Poured Over: Heather McGhee on The Sum of Us

“I wrote The Sum of Us in the hopes that people would read it together, that people from all walks of life, different backgrounds, whether they’re connected by something, a community, a school, a workplace, would pick it up and find for each person, a way into the story of America’s troubled history with racism, and then a way out together.” Trained as a lawyer, an expert in economic and social policy, Heather McGhee also excels at getting Americans to tell their stories — and look for solutions. Her urgent, important book, The Sum of Us is just out in paperback and she joins us on the show to talk about The Zero-Sum Hierarchy, The American Dream and other stories (and stereotypes) we tell ourselves, where we can go from here, the writers who inspire her, and more. Featured Books: The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with bonus episodes on occasional Saturdays).

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Heather McGhee, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is out in paperback. Which is why we asked you to join us on the show, because we want to keep this conversation going. Your book was a New York Times bestseller for nine weeks in hardcover. But now you’ve just heard that the paperback has been picked up in a couple of different places as a common read. Can we talk about that, before we dive into the bigger conversation?

Heather McGhee: I mean, honestly, it’s a dream come true. I wrote the some of us in the hopes that people would read it together, right, that people from all walks of life, different backgrounds, whether they’re connected by something, a community, a school, a workplace, would pick it up and find for each person, a way into the story of America’s troubled history with racism, and then a way out together. And so the City University of New York, and Occidental College and Wesleyan and now I just learned University of Arkansas, a historically black college, all of these different types of schools are picking it up as common reads, there’s five towns in New York State that are doing it. And that makes me so so so happy.

B&N: Let’s talk about the title of the book for a second, The Sum of Us.

HM: I had a whole bunch of different possible titles for the book, as I was working on the draft and the proposal and all of that none of them worked. The first title was linked fate, which is accurate, right? I’m basically saying that ultimately, our fates are linked. They’re tied together, you know, we are part of a common society here. And any racist poison is first consumed by its concocted, right, there’s just only so much we can have a system of exploitation and not have it ultimately reach all of us. So linked fate made sense, but was a little dry. And I chose the some of us in the end, because one of the first insights that I had in the course of my journey that I took to write the book was a whole body of research. And I went and visited the professors who really lead in this area, who told me that one of our biggest problems in society is that we have this mental model that we’re trapped in a zero sum game, the idea that there’s a fixed pie of well being and if I get a bigger slice, you must get a smaller one $1 more in my pocket must mean $1 less than yours. As a person with an economic policy background. I know that’s not true, right? I know, that’s not how the economy works. In an economy. It’s more like a game. And we want all of our players on the field scoring points for our team. We don’t want anyone sidelined due to debt or discrimination and disadvantage. But the zero sum lie tells many people, we’re not all on the same team. So we should be rooting against one another.

B&N: McKinsey has come out and said that the racial wealth gap costs us all of us roughly one and a half trillion dollars right now. And per year, and Citibank has come out and said, This is going to cost us $16 trillion over the next 20 years, there are physical fixed costs to the racial wealth gap. And yet this myth of the zero sum persists.

HM: Yeah, I spent nearly 20 years of economic policies studying our big problems in the American economy, poring over data and statistics trying to craft evidence based solutions to some of those big head scratchers about the American economy. Why is it become so hard to get a good job and hold on to one? Why is it that health care so unaffordable? And child care and housing? Why is it that our infrastructure, which used to be the envy of the world now gets a deep plus from the American Society of Civil Engineers? What’s wrong with American prosperity? When did we turn the lights out on the American dream and why? Those are questions that guided me, I wasn’t looking for a racial story, I was looking for an economic story. And in the end, what I discovered was that the economic data wasn’t telling me enough about why it is we can’t seem to have nice things in America because pure economics would say we should. It is great investment to make sure that college is affordable. It is great investment to make sure that every kid has high quality childcare and education. It’s a great investment to invest in early childhood and childcare. It benefits us $4 for every dollar invested. And as you said, the racial economic divide, which was created by public policy is costing us we don’t have all of our best players on the field scoring points for our team. And yet, the zero sum says we’re not all on the same team. And that’s why I set out on the journey. I literally logged in I don’t even know how many miles I went from California to Mississippi to Maine and back again multiple times, talking to different kinds of people, finding stories, honestly of white people whose dreams have been shattered because of systems that were set up at first to exploit people of color. But that once you create a system of exploitation, guided by that zero sum lie, and so it’s not going to be the optimal system. It’s really hard for anyone to go unscathed.

B&N: You write in The Sum of Us that everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. I mean, we have all Americans from all different backgrounds have internalized the stories of what success is, what the American Dream is supposed to be how we’re supposed to get there. So how then do we come together and start to counter those narratives that empirically are not true? We have the data and actually you include quite a lot of data in this book. And you have a very detailed note section. I think it’s about 102 pages.

HM:I think it’s 130 something. There’s a lot of receipts.

B&N: The data is there, the data and the data doesn’t lie.

HM: Yeah, you know, what I found the most inspiring was the people I met, in my journey, the story of a young woman named Bridget, white woman, Irish American descent, top of her class in high school. Ultimately, her family couldn’t make ends meet. And so she couldn’t afford to go to college, she had to go to work. And 20 years later, she’s stuck in a dead end job making minimum wage her and her husband, three kids, they’re always living on the edge, because of that story that you mentioned, the story of bootstraps, the story that we’re all supposed to make it on our own, she thought this was just the best that she could do. And she blamed herself. She also believed the story that was very predominant in her community. And in the media, she was consuming that it was immigrants fault, right, that they were taking her jobs. And it wasn’t until someone one of her co workers came and said, Don’t you think we ought to be able to make a living wage and have health care, and she said to her, I think we should make $15 Now, now, Bridget was only making like 725 at the time. And so she said, they’re never gonna pay people like us $15 an hour, but she went to the first organizing meeting anyway. And it was there in a basement that she heard a Latina woman come up and talk about her own life, being trapped in an apartment with three kids and bad plumbing, and never seeing a way out for herself. And as Bridget told me, she said, You know, I saw myself in her for the first time. And I realized that it wasn’t about us versus them that we’ve all got to come up together. And the only way we’re gonna have the power to make them pay us more for our work is if we come together. And it was that realization that we’ve been sold a bill of goods, that it’s all about individual work and effort, and there’s nothing that we can do together. And that in fact, we should resent and blame our neighbor and compete with our neighbor as opposed to find that we have common problems with our neighbor. And maybe we have common solutions. That transformation is the story that gives me so much hope.

B&N: When did talking about class change into this conversation about racial resentment, and zero sum?

HM: You know, in the book, I tell the story of a real shift that happened in American history. We used to be the country that invented the American dream, right? Obviously, right? It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t because people were smarter or worked harder. It was because of this mindset in the country that was born out of the lessons of the first Gilded Age of inequality. It was born out of the crucible of the Great Depression, it was this sort of New Deal, public goods ethos, this spirit that said, You know what, we’re all going to roll up our sleeves and the government and businesses and workers, we are all going to invest in the public good. And that public goods ethos was reflected in things like social security for the elderly write things like a massive investment of public money in housing that workers could afford. And the idea that working class people could own a home with this government subsidized mortgage that allowed them to pay off a home over time and build an intergenerational asset that was unprecedented it and it helped create the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And yet, virtually everything I just described all those public goods from Social Security to the to the GI Bill to all of the housing subsidies to this one simple phenomenon, which is really the metaphor at the heart of the book, which is a public good, that wasn’t economic, but it was just recreational the idea of publicly funded swimming pools, these grand resort style pools that could hold 1000s of swimmers that we used to have nearly 2000 Dev in the country as part of this public goods sort of building boom, all of that was racially segregated are for whites only in one way or another. The great American dream of homeownership was a gift of the American government and it was based on the never substance Shadid idea that Black people would be terrible credit risks. And so the government drew maps of the entire country and drew red do not lend lines around all the so called Negro areas that was a massive subsidy only to create a white middle class and lock out black families. Social Security for the elderly, excluded the two big job categories that most Black workers were in, in a compromise with the southern delegation to Congress, even the GI Bill was race neutral on its face. But because the benefits went through segregated housing and education sectors, so many Black GIs were left out. And the story of the public swimming pool for me was just this perfect metaphor. I went to Montgomery, Alabama I walked the grounds of Oak Park, this beautiful park that used to have 1000 plus person swimming pool that was segregated. And when in the civil rights movement, Black families were finally able to win court orders that said, hey, you know, these are Black families tax dollars that are funding these public goods to and in the case of the pools, their kids should be able to swim to many towns and cities, including Montgomery, decided to drain their public pools, rather than integrate them. In montgomery, they kept the entire Parks and Recreation Department of the city closed for 10 years, rather than integrated. The story of the train pool helped explain how it was that this country went from really supporting the idea that the government had a right and responsibility to ensure sort of a decent standard of living and quality of life for its people to this idea that has not worked out economically, that we’re all on our own, and that corporations imperatives should control government decisions, and that we turn away from collective problem solving, collective action and things like government and labor unions. The formula, frankly, that built the great American middle class, there was a really radical shift away from that formula. Once the government went from the one printing the signs that said whites only and drawing the maps that said no Blacks can get mortgages to being the one that said, You know what, we need to have civil rights. And that was really a break in our history. And the majority of white Americans change their politics after the Civil Rights Movement. You know, Lyndon Johnson, after signing the civil rights and voting rights act, would become the last Democrat running for president to win the majority of white voters to this day. And I don’t say that for partisan reasons, but just to show that the sort of party of the New Deal lost the main beneficiaries of the New Deal, after it also became the party of civil rights.

B&N: And Johnson knew that when he was signing that legislation, I mean, he said point blank, we are now going to lose the South for at least a generation.

HM: He said the South he didn’t know it was the majority of white people period. It was so important to me to go into the history of how we got here economically, why it is that we have so much wealth in this country, but the people who produce that wealth workers are getting less and less of it. Why it is that we don’t have a well funded public school in every neighborhood why we went from free colleges at the state schools to a trillion and a half dollars in student loan debt, all of that for me. The evidence shows that it’s drained pool politics at its core. But at the same time, I also found so many reasons to be optimistic. It was almost like once I learned that the fingerprints of racism in our politics and our policymaking, we’re on all of these different issues that seem disconnected health care workers rights college, even our inability to have great solutions for the global climate crisis. Once I saw the fingerprints of racism on all of it, it made it almost simpler to just make progress if we would just reject this old story that isn’t serving us anymore. The zero sum story that we’re not all on the same team, the zero sum story that is really being sold by a self interested elite to millions of white people in America. Not all of course, but but many that says the greatest thing you have to fear is your black or brown neighbor, even though we know who’s actually got the power to write the rules about our economy, right? It’s not immigrants and meatpacking plants and you know, black women in factories, right? It’s the boss right? And the boss is the one who is so often benefiting when we are fighting with one another instead of fighting for one another.

B&N: And coming back to this theme of storytelling and the stories we tell ourselves. The stories were told about who we are. I mean, if you look at the attacks that are happening on things like the 1619 project, or teaching American history in public schools, it’s an attack on who gets to tell the story. And there are multiple inputs no one is saying, you know, there’s only one version, we’re just saying your versions incomplete. And this and even when it’s things like you know, Johnson knowing to a certain extent what he was doing, there are people who take refuge in that statement. because they’re saying, Well, I’m in Ohio, or I’m in the Northeast. And I mean, I grew up in Massachusetts, and there are plenty of people who believe stories about how they should be doing that don’t actually intersect with reality.

HM: Yeah, I’m reminded of a memory I recount in the book. I’m from the south side of Chicago. But when I was in seventh grade, I went away to boarding school in rural entirely way, Western Massachusetts, I was one of a handful of kids of color. It was there, I first heard this expression about being socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. And I remember I was in the classroom and a little girl, you know, raised her hand and said, my family socially liberal, but fiscally conservative, and I felt like everybody in the classroom, their heads nodded. And it was the first time I heard that formulation. And it struck me as strange was like, Okay, I wrote it down. It was like a note, okay, something about this new world I’m in this is the way you’re supposed to be. 20 years later, here, I’m working in economic policy and doing the math and realizing that for the cost of the Trump tax cuts, we could have eliminated child poverty in America, right, that there’s something about this desire to say I’m socially liberal, which says, you know, I’m on the right side of history, I’m moral, right, I would never harm anybody. But I like taxes to be low, I don’t want to invest in the public good. And I increasingly found it hard to square that. In the book, I talked with lots of people of all backgrounds who were coming up against the moral quandary of the politics that says, we don’t need to invest in each other. Rich people should always have more money. But poor people don’t need $1 More, whether in wages or in welfare, right? There’s something about it, that is not true to the American creed, and to our best days. And there’s something about it that that really has to do with race, and this racialized view that there’s a hierarchy of human value in some groups of people are simply better than others. But my point in the some of us is that racism is so dysfunctional, and so pervasive in our politics and our policymaking. I’m not really talking about the interpersonal stuff. Here. I’m talking about structural racism and the kinds of racism that is waged for campaign wins in politics that ultimately ends up making us drain the pool. And therefore it destroys a public good and public will for a better life for everyone.

B&N: The signing of the Civil Rights legislation isn’t the only sort of pivot point. For a lot of white Americans. The financial crisis of 2008 plays a role in this book and a very significant role. At one point, you’re also saying, wealth is where history shows up in your wallet. And I think housing is possibly the best example for most people to understand what you’re talking about economic policy is not just numbers on a screen, it’s not just an EC wanna one textbook from freshman year, it is in fact, the stuff that impacts you regularly. So can we just talk about the financial crisis of oh eight, and the results of that, and you have a great story about a woman who ultimately was able to fight back and lead her community and she had not expected to be that person. But once again, this comes back to people taking action.

HM: So this is the chapter that’s nearest and dearest to my heart, because it’s the issue of financial regulation and lending and the credit markets was the issue that I worked on for the first half of my career and and that gave me the front row seat to the slow and totally predictable run up to what would become the great financial crash of 2008. The great recession in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s. We saw what was going on, but it was only happening in certain neighborhoods, but it being the creation of these new exotic loans that won’t just simple 30 year fixed rate mortgages, but that had exploding interest rates and balloon payments and prepayment penalties and super high interest rates. And it didn’t matter what your credit was those what are called subprime loans, were first being developed and tested out on the neighborhoods that were the least protected and the least respected, mostly black and brown homeowner neighborhoods, like the one in Wilmington, where the Tomlins now senior Black couple, she was a school teacher, he was an auto mechanic, they had scrimped and saved and bought their first home and then they were aggressively marketed and defrauded and lied to about the terms of a loan that could have cost them their house. And that formula of a credit worthy black family who was already a homeowner being sold alone that was more expensive and with worse terms than they qualified for happened all across the country. And why I say that racism caused the financial crisis is that it’s clear, right, the Feds finally ended up finding and disciplining most of the major banks for explicitly discriminatory lending, right. The majority of homeowners who got these toxic loans in the run up to the crisis had good credit, the majority were already homeowners, right? It was just wealth stripping, plain and simple. And I was there in so many of these meetings with regulators and lenders saying there’s a quiet crisis happening in certain neighborhoods where these loans are leading to foreclosure. And, honestly, the racial stereotype that Black people are just bad with money, the same one that created the redlining. With the invention of the mortgage market, the assumption never substantiated that black people would be bad credit risks, it allowed that stereotype to blind them from the data we were presenting. And it meant that the sort of machine of greed was allowed to grow unchecked, and then spread out into the wider and wider term mortgage market to the point where guess by 2007, it was massive speculation and people were flipping houses. But that happened at the end, in the beginning, when it could have been stopped. It was mostly people like Janice and Isaiah Tomlin. And their story moves me to tears, the story of so many black homeowners who finally were allowed to have that piece of the American dream, and did it you know, starting so many miles back from the finish line, because we’d already had four generations of white families getting subsidized no down payment, GI Bill loans, and VA loans and other kinds of subsidized mortgages that were explicitly not available to black families. And then this toxic combination of racism and greed that went ignored by the people with the power to stop it were mostly white and mostly very distant from the people like the Tomlins. And so stereotypes really stopped them from taking action when we could have prevented what would become the worst economic calamity in our history.

B&N: Stereotypes are also deeply cynical and manipulative, you talk about too where racism is deployed, strategically, it can be literally strategically useful. And a good example is when the ACA was being rolled out. And there were states that just refused to expand Medicaid. We see this again and again, where voters and states state governments make decisions that are not good for the people who live there, simply because they want to stick to a storyline that, in fact, isn’t true.

HM: Our inability as a country to have affordable health care for everyone is a huge problem. And it’s a huge head scratcher. Right? Why are so many of our peer economies able to figure this out, they spend a fraction of what we do and get better results and the majority of people who left health insurance in this country white, and yet, from the very first time in history, when Harry Truman first proposed a national health insurance plan. It was the segregationist Dixiecrat caucus in his party that said that national health insurance would be a blow to Jim Crow couldn’t have a quality in health care. And so they refused to go along with him. That was in the 40s. Finally, the first black president of the United States is able to sign a bill into law, one of the centerpieces of which is expanding Medicaid, so that working class people janitors, physician’s assistants, childcare workers, homecare workers, construction workers, people who work in small business can get the right to be able to afford to see a doctor and the Supreme Court and uses a state’s rights, legal theory, right to bring back this old kind of segregationist logic and says, You know what, federal government doesn’t have the right to expand Medicaid in all 50 states, we’re going to leave it to the states. And then you have this new Mason Dixon Line where most of the former Confederate states refused to expand Medicaid to allow working class people to be able to afford health insurance. And the research shows that the higher population of black people there are in a state that still has a white kind of power structure, the more likely they were to refuse to expand Medicaid. And there was a sense, I talked to folks in Texas, the state with the highest uninsured, where there’s a real crisis rural hospitals closing because there’s so many uninsured people on so much uncovered care where you have millions of white Americans in Texas who are going without Medicaid expansion, and it’s costing the whole state 26 hospitals closed over the period of a handful of years and they’re mostly in rural white conservative areas. And I talked to a hospital lobbyist there who’s a good old boy who said, you know, if we had expanded Medicaid, it would save these hospitals and the jobs that go with them, there’s just this political refusal because Medicaid or Obamacare, it’s associated in the white political imagination with Black people. And there’s this zero sum sense that if government is on the side of the other, then we should not have it, even if it might help me and my family.

B&N: Part of what’s so important about your book is that all of these conversations, or all of these details are put together in one place, and that we have an opportunity to really sit with them. You mentioned it earlier in this conversation where you are optimistic where you are hopeful. There’s a great story that you have about the Somali immigrant community in Maine, and I went to college in Maine. So I know Maine reasonably well.

HM: It is the whitest state in the nation.

B&N: It is but here’s this community that has become part of the larger whole.

HM: Yeah, that story of what they call a dying Milltown right, of which there are so many in the country in the whitest state in the country in Maine, where I went and walked the main street, right. And it’s clear, right, the best days of this town are behind it, right? You’ve got these boarded up stores. And yet, Main Street comes alive. And there are these shops with these brightly colored things in the window. And there’s music spilling out and you’re in the part of the main street that they call now a little Mogadishu because through an accident of history, a depopulating, you know, semi rural town in Maine, started to get an influx of new people. And I talked to the town administrator who said, that is the ticket to get new people, that’s when you can start to lure businesses back. And that’s what was needed. Now the thing is, those new people were mostly African Muslim, refugees and immigrants, right? The exact opposite people from virtually all measures of the people who had been in this town for so long, and yet many of them I tell the stories of a woman named Cecile, a guy named Bruce. White folks who just opened their hearts out of a sense of solidarity. The story of Lewiston, Maine, is a story of politics being what politics is of the mayor and the governor were anti immigrant and had this harsh anti immigrant rhetoric and actually connected it to welfare said, you know, all these immigrants are coming in and they’re getting on welfare, the old zero sum story, right. And so that’s why we’ve got to cut welfare. And by the way, we’ve got to cut taxes on the wealthy people too. And yet, this community formed these true bonds, these human to human bonds, and then ultimately, taking it back to health care became the backbone of a multiracial coalition that was able to win the first in this country ballot initiative, overturning the governor’s five time veto of Medicaid expansion. So that working class Mainers could could afford to see a doctor, right, the vast majority, 90 plus percent of the people who benefited from that were white. And yet you had a network of Somali taxi drivers using their radios to bring elderly white homebound Mainers to the polls write these stories that actually are happening all across the country. And right now I’m back out on the road doing a podcast of my own, where I’m going to 10 different parts of the country where there are these stories, these stories of what I began to call solidarity dividends, these gains that we can unlock better health care, cleaner, air better funded schools, higher wages on the job, but only if we come together across lines of race and create a real sense of being not in a zero sum game, but being really the sum of us. And that story is one that I think is waiting to be told all across this country. Ultimately, we are stronger if we aren’t fighting each other but if we’re fighting for each other.

B&N: You have a really excellent suggestion to for part of the solution towards the end of the book, where you’re talking about doing truth and reconciliation commissions a bit in the style of the South African model, but doing it at the local level. And I think that’s part of the conversation that’s been lost. And a lot of the context that’s been lost is the local level. So can we just talk about that for a minute?

HM: Yeah, one of the things that became really evident to me is that we’ve all been lied to. We’ve all been massively, Ill served by the dominant American history that’s robbed us of our shared history, both the struggle and the overcoming. And a couple of years ago, there was a study that showed that less than 10% of high school seniors could accurately name slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War. Right. That’s not an accident. That’s because of a well coordinated and funded campaign to lie to us about our history. Now, for me, I’m always asking why? Why would someone sell us that story that slavery was not because of the Civil War? What what are they afraid of? And I think they’re afraid of what the elite has always been afraid of in this country, which is people coming together seeing their shared interest in changing the rules to make them fair. And if we don’t have the history of the way we struggled before and overcome injustice, then we’re really vulnerable to the lies and the manipulation today. And that’s why a truth effort. And I go and visit with folks in Dallas, a place where this beautiful effort has grown up, that looks at the community history and says, let’s tell the truth about the little stories, not the big ones, not the big national news. But the little things that shaped the way we live the stories that created trauma, and that created resilience and overcoming let’s tell the whole story of our community. And then let’s also get together in libraries and in town halls and have a cross section of the community, right firefighters and cops and teachers and student activists and retired folks and librarians come together and say, what would it look like if Dallas or Topeka or all these other places, was really free of the lie of the idea that there’s a hierarchy of human value that some groups of people are better than others? What would it really look like for us to live our lives free of that old story, that story that was created in order to justify the economic model of slavery and land that that’s why it was created. That’s not our economic model. Right now, that’s not our values. Now, let’s finally jettison that old story. Those efforts are happening in dozens of places around the country. And it’s so inspiring. They’re multi racial groups. And so when you think about this well funded, well coordinated effort to ban history to shield white elementary school students from reading about six year old Ruby Bridges, integrating Louisiana schools, you have to just question what are they afraid of? I think they’re afraid of young people who are already in the most diverse generation in American history. They’re afraid of those young people understanding our history and vowing not to repeat it, and they’re afraid of those young people questioning the racial stereotypes and the lies and the zero sum the scapegoating of immigrants and the blaming of racial justice advocates for for our problems, right, they’re worried that we’re going to have solidarity. And that solidarity is strong enough to really topple the status quo and change who’s in power. And that’s ultimately why I’m so inspired when I hear which is what I’ve been hearing. As I’ve traveled across the country. It’s white parents and students that are fighting back against these laws that want to ban honest education. They’re saying, You know what, to be honest, that is our history. I’m reminded of a suburban white woman I met this summer named Rachel, who said, I grew up in Oklahoma schools my whole life. I’ve never heard about the Tulsa race massacre, until I saw about it on TV a couple of years ago. And she was outraged. She felt like she’d been lied to. And she also made the connection that when she was driving through the black neighborhood, and Tulsa as a kid, and she saw the poverty there. And she asked her dad, you know, why is this neighborhood so poor? And he had no answer for her. He didn’t tell her it used to be Black Wall Street and was destroyed, didn’t tell her that it built itself back up and then was destroyed again in the middle of the last century by a highway system that ran through it and destroyed 1000s of businesses that history was gone into, what less did Rachel take, right, she took well, there’s something wrong with Black people, and they’re always going to be poor. So yeah, we shouldn’t want to live near that. That’s the point. When you don’t know the role of history of powerful bad actors in history, then you can’t be on the lookout for them in the present. And you can’t have the kind of empathy and understanding that helps really build the kinds of bonds that are necessary to solve our biggest challenges in society.

B&N: You’ve written a really important book, but it’s not a wonky book. Yeah, it’s really elegantly written. Thank you. Can we talk about some of your literary influences for a second? Because I think this is really important, especially when you’re talking about storytelling and the power of storytelling and the consequences of story. It’s really important to think about how you learn to tell a story.

HM: So I’m, you know, a lawyer by training, I ran a think tank and my mother reminded me when the book when she finally read the kind of final draft, she said, You know, I’m just glad that all that education didn’t take the writer out of you. Because when I was little, I would come home from school, I would write stories and that was what like if I took a huge leap, right, I quit my dream job. I was running a think tank and I was testifying in Congress and but I just felt like, ultimately, it’s about people. It’s about their stories. It’s about the way that if you get close enough inside any individual story, the collective is revealed. Right people will talk about the choices They made in their lives. And if you know enough about it, you can see where decisions that were made as a whole open doors or close them for people, Susan Parrish who lost her home and her job in the financial crisis. And the story I tell about derivatives and subprime loans, right. My literary influences are many. I was really compelled by Toni Morrison by James Baldwin by W.E.B Dubois by the people who had written squarely about the Black experience, and yet their message is so human and so universal. And that was very inspiring to me. I also love fiction. I love a good yarn. Right. I love suspense, you know, one of the first readers of the drafts that, you know, you got to edit it a little bit, but this is a kind of a page turner about racism. And I was like, yes, you know, like, I want to be able to say, we’re telling real stories here that are totally backed up by 130 pages of notes. But they’re compelling. Because it’s our story. I wanted to write a book that was the story of us as Americans, and all of our beauty and all of our shame and all of our wonder,

B&N: And for all of our theories, and all of the things we tell ourselves, this is ultimately about people. Yeah. And you never, ever lose sight of the people and readers are going to meet a lot of really terrific Americans, you’re doing the best they can with what they have, but they’re trying to make change. And they’re trying to do it on behalf of their communities, not just themselves. And I think that’s a really important point to make that there is a larger picture here. Okay, so you said there’s a podcast coming, which I am super stoked to listen to thank you. And I know there’s a young reader version of the some of us coming, which I’m really excited about due date for that yet?

HM: No, no, we don’t have a cover of a draft cover. But I don’t have a date. I think it’s not going to be 2022 I think it’s going to be 2023. It’s coming out from Random House children’s, and it’ll be for middle grade readers. And I’m just over the moon excited. And you know, the podcast is coming out this summer produced by Higher Ground, which is the Obama’s podcast company, their audio company. It’s not me and Michelle like driving around in an RV tour in the country, let me clear. But they did greenlight it. And there are two or three stories that are from the book like we’re going back to Lewiston, and a couple of weeks main that town telling a new story of this amazing cross racial solidarity there. But most of the stories in this 10 episode series are new stories, stories that are the same theme, the idea of the solidarity dividend of how people come together across lines of race to win things. They couldn’t win on their own, but they’re adding to the case that this is what America can be.

B&N: I love that phrase solidarity dividend. I think that’s really a very, very important takeaway from this. But have we missed anything? We’ve covered a lot of ground in this conversation. So have we missed anything that you want to add?

HM: Last week, the book won the porch light business book of the year, I was surprised when I was watching the little, you know, YouTube award ceremony, I almost fell off my chair, I really didn’t expect it to win the business book of the year from this company that sells books to corporations. And I’ve been really interested in the reception, there have been a fair number of employers that have bought the book for their whole teams and said, You know what, this is a way for us to talk about these issues. And understand that it relates to our bottom line. Understand that this isn’t a zero sum. It’s not like we’re doing this for the workers of color. And the white workers just have to sort of struggle through it. You know, it’s about diversity being the superpower of teams, and that diverse teams are smarter and better at problem solving. And it’s because of that sort of production friction of people looking at the world in different ways that you get more innovation and ingenuity. And that to me is so exciting.

B&N: I’m right there with you. And I just want to point out too, that George Saunders and Elizabeth Gilbert and Abram Kennedy and Alicia Garza have all blurbed your book as well. So I mean, that’s a nice cross section of writers that you don’t always see on the back jacket of a single title. So thank you for everything you’re doing. Thank you for your time. This was excellent Heather McGee, The Sum of Us is out now in paperback and I hope loads and loads of people pick it up soon.

HM: Awesome. Thank you so much.