. Or who should pay taxes. Or what kinds of floors we should have under the human misery of our fellow American. +
++Sean Illing +
++Your book opens with a familiar question: Why can’t we have nice things? What nice things can’t we have? +
++Heather McGhee +
++I don’t mean self-driving cars or laundry that does itself. I mean things like truly universal affordable health care, or world-class, or even just reliable, modern infrastructure. I mean a public health system to tackle pandemics with efficiency and scale. I mean a well-funded school in every neighborhood. I mean a representative functioning democracy that allows majoritarian views on big public questions to prevail and not get stymied in arcane Senate rules. +
++These are the kinds of things that a wealthy, modern government should be able to provide for its people. And they are the types of things that this country has really failed to deliver on for all of my lifetime, and certainly for the past few generations. +
++Sean Illing +
++A big reason — maybe the biggest reason — for this is that Americans have internalized a story about how politics works and who deserves the privileges of citizenship. You call it a “zero-sum” story. What does that mean? +
++Heather McGhee +
++The zero-sum story is the idea that there’s this massive dividing line between Black people and white people, that they’re on opposite teams, and that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense. It’s a story that’s still with us because it’s very profitable. Because the upshot of selling this story is that white voters cheer the destruction of supports that could benefit them if it will keep the people on the opposite team from having something that they don’t think they deserve. +
++So what that has meant in practical politics has been the kind of zero-sum rhetoric that we hear from the right wing: the makers and takers, the taxpayers and freeloaders, the free stuff, the handouts, us versus them. +
++Sean Illing +
++We’re all products of deep cultural forces that shape us in ways we don’t understand and our identities are getting pushed and activated in ways we don’t recognize. How do you make someone aware of the illusoriness of their own identity, of their own story, without also offending who they think they are? +
++Heather McGhee +
++I think politics has a role. It’s really important that we do political messaging like the Race Class Narrative project that I co-developed and we housed at Demos, which was aimed at better messages for organizers and activists and candidates to beat the zero-sum scapegoating story. That’s really important. +
++But I met lots of white people over the course of working on this book who had actually rejected the zero-sum after growing up being steeped in it. It wasn’t because they heard the magic words in a campaign ad. It was because they had rolled up their sleeves in organizing. They had actually experienced what it’s like to trust someone who also needed the same change in their own lives. +
++Sean Illing +
++If I was among the richest and most powerful people in this country and I wanted to construct a pair of competing ideologies that would ensure my interests are never threatened, what we have now is what it would be: conventional white racism on the one side and what you see in some corners of the left now, which is a blanket condemnation of white privilege, or an obsession with various symbolic battles. +
++As you know better than anyone, if these are the terms, solidarity is unachievable and the whole plutocratic system keeps spinning. +
++Heather McGhee +
++I definitely think there’s a disconnect here between the way progressive actors with microphones elevate issues on Twitter and in news coverage, and the real concerns of, say, a Black family in St. Louis. So there’s a distortion of the causes of racial justice because of the white predominance in the chattering class on the left. It’s almost like white supremacy within the activist movement is hurting the activist movement’s cause. +
++My eyes were really opened to this when it comes to the role of race and racism in the environmental movement. If you’re just a casual observer, you might think that your typical environmentalist is a white guy with a fleece and a backpack, right? That’s Sierra Club, that’s the REI version of the environmentalist. It’s the upper-class family that recycles a lot and composts. That’s who’s most active on environmental issues — or at least that’s the stereotype. And it’s also because those groups are the best funded and also influential in policymaking. +
++But when I dug into it, it turns out that white people are much less worried about climate change and supportive of taking action than Black and brown people are. So your average environmentalist, as in someone who really cares about the environment and is really supportive of taking pretty aggressive action to address this existential threat, is a Black or brown person, not an upper-class white person. So that kind of white privileging within the ranks of the movement is actually cutting off the leadership’s connection to the people who are the natural base. +
++Sean Illing +
++Your book makes the incredibly important argument that racism hurts everyone, and yet what I hear over and over again from white people I engage with where I live (in the Deep South) is resentment over the notion that they’re “privileged” or tools of white supremacy. Just setting aside the merits of any of those arguments and why they’re elevated (which you just explained), the practical issue here is that these narratives function like conversation-stoppers and it’s the kind of thing I know you bump up against all the time. +
++Heather McGhee +
++You know, it’s funny because the white share of the vote to the right wing has been pretty consistent ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. So this new tendency to blame white allegiance to the GOP on the recent resurgence of racial justice in the national conversation feels a little hollow to me. Because it’s not like there were all these white people who were Democrats until the protests in Ferguson happened in 2014. It’s definitely made the dog whistles into bull horns, and it’s given a lot of fodder to Fox News and right-wing radio to harp on racial grievances. +
++But the long-term data is pretty consistent on this stuff. The majority of white moderates and conservatives say that Black people take more from society than we give. That’s not necessarily about Dr. Seuss books. This is a deeper and older projection that feels very necessary to justify the racial hierarchy. +
++The kinder, gentler version of this is the old “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” line that says poverty is about culture and effort and not about wages and benefits. So this spectrum has existed for a long time now in our politics. I think it’s easier in some ways for progressives to think about what we have the power to change, which again is the discourse that’s coming from the elite, very online, mostly white progressives. +
++But I don’t think this is the real issue. +
++Sean Illing +
++Yeah, I don’t think it is either, it’s just particularly salient right now for lots of reasons. But it’s important to say that there’s a flip side to some of these arguments about how the left frames these issues. As you point out in the book, Obama went out of his way to deemphasize race and appeal to the best of us — and what did he get? He got a Tea Party that used the language of fiscal responsibility to organize white resentment and undermine his presidency, so there’s that. +
++I’m curious if you think Obama’s story speaks to the limits of progressive nationalism? +
++Heather McGhee +
++I think it speaks to the limits of colorblind triumphalism and to our ability to have a conversation about this country within this ecosystem. I think Barack Obama understands race and always has. But I think that the Democratic Party leadership, and the mostly white people around Obama’s campaign, were so close to somebody who gave the lie to all of it. In my experience from having conversations with people who were in Obama’s circle, they really didn’t realize the extent of racism in our politics and our policymaking. They just didn’t get it. +
++And they hadn’t done the work to understand just how central race and racism was, and what the tools looked like, and how they’re deployed. But they were also white and they actually had a gut-level caution around talking about race explicitly. I think there was the assumption that by not talking about it explicitly, they could avoid the mines. And that was wrong. +
++That I think was the big insight that we gleaned from the Race Class Narrative project. We realized that there’s a way, and really an imperative, to engage on racism that isn’t feeding into the reactionary right-wing message but, in fact, gives white people and people of color a way to see that we’re all in this country together. +
++Sean Illing +
++That feels like a good place to pivot toward the solution, or the story you think we need to tell moving forward. What does that look like? +
++Heather McGhee +
++I think we have to tell a certain story and that story has to be heard through action. This is a point I feel I need to keep making. Because of the economics of democratic activism, there’s a lot of emphasis on getting the right message. It’s important, but it’s necessary, not sufficient. +
++We need to include in our worldview the story of the drained public pool. A way of understanding that this country had hit on the formula for creating middle-class security for working-class people — and walked away from it because of racism. And that the nostalgia of the Trump message to “Make America Great Again” contains some truth that the economic data really does bear out. Economic life really was better and easier in the past. But the people who destroyed that weren’t Black or brown people or women who wanted a seat at the table. It was the white elites who used racial and gender fears and distrust to convince the majority of white voters to turn their back on that formula. So I think that is really important. +
++We’re also in this resurgence of organizing and we have to double down. Ordinary people have experienced a rebirth of civic life. Whether they’re doing it for their own survival, or because they’re making minimum wage, or because their moral sense of self has been violated by America’s inequalities, people have decided that a part of being an American and a human being right now is to organize. And that is the space that has always changed lives and changed history. And we are in that space right now. And that’s what’s exciting and hopeful to me. It’s why I say in the book that there are solidarity dividends to be had, but only through cross-racial organizing. +
++Confronting the show’s recent controversies was the bare minimum, but still significant. +
++On Monday night, The Bachelor — following a tumultuous season finale and weeks of controversy over racism — had one of its most direct conversations about race ever as the show continues to grapple with its own problems navigating this topic. +
++In an emotional After the Final Rose special, which aired live after the finale, Matt James — the first Black Bachelor in the show’s 19-year history — spoke about the unique pressures he experienced in this role as well as his reaction to the scrutiny of Rachael Kirkconnell, the winner of his season who’s faced criticism over racist actions that have surfaced from her past. +
++“It’s a lot of pressure,” said James, of the overwhelming expectations placed on him as the first Black Bachelor. “For a lot of people, that was the first time having someone like myself in their home. … The position I stepped into was to take on the weight of everything going on in the country in that time frame surrounding social justice and within the franchise surrounding diversity and inclusion.” +
++Following the revelations about Kirkconnell’s past behavior, which included attending an “Old South” antebellum party in 2018 and “liking” a social media photo of friends posing in front of a Confederate flag, James has been at the center of a firestorm that’s called attention not only to these specific allegations, but to much deeper issues around race within the Bachelor franchise. In particular, longtime host Chris Harrison made himself synonymous with such issues when he gave an explosive interview in February defending Kirkconnell and arguing that her actions may have been more acceptable three years ago, when she was a student. +
++“Is it a good look in 2018 or is it not a good look in 2021?” Harrison asked during a tense interview with Rachel Lindsay, who in 2017 became the first Black Bachelorette and has since become a commentator about the events of the entire franchise, including its shortcomings. “It’s not a good look, ever,” Lindsay replied. +
+ ++In the wake of that interview, Harrison has stepped back from his hosting duties. Not only has it been announced that Harrison will not be helming the next season of The Bachelorette, but he was replaced by author and former football player Emmanuel Acho on Monday’s After the Final Rose special. “This might just be the most uncomfortable conversation in Bachelor history,” Acho said as the special began, teasing his interviews with James and Kirkconnell. Acho laid out specifically, too, what exactly Kirkconnell had done by attending the “Old South” party, noting that “antebellum” translates directly to “before the war” in Latin, and refers to a time prior to the Civil War, when slavery still existed. +
++James, in his comments, stressed that Kirkconnell’s actions were just as bad in 2018 as in 2021, and said he believed that she needed time and space to do the “work” and reflect on why they were harmful. “As someone who grew up in the South, it takes me to a place that I don’t often like to think about. I wasn’t okay,” James explained, adding that the two have since broken up and that he felt Kirkconnell had to reckon with her actions on her own. +
++“The most disappointing thing for me was having to explain to you why what I saw was problematic and why I was so upset. … And so when I questioned our relationship, it was in the context of you not fully understanding my Blackness,” James said, while speaking with Kirkconnell on After the Final Rose. “I don’t want to be emotionally responsible for those tears, because it’s like, the work and the reconciliation that needs to be done is one thing I can’t do for you.” +
++Harrison and Kirkconnell have both apologized for their actions, and Kirkconnell emphasized on Monday that she is confronting her ignorance and behavior. “I see someone who was living in this ignorance without thinking who it would be hurting,” Kirkconnell said of her attendance at the “Old South” party. “I never asked myself, ‘What is the history behind this?’” Kirkconnell reiterated that there is no excuse for her actions and rebuffed earlier comments from viewers who’ve sought to defend her by arguing that such parties have long been commonplace in the south. +
++This conversation was significant for The Bachelor, largely because of how much the franchise has long avoided confronting its problems with race. Those problems include casting racist contestants, amplifying stereotypes and playing into harmful tropes in storylines about contestants of color, and staying quiet on issues of discrimination and inequality. +
++Just two years ago, the show aired a segment about racism that never once used the word: Instead, it focused on contestants of color saying how the “hate” they received was uncomfortable. +
++Monday’s After the Final Rose conversation was the least The Bachelor could have done to demonstrate that it wants to have explicit and thoughtful conversations about racism within the franchise moving forward. As the show promises to take steps to reckon with its deeper issues around race — including expanding the BIPOC representation among its executive producers — this discussion marked a long overdue start. +
++
++
++
++The Biden administration is calling North Korea. No one is answering. +
++The Biden administration may have newly rejoined the global village, but the usually rowdy North Korean neighbors so far have greeted the Americans’ move-in with nothing but silence. +
++Pyongyang has yet to acknowledge that President Joe Biden is, well, the president of the United States. And Reuters on Saturday reported that multiple efforts by the US to directly interact with North Korea since mid-February, including through a United Nations channel, have yielded no reply. +
++“To date, we have not received any response from Pyongyang,” a senior administration official told me on Monday. “This follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage,” which means the Biden administration says North Korea didn’t interact with President Trump’s team for a while, either. +
++White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that later in the day during her daily press conference, adding that “diplomacy continues to be our first priority.” +
++Experts aren’t entirely sure what’s driving the quiet. One potential reason is that the North Korean regime isn’t a Biden fan — for example, a 2019 state-run news commentary called the then-presidential candidate an “imbecile” and “fool of low IQ.” +
++That came after Biden called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a “tyrant” and then, afterward, trashed his personal diplomacy with Trump, which may have cooled any ideas in Pyongyang about interacting with the US right now. +
++Another is that the country is in a severe lockdown to quash the coronavirus pandemic, a move that also precipitated a harsh economic downturn. If that’s the case, Pyongyang may prefer dealing with its domestic problems right now to engaging in complex diplomacy with Washington. +
++“They are focused on getting through this hard period,” said Joshua Pollack, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. +
++But North Korea’s silence extends beyond just rebuffing America’s entreaties. +
++North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has yet to authorize a ballistic missile or nuclear test this year as a way to darkly welcome the new administration, even though many experts suspected he might do so early in Biden’s tenure. There’s still time for that, though, since Pyongyang sometimes waits a few months before launching its weapons in defiance. +
++However, Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who holds a powerful position in the regime, did offer an oblique comment Monday aimed at the new US administration. +
++At the end of a lengthy media statement railing at the South Korean government for participating in annual joint military exercises with the US this month, she threw this in: “Availing myself of this opportunity, I’d like to advise the new US Administration that wants to give off powder smell in Korea across the ocean. If they want to have a good sleep for coming four years, it would be good for them not to seek something to do unseemly that may not make them sleep properly.” +
++This is the first of a comment directed at the president and his team since they came into office. +
++It’s possible the Biden administration may not mind the general silence directed at the US, at least for now. After all, they’re also dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, as well as an intransigent Iran, a looming decision over whether to keep US troops in Afghanistan, and the challenge from China. A dramatic North Korean provocation would just add to the president’s growing inbox. +
++But it’s likelier than not that Pyongyang will eventually respond. And when it does, the message likely won’t be a welcoming one. +
++Biden’s team has already sent a strong signal that North Korea won’t like +
++Since 1992, America’s policy toward North Korea has been mostly consistent: It would seek the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Simply put, that means the US won’t station nuclear-capable warplanes in South Korea and Seoul won’t seek the bomb, all so North Korea feels comfortable enough to verifiably dismantle its nuclear arsenal. +
++When Kim and former President Donald Trump met in Singapore in 2018, they signed a declaration in which North Korea promised to work toward such an outcome. +
++But three times now the Biden administration has offered a harder-line stance than that, potentially reversing even that limited progress. +
++In February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the UN’s Conference on Disarmament that the US “remains focused on denuclearization of North Korea.” By phrasing it that way — the denuclearization of North Korea instead of the Korean Peninsula — he seemed to be suggesting that only North Korea needs to give up its nuclear weapons, while the US can still maintain its nuclear defense of South Korea. +
++Last week, the US — along with its “Quad” partners Japan, India, and Australia — released a statement saying, “We reaffirm our commitment to the complete denuclearization of North Korea.” +
++And then on Sunday, a State Department press briefing about Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Japan this week noted they would “reinvigorate trilateral cooperation on a broad range of global issues, including the denuclearization of North Korea.” +
++Even though Biden’s team has said its North Korea policy remains under review for a few more weeks, those statements indicate the administration has made up its mind. The goal now, it seems, is to let Pyongyang know it alone must agree to a non-nuclear future. For now at least, it looks like the Biden administration is taking a harder line than the Trump team did. +
++That might please some US allies like Japan, which prefers a tougher stance against North Korea. But Seoul, which wants to keep diplomatic channels with Pyongyang open, certainly won’t like it, and neither will Kim. +
++In 2018, for example, the state-run Korean Central News Agency blasted the Trump administration for even suggesting that only North Korea had to give up its bombs. “When we refer to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, it, therefore, means removing all elements of nuclear threats from the areas of both the north and the south of Korea and also from surrounding areas from where the Korean peninsula is targeted,” the commentary read. “This should be clearly understood.” +
++Thus the Biden administration’s stance, should it remain in place, could ratchet up tensions with North Korea even further. +
++Almost no experts believe Pyongyang will ever give up its nuclear arsenal, especially since it sees those weapons as its best defense against an improbable US-led invasion. Plus, few nations voluntarily give up their nuclear weapons after spending decades to acquire and build them. +
++The North Korea-focused formulation “doesn’t help any, and it’s not clear why they’ve chosen this language,” said Middlebury’s Pollack. “It plays straight to [North Korea’s] complaint that the US just wants to demand their unilateral disarmament.” +
++The Biden administration has promised to keep conversations going with allies about its North Korea policy until it finalizes its plans. “Throughout the review process, we have and will continue to engage with our Japanese and South Korean allies to solicit input and explore fresh approaches. We have listened carefully to their ideas, including through trilateral consultations,” the senior administration official told me. +
++Even so, the repeated American position worries experts that a decision may have already been made by default — with potentially disastrous results. +
++“If this is the new formulation, I would not expect the North Koreans to reciprocate any overtures,” said Ankit Panda, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There are very few incentives to take a first step until they see a positive sign from the US.” +