Lisette’s Take: “I know Heather through reading her work, particularly the book The Sum of Us, but also I just know her as being that person that is so committed to the city and country.” To hear all episodes and learn more about Lisette Nieves, visit Lisette-Nieves.com
Heather McGhee is a bestselling author, nonprofit executive, public intellectual, and political strategist. She is a former president and currently a trustee emeritus of Demos, a progressive U.S. think tank. In 2021, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together debuted at #3 on the New York Times best seller list and stayed there for 10 weeks. In it Heather argues that white Americans "have been steeped in the notion of 'zero sum' — that any gains by another group must come at white people's expense." She’s a regular contributor to NBC News and frequent guest on current events shows like Meet the Press and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Lisette Nieves: Hi everyone. This is Lisette Nieves with the Junction Podcast. I'm so excited, I have Heather McGhee with me today. How lucky are we to have this conversation? Let me tell you a little bit about Heather. Heather's a bestselling author, nonprofit executive, public intellectual, political strategist. I can go on and on. She's the former president, currently a trustee of emeritus of Demos, a progressive U.S. think tank. To me, she is all things political and thoughtful and strategic, and I'm excited for this conversation.
I just wanted you to know that I know Heather through reading her work, particularly the book The Sum of Us, but also just know her as being that person that is so committed to the city and country. And I'm lucky to have her. So Heather, welcome to The Junction.
Heather McGhee: Oh, Lisette, thank you for that warm introduction. That was wonderful. I've been looking forward to this conversation. It's been on my calendar for a while and I'm like, "Ooh, I get to have lunch with Lisette today."
Nieves: There you go. I am super excited. So Heather, even before we get into our convo, give me a little sense of what your day was like this morning.
McGhee: Oh, well, let's see. I woke up first at 4 o'clock because, for some reason my 14-month-old woke up at four. But because my husband's observing Ramadan, he sets his alarm for a little before 5. So we did a little handoff and my husband had his last meal of the day before sunrise. I went back to sleep for half an hour, woke up again to get my seven-year-old up. And then it was that mess that all parents know of trying to get everybody in a good mood and out of the house and fed and on time and homework done and packed and all of that.
And then I came back from dropping off my son at a great public school in our community and got to work. I was doing a bunch of reading. I was trying not to get too distracted by the news of the ever-escalating and widening war in the Middle East. And I had a couple of phone calls, but the whole day I was looking forward to this conversation.
Nieves: All right. Well, they always say the Marines do so much before 9:00 AM, but I guess they haven't met Heather McGhee, right? I mean, just put a mom to work, right? By 9:00 AM, so much has happened.
McGhee: That's right.
Nieves: There is so much to get into. I mean, oh, don't worry. We're going to get into the war, we're going to get into a lot of things, but let's just start a little bit with the early Heather, Southside Chicago.
McGhee: Oh, okay.
Nieves: Tell me a little bit about that growing up.
McGhee: I was really fortunate to grow up in a really close-knit community on the south side of Chicago. My paternal grandparents were very connected. My grandfather, Earl McGhee, was a Chicago police officer. My grandmother, Marcia McGhee, was a social worker, guidance counselor in the schools. And then my father married a white woman who had an amazing history herself, had grown up in a family of nine that had taken a vow of poverty for social justice in the 1960s, late 1950s, 1960s.
And so my world just kept expanding. As the family grew, I ended up going away to school, in middle school, all the way to the East Coast, which was very much a world-expanding experience. And I had roommates who were from Hong Kong.
Nieves: So you're a boarding school girl.
McGhee: I was. I was. I am. I am. Many of my closest friends, including my husband, are actually people I met in high school.
Nieves: Oh, wow. I love that. When you think about, and getting a little bit to the book The Sum of Us, but we're going to be talking about a variety of things, you talk so much and you anchor a lot of the book and looking particularly at Chicago and looking at what people would be willing to trade off versus having a common goal, a common agenda.
McGhee: Yeah.
Nieves: Can you just talk a little bit about that?
McGhee: I was very attuned to politics when I was growing up. Politics were always talked about in my home. And I remember a seminal, the first sort of seminal political experience for me was the election of Harold Washington as mayor and then his assassination. I think of it as an assassination because it was so dramatic, but he died at his desk and it was such a loss.
And then, a little bit later, I was really shaped by the welfare reform debates of the mid-1990s under Bill Clinton. And my community that I grew up in had a lot of folks who relied on public assistance. And my mother worked often with families with disabilities and families in poverty. And so I remember the sort of tone and the characterization of particularly Black single mothers. My mother's a Black single mother, right? And many of the people in my life were Black single mothers.
Nieves: The constructed narrative of that, right.
McGhee: And I just remember it being so contrary to what I knew to be true. I mean, speaking of ingenuity and persistence and grit, right? If you want to find somebody who can make a way out of no way, it's a single mother and a single mother with low resources.
So I just sort of saw the lie. And I remember really questioning why it was that the most powerful people in our country were blaming women who had so little and worked so hard for what was wrong with our economy. And it set out in me a drive to be at the table for those conversations about the economy, to learn about what the economy was and what was really causing inequality and what was really underneath the sort of economic dysfunctions of our society. But it was that racialized and gendered lie that was a real catalyst for me.
Nieves: Yeah. And this is where I feel such a deep connection to it, because being born and raised in Brooklyn, in a 95% African-American and Latino community, talk about the narratives. The narratives were, "Oh my goodness, well, you're going to go to a poor school, you're going to be this, you're going to be that." And absolutely what we saw was a 1970s in New York where it was all working-class families who counted on being public servants. But that's not talked about, right? Who kept the city afloat? My parents organized a rent strike.
McGhee: Wow.
Nieves: And this was in the '70s, but this is why I always enjoy reading your work because I get the bio along with what was happening, the context. And while the Bronx was burning, what was happening in Brooklyn was that there was a whole group of very progressive lawyers who were organizing tenants. And many of these were white, young lawyers, came to our building, organized tenants, my parents, and they ultimately won.
McGhee: That's amazing.
Nieves: Took years. But it's an interesting thing about what is the narrative of, we know the Bronx is burning, but we don't talk about why didn't Brooklyn burn down or what happened or what did people learn from that experience. So it's a moment where there was some solidarity dividends that we want to-
McGhee: That's right. I was just about to say.
Nieves: I just want to bring it full circle there. I want to talk a full circle there. So talk to me about solidarity dividends, and do we even have a chance to find somebody?
McGhee: Yeah. So first, for definitional purposes, if folks haven't read the book, the bottom line is that everything that really matters in life, I can't do on my own. We can't do on our own. It takes collective action in order to get the pipes fixed in your building when the landlord doesn't want to, to get the rent made more affordable, to get the stairway fixed. Whatever it was that was causing collective harm in your parents' building, it was not going to be one person saying, "Oh, I'm going to withhold my rent," because they'd be evicted, right?
Nieves: Correct.
McGhee: No, it was everyone organizing and saying, "We are going to use our collective power against someone who has more power than any of us on our own." And so that question of collective action, that's not a new thing. Everybody should know that that's how things happen. That's how the wheel of progress turns. That's how solutions are won. But in a society that is multiracial and that has been so deeply divided by race and racism, and where people in power have often used racism to wedge us against each other, to create this zero-sum story. In a zero-sum game, you can't have any mutual progress. If one group gets a point, the other group loses a point, right? It's all about us versus them in competition. And when we have that story sold to us time and time again, it makes people reluctant to take collective action. They blame themselves. They try to figure it out themselves. They blame their neighbors.
Nieves: Oh, absolutely.
McGhee: And so then you don't get what I coin in the book, the solidarity dividend, the gain, the dividend that can come through collective action. And whatever it was that you won in that rent strike was the solidarity dividend. And it was importantly, I think, multiracial, right? I'm sure there were tenants of all races and you had those white young, probably socialist lawyers coming in. It was a real multiracial coalition that showed cross-racial solidarity and won against a powerful force.
Nieves: Absolutely. And so it's an interesting time right now, just let's look at it. In one way, you can look at a recent mayoral election in New York City and say, wow, through one lens, political lens, you might say, that's an example where we could look at it and say there was some kind of solidarity dividends there.
McGhee: Big solidarity politics. Absolutely.
Nieves: Absolutely. We saw that, especially intergenerationally, broke records in the election. And then we look at national politics, and we might see the opposite. So how would you look at what's happening right now?
McGhee: So two things. One, this is not a real representative democracy. Our country is not fully designed in order to let the will of the people prevail. And so you're going to have sentiments in our society that are not making it through the brutal jerry-rigged math of not competitive House districts, of a Senate map that treats acres like they're human beings. And so we have a wildly distorted federal politics. And I talk in the book about how the reason why there are so many holes in our democracy and why it's so skewed, you can trace it all back to slavery and to racism in the 20th century and beyond.
And for better or for worse, I think people have looked to outsiders to disrupt a system that they see as rigged against everyday people. And that's a left, right, uniting concern. So populism, the idea of somebody who's from the outside of the system, who's not the same old status quo, who's willing to take big swings in an era of runaway inequality where people are worried about their next mortgage bill, their next rent, they're worried about the next generation, you do want someone to make a big move. And I think that's something that actually, as far apart as they are ideologically and morally, I think that's something that connects Mamdani and Trump.
Nieves: Oh, absolutely. And we see that, right? I think whether it's a DSA or MAGA, whether you agree with either side, I think this question of a re-imagination and a questioning of institutions is something very solid and profound that both sides could agree on.
McGhee: Yeah.
Nieves: I do think in this idea of the solidarity dividends, that's inherently threatening to people in power. By design, it is, right?
McGhee: Absolutely.
Nieves: By design, that's threatening. And so when you think about the political ecosystem today and the range of policies that are being debated or not being debated, what is the most threatening to solidarity dividends?
McGhee: Oh, that's so interesting. I would say there are a few. One is real democracy, right? One is actually letting it be one person, one vote, having the national popular vote instead of the electoral college. Really having a representative of democracy. That's why you see this push, the Republican-led Congress just passed a really dangerous bill to require folks to do what is so hard to do, which is find an original copy of the birth certificate, have a passport. It's like, okay, if you don't have a birth certificate, you couldn't get a passport, all of this in order to vote. So I think that's a big piece of it. I think that's the ultimate fear of people who want to keep power concentrated in small hands is... In small hands. That's funny.
Nieves: You didn't even intend that. And that was right on cue, Heather.
McGhee: In a small number of hands, but if they happen to be small, that's fine. People who want to keep power concentrated in a small number of hands, of course, fear democracy.
And then I would say the second is that the only thing that can take on concentrated economic power, which is what we're talking about here with this millionaire and billionaire class, is organized people. And so the other big threat is widespread organizing. And of course, for most of the 20th century, the vehicle for that was labor unions and were people who shared an industry and shared a class identity and came together to do exactly what your parents did and find their places of common interest and use their leverage to strike.
You saw in Minneapolis after the killing of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty by ICE. You saw not just the kinds of street protests and vigilance and monitoring and recording. You saw not just the mutual aid networks that are running like a river throughout communities where there are concentrations of undocumented people. But you also saw a massive strike, right? And that took incredible organizing. I was talking to one of the organizers the other day about the strike, the day of action that was a strike-
Nieves: And a leveraging of technology.
McGhee: That's right. And you saw tens of thousands of people, 50,000 plus people refuse to go to work. Minneapolis is not a big city. You can drive from one end to the other in 15 minutes, but it was occupied by thousands of masked agents armed to the tilt.
Nieves: Or hyper diverse, right?
McGhee: Yes. It's also not hyper diverse. And in fact, so much of the diversity has come from the fact that they've been welcoming to refugees. Everyone knew someone who was being targeted, not even because they were undocumented, but simply because they were an immigrant or looked like one. You had hundreds of people with asylum status, refugees, put in a plane and dropped off in the middle of the desert.
So I just think that that level of solidarity and action, and especially when it includes an economic component, one of the organizers explaining how they got the airport workers to shut down many flights, how they got a network of HR folks to be able to help with letters that people needed to write to HR if they were going to skip work. I mean, it's just like real on the ground grassroots organizing to say we will pull-
Nieves: Transportation brigades to get children to and from school.
McGhee: There you go. That's right.
Nieves: This is that piece where I did feel the solidarity dividends notion, which is the assumption that you have to experience it intimately for it to matter to you. And in some ways it did, in some ways it didn't. It was just like, this is a broader, this is a large umbrella of what we need to fear.
McGhee: That's right. That's right. This is wrong is what they were saying.
Nieves: It's just wrong.
McGhee: This is wrong.
Nieves: This is wrong. So since you brought up ICE, this is different.
McGhee: Oh yeah.
Nieves: This is different now, right? This is a federalized, hyper-financed military force, right? Paramilitary force, let me put it in that way, right? How would you think about it differently today?
McGhee: It's really interesting because it's very different from the immigration enforcement that we've seen in the past 40 years, right? But the thing it is most like in our context are the fugitive slave patrols.
Nieves: I was just going to say, it's fugitive slave brigades. And we also know of in the early '70s, the roundup of Mexicans in California and the like. All modeled after that, right?
McGhee: Yes.
Nieves: This idea of paramilitary forces reinforcing this, yeah.
McGhee: Who have been authorized to ignore the Constitution, who are basically just hunting for people. We've lost almost a million of our neighbors since this administration who've been taken away and without due process in so many cases, just cruelly treated like subhuman.
And that Lisette really comes back to the zero-sum story. You couldn't get to the permission structure that has allowed the dominant political party in Washington to go along with this dehumanization to the creation of what is technically speaking, concentration camps, warehousing folks, this kind of state terror in communities, if there had not been campaigns dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrants. And the story on the right wing from talk radio to cable news to the political campaigns was saying, "They are coming after you, your livelihood, your safety, your pets, right? They are coming after your way of life. It is either us or them and only I,” as the would be desperate speaking,” only I can protect you from them."
That narrative is known as the great replacement story. It's a story that says that people of color, immigrants are trying to take over the country. And that story is really, it is in structure the same thing as the story that justified the rise of the Third Reich. And I think we need to be very plain about that because as students of history, we shouldn't be worried about being too accurate with the patterns that we see, with naming the patterns that we see.
And so these are very scary times because there are times when whole parts of our communities have been dehumanized and so atrocities have been excused. And the lack of accountability and checks and balances from the Supreme Court, from the Congress is what's really worrisome. And what is beautiful about the uprisings that have happened from Charlotte to Los Angeles to Minnesota have been that everyday people have said, "Oh no, this is not who we're going to be anymore." It may have been in our past, right? We're not going to be naive about that. And it may be a part of the story. There are many stories that make up America, and this is definitely a chapter in the story, but that ends now.
Nieves: There are some people who have this real, they're looking at this context and feeling really dire about it, right? And you as a mom with two under 10, right?
McGhee: Yes.
Nieves: What do you want to say to all those other moms out there? What should they be doing?
McGhee: Put your feet up, ladies. No, I mean, I think that we work so hard. I've been really in caregiving this year, and oh my goodness, how hard we work, how we want to do it all. We want to perfect it. We want to pour ourselves into these children, and they'll take everything we have to give and then some. But I'm feeling right now the real need for us as mothers, as caregivers, to put on our own masks, to take care of ourselves, to model what it means to take care of yourself for your children, to give them the independence of not working so hard to smooth the pathways for them. I'm of course talking to myself here.
Nieves: That's okay. You know what? You're talking to every mother, right? You're talking to every mother, right?
McGhee: Yeah.
Nieves: Trust me, I'm here on it. Well, thank you so much for your time. Count on me to host hopefully one of your first book launch parties. I'd love to have you and your mom here.
McGhee: Oh, wouldn't that be great?
Nieves: Oh, it would be great. It would be great. And just thank you. Thank you for being you.
McGhee: Thank you for being you.
Credits: Thank you for listening!
At The Junction, we reflect on the moments that make us — with today’s most impactful leaders. The show was created and hosted by me, Lisette Nieves, and produced by LWC Studios.
This show is available everywhere you listen to podcasts, and on YouTube. I encourage you to share video and audio episodes by linking to them on social media, websites, and by sharing them in your online affinity groups. Our executive editor is Juleyka Lantigua. Michelle Baker is our senior producer. Alyson Rich and Cesar Ventura provided administrative support. CDM Studios is our live recording location. Our theme song is “La Juntura Cultural,” arranged by Randy Seriguchi, Jr. and D'Artanian Woodard, produced by Randy Seriguchi, Jr., and recorded by Farmacy Studio.
For more information and episode transcripts, visit Lisette-Nieves.com. If you’d like to reach out, please email us at Hello@LWCStudios.com.