TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is author and scholar Heather McGhee. Her book "The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together" came out in 2021, but it reads like it was written for this exact moment. The thesis is deceptively simple. Racism doesn't just hurt the people it targets. It hollows out the lives of everyone, including white Americans. McGhee traces the history of this country, showing how it has often chosen to destroy public goods rather than share them.
Just recently, President Trump told The New York Times that civil rights protections resulted in white people being very badly treated, that he calls it reverse discrimination. The administration is dismantling diversity programs across government and urging white men to file federal discrimination complaints. It has also removed the MLK holiday and Juneteenth from this year's fee-free days at national parks, a move many see as a direct assault on Dr. King's legacy. In her book, McGhee writes about research that shows many white Americans have come to believe antiwhite bias is now more prevalent than anti-Black bias, despite evidence to the contrary. She set out to understand where this belief comes from, who profits from it and what it costs all of us. She calls her book both a diagnosis and a way out.
Heather McGhee is the former president of Demos, a progressive think tank focused on democracy, the economy and racial justice. She has drafted legislation and testified before Congress on policy initiatives, including debt-free college and voting rights protections. She's a contributor to NBC's "Meet The Press" and delivered her 2019 TED Talk called "Racism Has A Cost For Everyone." Her podcast, "The Sum Of Us," extended the arguments in her book. And, Heather McGhee, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
HEATHER MCGHEE: Tonya, thank you so much for having me.
MOSLEY: Heather, I want to start by playing something for you. It's Andrea Lucas. She's the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that's the agency created in 1965 to enforce the Civil Rights Act. And in this clip, she is making a callout to white men. Let's listen.
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ANDREA LUCAS: Are you a white male who's experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the EEOC as soon as possible. Time limits are typically strict for filing a claim. The EEOC is the federal agency charged with enforcing federal antidiscrimination law against businesses and other private sector employers. The EEOC is committed to identifying, attacking and eliminating all forms of race and sex discrimination, including against white male applicants and employees.
MOSLEY: That was Andrea Lucas. She's the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she's calling for white men to also file if they feel discriminated against. I just want to slow down on this callout because you've looked at this data closely, and I want you to talk about the facts and what they actually show and who has benefited from the Civil Rights Act and actually who's been left behind since 1964.
MCGHEE: I want to say, first of all, that in a really masterful way, everything that the Trump administration is doing is both about what it's doing - asking for people to complain to the government about perceived bias - and about driving an underlying core narrative. And that core narrative is an us-versus-them zero-sum story. It's a story that says that there can be no mutual progress, that if people of color or women get ahead, if there are more immigrants, then that must come at the expense of white people, of men, of native-born citizens, right? It's this core zero-sum lie. I call it a lie because the facts make it very clear. In fact, civil rights have been a benefit to most sectors of the society - that antidiscrimination laws have had beneficiaries from people with disabilities, first-generation college students, white women have been the disproportionate beneficiaries of affirmative action, and that even white men have - because of long-standing deliberate and explicit bias towards them, have actually benefited from companies and institutions that have been more successful because of their diversity.
And so we really have to both take the face value of what's happening and also understand that for this new EEOC chair to say, white men, you are being hurt by this new - as in, the last 60 years - regime of civil and equal rights is really about both soliciting plaintiffs, but more importantly, it's about selling a story - selling a story to white people that says, you should fear the progress and even the presence of people of color.
MOSLEY: This idea of the zero-sum lie, you actually talked to scholars at Harvard who have studied it, and they found that the thing is, a significant percentage of White Americans believe there is a bias against them and that it is now more prevalent than anti-Black bias. And I guess that might not be surprising to some, but researchers told you that they were shocked because it's so contrary to the facts. What did you find when you went looking for the source of that belief?
MCGHEE: You know, it's funny now because I wrote "The Sum Of Us" in the era of 2017 to 2021. And I had to do a lot of legwork to find where this zero-sum narrative was coming from, who was selling this idea for their own profit and, of course, ultimately what it was costing people to buy this idea that there's no mutual progress, that they should fear their neighbor and their neighbor's success. Of course, now in the year 2026, we hear that zero-sum story everywhere. Us versus them, as the fascism scholar Jason Stanley says, is the core story of fascism.
MOSLEY: It's not something that just happened, though, that just appeared with this administration. When you went out looking - because you interviewed many people. You even traveled to different parts of the country to try to figure out where the source of this zero-sum lie comes from. And of course, it's not one particular place, but it's, in a way, been interwoven since the Civil Rights Act.
MCGHEE: Yes, I mean, when I look at the history of this country, in many ways, the zero-sum story was even older than the 20th century. I tried to find where did this idea come from, and what I found was that it was really crafted in the cradle of the United States. We have to remember that this country was founded on an idea that deny the humanity of whole parts of the human race and created categories of humanity and a hierarchy of human value.
And if we look at what the colonial plantation class had to convince everyday European settlers of, had to convince them that there was this new taxonomy of race that gave them a sort of leg up over the people who were Indigenous and African enslaved people. And oftentimes in the 17th century, you had Europeans, Africans, Indigenous people all in sort of similar economic circumstances, in various levels of indenture and unfreedom. And yet, the threat to the colonial plantation elite of that time, of having these categories of people band together was nearly constant, and it resulted in a number of rebellions, including the most successful of which was the Bacon's Rebellion.
And after that cross-racial servant uprising, which burned the capital of colonial Virginia to the ground, we had in this country - what would become this country - a new set of laws that really created that zero-sum hierarchy, that made a new race of people, uniting European settlers across country and religion into this uber category of white and put them above Black and Indigenous people in terms of their rights and their economic status. And it was really a goal to break the bonds of cross-racial economic solidarity.
I bring that history up because it feels like we are, in many ways, experiencing that tension every 50 years or so. When economic inequality gets really severe, people who are divided by race or color, language or origin start to realize that they actually have more in common than what sets them apart and that they shouldn't fear their neighbors or blame their neighbors for their economic status but should be looking up the economic ladder at the people who have the power to set the rules. And that's when you begin to hear the zero-sum story louder and louder from millionaires and billionaires, self-interested folks who want to keep the economic status quo just as it is. And so, one thing that I think we really have not understood is how much the zero-sum story is not just about race and civil rights and diversity, but it has been the framework for the economic story in this country.
MOSLEY: You know, the thing that I think is also pretty interesting to talk about in this moment is, before Dr. King was assassinated, he actually said that a real change depends on an honest diagnosis of the actual disease. You start off your book with the story of the swimming pool in our country. There was this phenomenon in the 1920s when towns and cities tried to outdo one another by building these elaborate pools that became American symbols of the common good, but they were drained and filled with dirt rather than shared with Black neighbors. What did the draining of the pools signify for you really kind of as a grounding of your thesis about the larger American narrative?
MCGHEE: You know, as a person with a background in economic policy, I learned an economic history of this country which was that we had the Great Depression and the Gilded Age of inequality, and then we had the New Deal, which was this strong, muscular commitment to the public good, and that those policies - Social Security, massive investment in housing, collective bargaining laws, wage and hour laws - all of these economic public goods - the GI Bill, massive investment in research and development. And as I came to understand it, all of those economic public goods, they worked - right? - and yet they were a lot like those segregated public swimming pools, Tonya.
They were public goods that were in many ways for whites only, whether it was because Social Security excluded the two job categories that most Black workers were in - in a compromise with the Southern delegation to the New Deal Congress - whether it was that massive investment in housing that workers could afford and the federal policies to create and encourage mortgages to make the dream of home ownership a reality. That was all predicated on the never substantiated assumption that Black people would be too much of a credit risk. And so the progressive New Deal government required racial covenants, agreements that said that the housing stock built with federal support could only be to sold or leased to people, quote, "wholly of the Caucasian race."
And it wasn't until the civil rights era and the beautiful cross-racial protest, litigation, agitation that attacked segregation in all of its forms - public swimming pools were actually one of the first areas where Black families who lost children because they could not access the safe public swimming pools led the fight. And we saw courts issue desegregation orders for public swimming pools all over the country. And in response, towns and cities decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than integrate them.
I've visited some of these sites of these lost public swimming pools, just wide, flat expanses of grass in public parks. Was just such a powerful metaphor for the way in which a robust consensus held by white voters that government had a role and a responsibility to ensure the decent standard of living for people - affordable college, home ownership, good jobs, well-regulated businesses - the sort of economic consensus of most of the 20th century, it fell apart in the face of the inclusion of Black and brown people, people whom white voters had been taught to disdain and distrust.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is author and scholar Heather McGhee. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking to Heather McGhee, author of "The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together."
There's a rewriting that is happening all across the federal government, including in places we might not immediately think of as political. National parks are an example of this. They're often called America's public memory - places that we have collectively decided matter enough to protect. For some Black families, visiting a national park on Juneteenth or MLK Day also carries a specific meaning. It's a way of saying that this land is ours too. From your point of view, what is lost when that symbolism disappears?
MCGHEE: You know, "The Sum Of Us" came out in 2021 at a time when the country had been in many ways transformed in terms of our collective consciousness, where white people all over the country were waking up to the fact that we've all been lied to about our history, were themselves really looking to find the kinds of answers that would make sense of the racial inequalities that we still have and were feeling proud of their ability to kind of wake up, to understand this country in its fullness. And I do believe that if you don't understand how bad it's been, you really can't appreciate the glory of this nation and the overcoming and the triumph and the resilience of our people.
And so, that is part of what is lost, not just for Black families who, you know, may take Juneteenth in a national park as a time to connect to our own history, but when the administration tries to erase the parts of our history that show how far we've come and, of course, I think in a self-interested way, show exactly where they'd like to take us again, they're also taking out the parts where we really understand who the American heroes are.
You know, I think in our 250th anniversary, we should be celebrating new unsung heroes of all races. I think of Viola Liuzzo - right? - who was 39 and marched in '65 from Selma to Montgomery and was killed by three Klan members. She was a white woman who gave her life in support of civil rights. I think of Gilberto Gerena Valentin, who was a Puerto Rican civil rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama, who was an Asian American civil rights activist, worked closely with Malcolm X. Right? These are people who are part of how we got to this place today, and most people don't know their names. Most people are therefore kind of robbed of the moral choice to identify with people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds who throughout history, when it wasn't easy, chose to stand on the side of the oppressed and to move our country forward. That's the kind of history we should be celebrating today.
MOSLEY: The administration has also been renaming landmarks, turning Denali back to McKinley, removing a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page, changing enslaved African Americans to enslaved workers. There is a pattern here.
MCGHEE: Oh, I mean, the list goes on and on. I mean, ridding books about, you know, racial history from military libraries. A lot of the military heroes who are women and people of color have been stripped from the Defense Department's, you know, sort of celebrations. I mean, we know what's happening. It's really quite transparent. I do believe it will be temporary. We've seen the polling data that shows time after time that Americans don't want history to be erased. They don't want books to be banned. Americans of all stripes and all political persuasions don't support the whitewashing of history. So I do believe this is all quite foolish, quite childish, frankly, and quite temporary.
MOSLEY: What makes you feel that it's quite temporary? Because I think about how so much of this history we just were learning in the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, I understand it's cyclical, but there is so much omitted history that we have kind of been contending with, and these are the very things that this administration seems to be targeting.
MCGHEE: You know, I'm optimistic for a few reasons. One, because I've spent the past few years on the road traveling to places where white Americans come up to me and say that they are furious, that they were lied to in their own history and schooling and that they are proud of having woken up and that they'll never go back to sleep. I'm optimistic because young people - there's a young readers, middle- and high-school, adaptation of "The Sum Of Us," and so I've been to dozens of schools and libraries. The thing about young people today is that in their phones they have access to every piece of information in the world - right? - and so they take as a matter of course that they shouldn't be lied to, that there shouldn't be censorship, that they should have access to all information. And they are, of course, the most diverse generation in American history, and they understand what time it is.
And so, I do think that the administration's censorship and violations of the First Amendment are going to be temporary. I do believe that they will be reversed when this administration ends. And I do think that, more importantly, they haven't changed public opinion. In fact, they've really strengthened most Americans' support for unfettered access to the real, unvarnished history of this country.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Heather McGhee, author of "The Sum Of Us." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and we're continuing our conversation this MLK Day with Heather McGhee about the economic and social costs of racism and a policy she argues could help build a more inclusive future. McGhee is the former president of Demos, a progressive think tank focused on democracy, the economy and racial justice. She's drafted legislation and testified before Congress on major policy efforts like debt-free college and voting rights protections. She's a contributor to NBC's "Meet The Press" and delivered a 2019 TED Talk called "Racism Has A Cost For Everyone." Her podcast "The Sum Of Us" extends the arguments of her book.
I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about some of the material ways we see the zero-sum lie. This month, the administration froze something like $10 billion in child care subsidies and cash assistance for low-income families, and this happened in - specifically in five Democratic-led states. The claim was fraud, even though there is no evidence that exists in many of those states that were impacted. The stated justification was a welfare scandal in Minnesota, which the president has used to attack Somali immigrants, even though most of those charged are U.S. citizens.
MCGHEE: That story is being used as an excuse to do something which has been a long-term project, which has been to shrink the commitments that governments make to everyday people in pursuit of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. And what they're trying to do is make parents who are struggling in California and New York to send their kids to affordable child care and to put food on the table resent Somali immigrants in Minnesota.
But, you know, as soon as I heard welfare fraud, I was reminded of Brett Favre - right? - who pushed Mississippi to get $77 million in funding that was supposed to go to the temporary assistance for needy families to his alma mater for sports facilities instead. He was personally paid over a million dollars from TANF welfare funds for speeches that he never made, right? You don't hear much about that story anymore because it doesn't fit the story that would have everyday folks blame struggling working-class people and, by extension, make them resentful of the very idea of welfare at all.
But we see drained-pool politics all over the agenda right now, right? We see the administration with the DOGE so-called department coming out early in its existence in January and saying, the government is too woke. We're going to freeze all federal grants and disbursements, sending chaos through the health care system, the hospital system. Cancer studies are being paused in their tracks and sent into chaos because of this war on medical research, this war on the idea that government has a place. And the sort of smokescreen for it, the emotional logic for it, is that our government has become too woke.
MOSLEY: You have this striking research in your book where you show that as the percentage of Black residents in a state increases, the likelihood that the state will expand Medicaid decreases. Just to bring this all together, like, everyone in that state is then caught in the crossfire.
MCGHEE: That's exactly right. When the United States Supreme Court used a states' rights legal theory - right? - whenever you hear a states' rights legal theory, you should be thinking about the long history of segregation and slavery. But this was the Roberts court who said, oh, no, the congressional mandate for expanding Medicaid so that, you know, real working-class people making, you know, $30,000, $40,000 a year would be able to have Medicaid coverage, said that that should be left to the states, right? It shouldn't be a federal 50-state requirement. And so, soon as that happened, you saw a new Mason-Dixon line of health care, where most of the former Confederate states refused to expand Medicaid and most of the former Union states said, yeah, of course, we will do this.
And so we also see today that we just had a fierce debate in Washington and a shutdown over allowing a key part of the Affordable Care Act to be dismantled. And so we're going to see premium increases for 22 million people. There's also has been passed into law Medicaid reductions of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years that could lead to coverage losses for 10 million Americans. And so this fight about health care has always been inflected with the core story of race and who belongs and who deserves.
Dr. King was right that injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman, but when it comes to systems in our society, if they're not universal, then it's going to leave someone out. And so, of course, the largest share of the uninsured in America are white people. Black and brown folks are disproportionately uninsured, but the largest group are white people. And yet, the majority of white voters had been opposed to the Affordable Care Act when it was passed and for a decade since.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is author and scholar Heather McGhee. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking to Heather McGhee, author of "The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together."
I want to get to some of the things that you call solutions. So the idea that when we reject zero-sum thinking, everyone gains, you call that the solidarity dividend. Where have you seen that working?
MCGHEE: As I journeyed across the country and found this common thread of racism in our politics and our policymaking underlying so many of our most vexing public problems - our lack of affordable health care, education that was too expensive, housing that was too expensive, our, you know, lack of clean air and water, inability to address global climate change, the holes in the bedrock of our democracy - all of this had this common thread of racism in our politics and our policymaking. And yet, I didn't get more pessimistic. In fact, I became more hopeful that if we just pull on this thread, progress on all of these other issues will come to be closer at hand.
And so the core insight is that when it comes down to it, we need each other. There are so many things that really matter. The most important things in life, I simply can't do on my own. Government is what helps us do things together that we simply can't do on our own, and in a diverse society, that means it's going to take multiracial collective action. And so I began to see that in communities where they had rejected zero-sum thinking and embraced cross-racial solidarity, to use collective action to get something, and I'm talking about real things - higher wages, cleaner air, better-funded schools - there would be a dividend, a real measurable gain, whether that was a campaign that was led by a Black and white team, Democrat and Republican, both bound together in their ability to say, I made a mistake and I was incarcerated. Those two men together led a campaign in Florida to restore voting rights to millions of people in Florida who had felony convictions, white, Black and brown, right?
MOSLEY: That was around 2020, 2021.
MCGHEE: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yep.
MCGHEE: In the book, "The Sum Of Us," I tell the story - very prescient today - of a town in the whitest state in the nation, in Maine, that had seen its best days go by, that was experiencing population loss and job loss, vacancies in the Main Street, factories closing. We all know this story. But of course, towns like that, what they really need is new people. And in the town of Lewiston, Maine, the new people who happened to come were mostly African refugees and immigrants who were, many of them, Somali people who came and helped breathe new life into that town. And its economic fortunes turned around because of the cross-racial solidarity that many white Mainers learn to have to rely on to be able to revive the town of Lewiston, Maine.
MOSLEY: You know, in this moment, with what we are dealing with in communities with immigrant populations, with ICE, I mean, I want to know what did those places have in common, particularly the town in Maine and in Florida? Is there actually a pattern to how multiracial coalitions actually get built and hold?
MCGHEE: It's such a good question. As I've traveled across the country, I've learned a few things. One, there is no substitute for organizing. And what does organizing really mean? We're seeing it happen all over the country right now - people who never considered themselves activists, who are feeling their moral sense be activated by the threat to their neighbors, by the terrifying sight of armed, masked men patrolling outside of schools. I'm talking about schoolteachers, hairdressers, neighbors who have said, I'm going to get on a WhatsApp or a Signal thread with my neighbors, and suddenly I know hundreds of people, and we have over the course of a week figured out how to protect the people in our community, how to take time to bring resources to a family that is afraid to leave their house because four of them are U.S. citizens, but one of them is not.
Those are the kinds of fundamental kind of activations of the very idea of citizenship. And I'm not talking about your status and your documentation. I'm talking about your willingness to be a neighbor, to be a participant in your community. That skill of being open to and also being able to connect with people in your community in pursuit of a common goal, that's organizing. There have been moments in our country when organizing was at an all-time high, when, you know, a quarter of the population participated in some kind of protest. We are getting back to that kind of era right now.
And I just want to say that the exact opposite of the us-versus-them rhetoric, the zero-sum lie, is something that Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King talked about, which is the beloved community. That was the promised land. That's where they wanted us to get to, was a place where activism and protest would sort of ignite a sense of shame and responsibility on the part of the white majority in the 1960s, but that ultimately we would get to a place where we all benefited.
MOSLEY: Can you talk about the weaponization of being called an activist in this moment? The administration is often using it as a dirty word as people step out into the streets. We are seeing that many are afraid for their lives, as they should be. You know, they're coming in direct contact with ICE and law enforcement.
MCGHEE: This is a very old tactic that is used by people in power who are trying to concentrate power in their own hands and who don't want to see millions of people exercise their fundamental rights to dissent, to protest and then, of course, to vote. Last year, a national survey of 500 political scientists found that the U.S. was in the process of slipping from democracy into a form of authoritarianism, right? The benchmarks of authoritarianism - from persecuting political opponents and using the military to dominate civilians, to controlling the media and defying the courts - right? - that's precisely how the government was - is beginning to function in this administration.
And so if you think about it, what you want in that kind of a society, if you are in power, is to make everyday people - the only people who actually have the power, as long as there are still elections, to release your grip on power - is for them to be afraid, for them to think that it is dangerous and socially undesirable to speak out and be active. I mean, the good news is, here, that just doesn't cut it. It's never cut it in this country that has been made better generation after generation because of activism. And, you know, I don't think that this administration is very credible when one of its very first acts was to pardon thousands of violent activists who took part in January 6.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is Heather McGhee, author of "The Sum Of Us." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking to Heather McGhee, author of "The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together."
Heather, for white Americans who hear your argument, you know, and they think, because they may believe in the zero-sum lie, that this sounds like I'm being asked to give up something, what do you say to them? And for Black Americans too, and others who are skeptical that solidarity will ever be reciprocated, what do you say to them?
MCGHEE: You know, racial and economic inequality costs our country so much. The economists at Citigroup found that the Black-white economic divide had cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion over the course of 20 years. And it makes sense, right? If you think about it, if you've got so many of your players sidelined due to debt, discrimination, disadvantage, they can't be on the field scoring points for your team. And of course, the zero-sum lie tells folks we're not all on the same team. But that's just not true. We are in an interconnected economy.
Today, the average Black college graduate has less household wealth than the average white high-school dropout. I'm going to say that again. If you are a white high-school dropout, you are likely to have more household wealth - savings, assets, stocks and bonds, inheritances - than a Black college graduate, and that's not because of something the Black college graduate did wrong. That is because of the direct history of redlining and discrimination that has made that Black college graduate sort of inherit debt and wealth poverty instead of inherit wealth.
And so think about our society and what it would be if that Black college graduate, instead of spending the first decade of her career trying to get out from a mountain of debt, was actually able to go right into the marketplace and pioneer an invention that would solve a big problem in our society, would be able to go into public service at a hospital as a physician and be the person who operated on you or your family member, right? Even the very, in some quarters, controversial idea of reparations, which feels like exactly a zero sum to some people, I don't see it as zero-sum. I don't see it as a taking from one group and giving to another. I don't see it as an admission of guilt by white Americans. I see it as seed capital for the nation that we're becoming. And I think that when we look at what Black Americans have contributed to our society without that cushion of wealth, we have to see that we could all benefit.
I also think it's important for our democracy for us to live in a society where if government harms you, they make it right. If seven people on a city council vote to take your family's land, and 50 years later, a hundred years later, those seven people are no longer alive, that doesn't mean that your descendants will still suffer the consequences of that for all time and there'll be no apology and no repair. Thankfully, we are in an era, despite this administration, when we're starting to see progress.
MOSLEY: We're starting to see progress, but then let's talk about the attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. ProPublica even published this blistering investigation about it over the summer of who's being fired with these DEI purges. Nearly 80% are nonwhite. Most of them are Black women, women who spent decades in public service, who took an oath, who built careers. Now all gone. When you began to see this pattern, what did you feel? And I want to ask that and particularly because you are still so optimistic and feeling that we are still moving in a direction toward progress when right now it feels pretty dire for a significant percentage of the population.
MCGHEE: I want to be very clear that this administration has been brutal in its attacks on the public good, and specifically its attacks on people of color in public service and, disproportionately, Black women. And you're exactly right. At the same time, this is so obviously folks who are holding on white-knuckled to a tiny idea of we the people, and they're denying the beauty of what we are becoming as we become a country with no dominant racial majority, as we become a country that has owned up to and understood our true history. People don't unsee what they saw in the summer of the uprisings in the wake of George Floyd's murder. People don't unsee what they saw when ICE killed Renee Good.
This is a country that is in fact, just as it has always been, warring between a faction that wants to keep wealth and power concentrated in its hands and a diverse, striving, agitating, often activist, multiracial population that is trying to figure out who they are to one another. But I think that the reason why the attacks have been so brutal and overreaching is because we are so close to a place where there is an enduring multiracial governing majority that wants this country to live up to the values that we were taught it was founded on and is ready to do the work to actually make it so.
MOSLEY: You know, I hate this question I'm about to ask you, but I also really love it. I mentioned how Dr. King said real change requires an honest diagnosis. If you could sit with him today, what would you tell him about where we are?
MCGHEE: I'm sorry, Tonya. You saying that was just very moving because I pictured myself getting a chance to be with him, and that's a powerful thing. Dr. King, in his very short time on this planet, gave us so much and was such a prophet. I don't think he would be surprised about where we are because he was a student of history and he knew that the arc of the moral universe was long and that it bends towards justice, but he also knew that it snaps back sometimes. And he also knew that the very narrow, self-interested elite was always going to try to sabotage progress.
I think he would be proud of who Black people are today and what we've accomplished, what we've contributed to the world. I think he would be disgusted by the enduring inequalities of our - in our society that have grown so much since his time. But so much of what he spoke about was so prescient. He began in the later part of his activism to really focus on the ills of capitalism and the ills of militarism, racial and economic inequality. And of course, those ills are very much at the heart of what is plaguing us in our society today, from the takeover of Venezuela with a motivation of controlling oil resources, and no care for the people who live there and have been in desperation for so long, to the militarization of our communities, to the dehumanization of immigrants and people of color in the rhetoric that this regime has espoused. He wouldn't be surprised by it.
He would be inspired by the activism that is happening today. But I do think that for somebody who saw so much progress in such a short time, he would be impatient for us. He would say that the - as he did say in 1967 - the beloved community is a realistic vision of an achievable society, one in which problems and conflicts exist but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. And I think he would say, why haven't we gotten there? Why are so many people still willing to believe the zero-sum lie? And I think he would have a lot to say to the current White House.
MOSLEY: Heather McGhee, I really appreciate this conversation and you. Thank you so much.
MCGHEE: Thank you, Tonya. Thank you for having me on this really sacred day. I'm so grateful.
MOSLEY: Heather McGhee is the author of "The Sum Of Us."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. On the day she married her husband, Salman Rushdie, her longtime best friend died unexpectedly. Eleven months later, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while being interviewed on stage. We'll talk about that year, which she describes in her new memoir, "The Flower Bearers." I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF CANNONBALL ADDERLEY'S "WALK TALL/MERCY, MERCY, MERCY")
MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF CANNONBALL ADDERLEY'S "WALK TALL/MERCY, MERCY, MERCY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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