FREE FOR ALL: Heather McGhee on reparations as "seed capital for the nation that we are becoming"
The author and activist on why paying America's debts benefits everyone, and how Democrats must learn to make meaning for voters if they're going to compete with Donald Trump
Author, activist, and policy wonk Heather McGhee has argued brilliantly that fighting racism benefits all Americans, because racism has cost all Americans so much.
In her book The Sum of Us, McGhee details how American leaders have chosen to deprive all Americans of a whole range of public goods rather than extend them to Black people. She’s famously called this “drained-pool politics” (after how towns across America abandoned public pools in the 1950s and 1960s rather than open them to Black citizens), and understanding it is central to her argument that taking responsibility for old debts and finally providing benefits due Black Americans takes nothing away from white Americans. Rather, it’s the first step toward economic justice for all.
We talked to McGhee following the launch of the New York State Reparations Commission, and she spelled out her vision for what a just economy could look like and how reparations would be an investment in the future: “seed capital for the nation we are becoming.” She also made the case that, to realize multiracial democracy, the Democratic Party needs to find a new generation of leaders who can help people make meaning out of their lives and compete with figures like Trump, who may not have actual policy solutions but are speaking deftly to the anxieties of an age of transition.
We urge you to read our full conversation, and we promise that once you do, you will never think of the issue of reparations the same way again.
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Your book makes such a compelling case that addressing racism is not a zero-sum game. Fighting racism benefits white people also. New York, as you know, just launched a Reparations Commission, and I was just thinking that, probably, of all the remedies out there, it's the one most perceived as zero-sum. So I wonder how you see and situate the growing movement toward reparations in the context of the tension between zero-sum and non-zero-sum thinking on race.
Reparations are not zero-sum. I think of reparations as seed capital for the nation that we are becoming. We’ve gone so far in this country on the backs of the descendants of a stolen people who’ve contributed unbelievable amounts to this country's prosperity and ingenuity and culture and intellectual life, and we've done so as Black people have faced every possible constraint and barrier.
It is so important for economic reasons for this community, which is an underinvested asset in this country, to have the kind of wealth cushion that turns people's dreams and aspirations into reality. It’s so important for our democracy for everyone to know that they live in a society where when government harms you, they make it right. There’s no sense that, “Oh, time has passed, and so the seven members of the city council that voted to take your family's land are no longer with us, and therefore you will continue to suffer the consequences of that for all time, and there will be no apology and there will be no repair.”
That’s not the kind of society we want to live in. It’s not the kind of society that we created for Japanese Americans, that was created for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. That is not the kind of society that upholds human rights and equal protection under the law. I also think that our country is a can-do country, and there has been this tremendous shift in public will and recognition that the mythology we've been sold about American innocence was a lie. I spend most of my time, multiple days a week, on the road traveling across the country talking to audiences about these issues. They’re in central Pennsylvania and central Missouri and many, many red and purple communities, and there is a recognition that we need to do better.
But this country is a country of people who want an app for fixing something. We’ve created, as a racial justice movement, more awareness and agreement that harms have been done. Americans want to say, “OK, so what do we do now? How do we fix it? How do we keep moving towards the future?” So I didn't originally write a ton about reparations in the book. In my career as an economic policy advocate, I focused a lot on the racial wealth gap, but the Overton window was not yet open on reparations. But it’s clear to me now from the past three years that I’ve spent on the road that there is a grassroots movement for reparations and, even beyond that, a curiosity about the possibility of reparations, largely in white communities, that is about wanting to overcome and wanting to be the country that lives up to the myth that we were sold.
I love how you relate it to this idea of the seed capital for dreams coming true. But with this issue of reparations, and also on issues like climate, the opposition is so good at defining them in terms of what will be taken away from you. Often, those of us who want these things are not equally and oppositely good at narrating the gains — so that, on climate for example, people don’t see a picture of themselves as being able to breathe freely and drink water without anxiety, but they can vividly imagine not being able to eat beef or drive a car.
Similarly, on reparations, “what is being taken” has been so weaponized and ginned up. But you're talking about seed capital for dreams. If this were to happen in a big way, to go well beyond a commission exploring it, start to paint a picture of an America with reparations, with that cushion of Black wealth. What does it start to look like? What starts to happen around you? What's the crackle and pop of that America?
It’s an America where there are Black Wall Streets and Rosewoods. It’s an America where Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard is not the most disinvested, boarded-up block in your community, but rather is a place where there are thriving Black businesses and schools and places of worship.
Today you have a Black college graduate who has done everything she’s been told to do by society, she’s gone to college, she's got a job, she’s got a decent income, and yet because of history, because of explicitly and deliberately racist policies in her family's past, she has less household wealth than the average white high-school dropout.
Imagine instead that Black college graduate could be the doctor that operates on your kid, the next person to invent the greatest thing, who solves some of the big challenges of our time, who unlocks the future — if instead of being held back by being underwater financially because of decisions not of her own making, she’s got the resources to be able to contribute to her God-given potential.
It’s so important that we articulate the cost to everyone of a society with this degree of racial economic inequality, where there are whole neighborhoods that have been strategically disinvested, that have been shot through with highways that didn’t just make those places unwalkable and unlivable, but also stole wealth from their business owners and landowners.
So those communities are now no-go zones for the rest of the society. They’re places with high levels of crime. They're places with high levels of toxic pollution. They’re places you want to pay $40,000 more, $100,000 more, for a house to get out of because the schools are disinvested and are still experiencing the costs of that racism.
So the freedom that would come for every American in knowing that there is not a gaping wound of injustice and — I'll be blunt — guilt and also fear, as it's experienced for most people who are not Black, is, I think, worth fighting for.
There’s obviously the economic story, the economic development story, and of course, when we talk about reparations, we are talking about money. But I also think that it is really essential for a thriving democracy to be the kind of society that repairs its harms. This is a great enough and grown-up enough country to stop lying to itself and to take responsibility.
I also always like to challenge the idea of reparations as taking. Because the picture that the right wing paints about reparations is that the government will come to a white homeowner's door, a white taxpayer's door, and ask them to write a check to their nearest Black neighbor, that this is money coming from white people going to Black people, that it's a moral taking, that it is something that white people, morally, are saying they owe to Black people. And that’s just not true.
The entity that did the discriminating — that created the Black codes and the redlining and the system of slavery and the systems of violent policing and eminent domain and urban renewal — all of that was done by a governmental entity. So the entity that owes is the government, and that is a government that all of us have paid into and will continue to pay into. Reparations is no more a taking from white people than the creation of another drone or fighter jet is a taking from white people, than the post office is a taking from white people. So that's another piece of the story that I think is very important that we push back on.
Switching gears, I want to ask you about something that’s been a focus of ours in the newsletter for 2024, which is this notion that we have as a country — and I think this is true of other countries, also — really failed at what I would call change management for people, which is to say that we’re much better at changing things than we are at helping people adapt to the things we've changed.
I think if you take a 50-year view, America has lived through a ton of change in gender norms, in family structure, in race and demographics, technology, the economic relationship with China, and climate change hovering over it all. I often feel like progressive forces are a little bit oblivious to how even if many of these are changes we want, they’re hard on people. Just because change is good doesn't mean it's not hard.
I wonder how you think about that notion of a failure of change management and what it would look like for progressives to take the problem of coping with change seriously.
I really like that idea. I do think that the anxiety of contemporary life is the most important factor in understanding our authoritarian politics, in understanding our politics in general, our politics on the left and right. I think perhaps that some of the elitism charge that gets leveled at Democratic politicians and progressives in general may have to do with this.
I’m always skeptical of the characterization that Democratic politicians and progressives actually look down their noses at people who don’t agree with them and that your everyday person in a rural community actually experiences that, that there’s some conversation or actual experience that impacts their lives that makes them think, “I'm going to be fine with torching the planet because I think that somebody looks down on me that I’ve never actually met.”
This tracks with economic insecurity as well as identity insecurity. I do think that there is a comfort level with change and with the changes that our society has wrought that many progressives and Democratic politicians have in common with one another and that is not shared by young people, people in disinvested urban communities who continue to see the economic changes that leave them behind, or people in rural areas or people whose conservative ways of life are no longer reflected in the cultural forefront, the cultural leading edge.
So what would that look like? That's a harder question because having leaders help people manage change requires first a relationship between leaders and people that doesn’t exist outside of Trumpism right now.
Wait. You mean that only Donald Trump has forged those kind of relationships?
Yes. I think that Trump is the best example of a leader having the kind of relationship where he’s making meaning out of life for people.
I deeply agree with that, but it’s also such an insane sentence to hear out loud.
I know, right? I know. I know.
But it's so important. It’s so important that you say that because who would imagine that this guy has done that? But it is true. Can you just unspool that a little bit because I want people to really understand this point?
So Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story.
Donald Trump actually does all those things for his people. Frankly, Donald Trump may do those things for us, too, just in opposition. We are a celebrity culture. We are a culture where individuals use cultural icons to fill in the gaps in their lives and knit together a sense of identity, and Obama did that for us.
You would wear Obama gear, and you would signify to people who you were and who you were with and what your version of America was, and it made you feel better about it. You went to the rallies and it was a religious experience, and that’s just at the basic level of comparing different presidential candidates.
But there’s also something deeper, of course, that Trump and Trumpism does, which is that he’s more than a presidential candidate. Because he’s been a figure in reality TV — our other big significant institution in this country — he really offers to those who identify with him a way to understand to whom they belong, who is Other, who’s against them, who’s with them, and what any individual phenomenon that comes through the news or through their lives — whether the closing of a factory, the war in the Middle East, or Taylor Swift — means to them.
Of course, it’s not just Donald Trump. It is the right-wing media ecosystem that both created Donald Trump and has been shaped by his peccadilloes, but it’s real. It’s religious, it’s a boom, it's galvanizing. I think that you can’t say, “Oh, our leaders should help people manage change,” because it sounds so strange to even think that Joe Biden could help us manage our anxiety about relationships and family.
But Michelle Obama does. She literally does, right? She literally gives us advice in a less showman-like way than Trump does because she just actually says the words and has taken an Oprah-like place in the lives of many people. But she offers advice, and she and her marriage and her family provide a model that is aspirational. I think that we have to understand that to lead effectively, you have to really be in people’s lives in a way that helps them make meaning out of everyday life.
I love that so much. Getting beyond this year and these two candidates, I wonder if an implication of what you’re saying is that, in the future, the model of who will make a compelling Democratic candidate, a compelling alternative to American fascism, may start to look like a different profile. It may start to look like a different type of person, if the skills you’re talking about are centered.
I think they have to be. We’re in the attention economy. So to be able to get people's attention, capture their imaginations, and pull their focus, and, therefore, get their loyalty — and I say this with great grief as a policy wonk — I don’t think it’s just a policy agenda. It is a personality. What’s necessary is a personality. What’s necessary is an understanding of the need, because of how much change is happening, because of how much information is incoming through our phones every minute, because of how fractured our media landscape is.
Leaders need to understand how to be a framework for people to filter the world through and a cultural home where people feel safe and protected. I understand that, because Trump and Modi and others are that right now more effectively than anybody else, and because there’s something scary about the idea of that kind of lionization, progressives might be uncomfortable with it. But that’s why I mentioned Obama and I’d also mention Bernie and other people who have broken through to signify more than just a policy agenda, but rather an identity and an aspirational identity. We can access that.
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