Zero-Sum Justice

Summary

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Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | "Zero-Sum Justice"

Slate Podcasts | July 15, 2023

Overview of the Episode

This episode of Amicus explores the narrative of "zero-sum" justice—how myths of scarcity and zero-sum thinking underlie many current Supreme Court decisions and broader American social and political dynamics, particularly in terms of race and equality.
Host Dahlia Lithwick first interviews Joel Anderson, host of the podcast Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas, for an incisive look inside the psyche and personal history of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, connecting Thomas's life story to recent jurisprudence, particularly on affirmative action.
In the second half, Dahlia is joined by Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us, to discuss how the zero-sum paradigm of race and scarcity has shaped not only courts but also the entirety of American public life, and why solidarity and hope can counteract self-defeating zero-sum politics.

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Part 1: Justice Clarence Thomas and the Zero-Sum Court

Guest: Joel Anderson, host of Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas

Thomas’s Search for Identity and Belonging

• Instability and Restlessness
  Dahlia opens by reflecting on Thomas's "instability of identity," observing the "famished for home" quality that led him to ping-pong from the priesthood, to black nationalism, and eventually to championing conservative legal movements.

  “If I could knit together the whole narrative of the person that you offer, Joel, it’s just somebody who’s looking for a home, and he's so famished for home that he just keeps landing in these situations that are almost like parodies of political or intellectual movements.” (03:25)

• Unmoored Childhood and the Desire to Be Wanted [04:43]
  Anderson describes Thomas as “a person without people,” shaped by a lack of warmth and affection in his youth and a longing to be valued.

  “He was desirous of having people that appreciated him… The GOP pipeline today—and certainly 40 years ago—was very seductive.” (04:43)

Public Persona: Warmth and Rage

• Duality: Gregarious vs. Angry
  Lithwick and Anderson discuss the contradiction between Thomas's public displays of bonhomie (infamously, his booming laugh) and accounts of deep anger, especially visible at his confirmation hearings.

  "He’s both… He shows that side to a lot of people… but I think the people that he presumes are enemies or critics, that’s where you get all the anger. And I think that anger...goes all the way back to his youth.” – Joel Anderson (07:51)

Preference for Harshness and “Directness” in Political Allegiance

• Harsh Upbringing and the Embrace of ‘Tough Love’ [10:33]
  Thomas is said to prefer outright, even openly hostile, honesty (as experienced with some Republicans) over “falsity” from liberals, relating back to the stern cruelty of his grandfather.

  “He thinks that the people that treat you the worst are the people that...are telling you the truth. Like, he thinks that harshness is a form of love or affection… That’s actually the way that he was raised.” – Anderson (10:33)

Family, Alienation, and Class

• Visit with Thomas’s Mother [12:07]
  Anderson narrates the intimate, unguarded experience of visiting Thomas’s mother, noting her warmth but emotional distance from Thomas, and her closer ties to his late brother and first wife.

  “I can't imagine that very many people have ever knocked on that door or even thought to do it… She talked about how she was closer to his first wife, Kathy Ambush, as opposed to Ginny Thomas.” (12:54)

Affirmative Action: Personal Wounds as National Policy

• Thomas’s Path and the Affirmative Action Decision [17:45]
  Lithwick and Anderson address Thomas’s fierce opposition to affirmative action, despite being a beneficiary himself. Anderson suggests Thomas’s views are shaped by profound psychological wounds from being dismissed as unworthy after entering Yale Law School as part of a special program.

  “Each instance of it makes him feel smaller and more full of kind of shame and judgment by the world… it’s just a psychic wound that's being played out on the biggest national scale.” – Lithwick (17:45) “Instead of getting mad at the people that feel that way about him, he's...mad at people who have benefited similarly. And he just thinks, ‘I was actually special. You all got in because of preferences.’” – Anderson (17:45)

Gender, Pain, and the Limits of Empathy

• Black Women’s Pain and Anita Hill [24:41]
  The conversation highlights the erasure of Black women’s pain in Thomas’s worldview, connecting it to his fraught relationship with his own mother and his lack of appreciation for the obstacles faced by Black women.

  “Clarence Thomas feels victimized in a way that supersedes anybody else… I think that he's a sexist, that he fundamentally doesn't have respect for the challenges that women have.” – Anderson (22:34) “When [Anita Hill] said in that confirmation process, he got race. I was left with gender. And that is less. It is less.” – Lithwick (24:41)

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Part 2: Heather McGhee and the Cost of Zero-Sum Thinking

Guest: Heather McGhee, author, The Sum of Us

Why Americans Vote Against Their Interests

• Race as a Wedge: The Hidden Cost of Racism [30:06]
  McGhee recounts her journey from economic policy expert to investigating why Americans—especially white voters—adopt and defend policies that undercut their own economic well-being, concluding that racial division is the key.

  “It turns out that it really is, in a way that we hadn't really tallied, the hidden costs of racism in our politics and our policymaking that is driving inequality.” (32:42)

The Supreme Court and a “Zero-Summiest” Term

• Scarcity Mentality in SCOTUS Decisions [34:18]
  Lithwick observes that the latest term was driven by zero-sum, scarcity-based logic where every gain for one group is cast as a loss for another (affirmative action, environmental law, etc.).

  “This myth of scarcity, this myth that if other people, particularly people of color, get any goods or benefits or services, you are somehow diminished..." – Lithwick (32:42)

Debunking Zero-Sum Logic: Shared Prosperity

• Roberts’s Student Loan Analogy [34:18]*
  McGhee rebuts Chief Justice Roberts’s argument opposing student debt relief by noting both its inaccuracy and the broader folly of pitting neighbors against each other.

  “It’s very zero sum… Why would you set up a zero sum argument as if it's somehow bad for someone with a lawn care business to have more people in their community be free of $10 or $20,000 of student debt?… That zero sum thinking makes us root against our own team.” – McGhee (34:18)

Historical Roots: How Slavery and Segregation Hurt Everyone

• The Parable of the Drained Pool and the Southern Economy [42:17]
  McGhee cites Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 argument that slavery impoverished most whites, too, and the famous phenomenon of southern cities draining public pools rather than integrate them, hurting the whole community.

  “I wanted us to question the role that racism plays in shortchanging our public goods and really expand the aperture to see that… We all pay a cost. Not an equal cost, obviously, but we all pay a cost.” (45:25)

• Palmer v. Thompson (1971): The Drained Pool as Law [46:24]
  The Supreme Court upheld the closure of public pools rather than require integration, institutionalizing the “drained pool politics” metaphor McGhee centers in her book.

Neoliberalism, the New Deal, and Undelivered Promises

• Exclusive Benefits, Then Drained Pools for All [51:21]
  McGhee observes how New Deal and postwar public goods (schools, housing, Social Security) largely benefited whites, but when integration became possible, white voters often chose to withdraw support for public goods altogether—hurting themselves and everyone else.

The Role of the Supreme Court

• Court as Barrier, Not Protector [49:08, 55:20]
  McGhee argues that faith in the Supreme Court as a shield for minority rights is often misplaced; more frequently, SCOTUS defends the interests of the powerful at the expense of the public.

  “The courts need to play a smaller role in deciding these questions…when we keep perfecting our democracy…we’re going to very much change the shape of the Court.” – McGhee (46:24)

Hope and Solidarity: Real-World Stories

• The ‘Solidarity Dividend’ and Case Studies [62:03]
  Drawing on episodes from her podcast adapted from The Sum of Us, McGhee describes instances where cross-racial, interfaith, local movements have won real economic and social victories—for example, stopping a polluting pipeline in Memphis through Black–white coalition.

  “There are real gains that we can unlock, but only by coming together across those lines of race—like cleaner air and higher wages and better funded schools.” (62:03) “The fact that I was able to find so many stories of hope, of unlikely victories, means that they're happening.” (66:23)

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On Thomas’s “tough love”:

  “Cruelty is love in that household.” – Dahlia Lithwick (21:20)

• On the erasure of women’s pain:

  “He got race. I was left with gender, and that is less. It is less.” – Anita Hill, recounted by Lithwick (24:41)

• On zero-sum logic in student debt:

  “It’s actually like the stupidest example you could give because what is the number one reason that young people are finding it hard to buy their first homes? Student debt, right?” – McGhee (34:18)

• On hope through action:

  “And the way I’m going to have more power than doomscrolling is to organize.” – McGhee (68:48)

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Key Timestamps for Segments

• 03:25: Dahlia and Joel Anderson on Thomas’s elusive sense of belonging
• 07:51: Thomas’s dual personalities: warmth and anger
• 10:33: Anderson on Thomas seeking harsh honesty as a form of love
• 12:54: Anderson’s visit to Thomas’s mother; family complexities
• 17:45: Thomas, affirmative action, and psychic wounds
• 22:34: Gender and pain: Thomas’s disregard for Black women’s experiences
• 32:42: Heather McGhee introduces the economic cost of racism
• 34:18: The Supreme Court’s zero-sum logic; student debt decision
• 42:17: Hinton Helper and the economic harm of slavery to whites
• 46:24: Drained pool metaphor and Supreme Court complicity
• 51:21: New Deal legacies, integration, and the drain on public goods
• 62:03: Hopeful case studies; solidarity dividend in practice
• 68:48: Practical advice—ordinary people can drive change

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Tone and Language

• Dahlia Lithwick combines incisive legal analysis with empathy and narrative flair, while Joel Anderson brings reporting nuance and historical detail, and Heather McGhee grounds her arguments in personal experience, research, and optimism.
• The conversation is both critical of systemic failures and ultimately uplifting, pointing listeners toward paths for engagement and collective action.

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Summary Takeaway

"Zero-Sum Justice" diagnoses how the Supreme Court’s recent output and American public life are gripped by a zero-sum, scarcity-based logic, often racialized, that hurts everyone. Through the lens of Justice Clarence Thomas’s life and judicial philosophy, and Heather McGhee’s research on collective wellbeing, the episode challenges listeners to see the hidden costs of division and the tangible benefits of solidarity. The ultimate exhortation: although zero-sum thinking is powerful and destructive, there is hope and power in joining together to claim shared, just futures for all Americans.

Transcript

[A]

And he just thinks that I was actually special. You all got in because of preferences and there are a lot of people like that. Clarence Thomas is certainly not alone.

[B]

It's all very well and good for justices to be anti government when they are the government, right? When they're paid by the government, when their pensions are with the government, when they have more power than most of the planet. And so I always take it with a grain of salt.

[C]

Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law. I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover those things for Slate. I wanted to take a second to thank our Slate plus members who carried us through Opinionpalooza and delivered us to the relatively tranquil shores of summer on Amicus. We'll be back in the fall with more exclusive extra content like my chats with Mark Joseph Stern, but he is having a well deserved break for right now. You can still sign up for Slate plus to get ad free versions of Amicus. Never hit a [e-mail] and most of all to support the work that we do here on Amicus. So go to slate.com amicus plus for more details and thank you so, so much for supporting the work we do here at the magazine. And so with that, welcome to our summer series where we take a little step back and meet people whose books and ideas help shape our think about justice in the courts. And this inaugural show of the summer series is a packed offering of just that. Our guest in the second half of this episode has been on my Amicus wish list for an incredibly long time. Heather McGee is simply one of the most important thinkers about equality and inequality in the country. Her New York Times best selling book, the Sum of what Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together was first published in 2021. But since she's followed up with an incredible podcast series of the same name and an adapted version for young adult readers came out this year, Heather's lens of the solidarity dividends that we give up when adopting a racially undergirded zero sum politics is just a really vital viewpoint when thinking about the U.S. supreme Court. But first, before we get to Heather, we're going to turn to one of the zero sumiest of the justices on a very zero sumi Supreme Court. Supreme Court. We're going to take a long, hard look at the life and frankly, the psyche of Justice Clarence Thomas. And to do that, I'm joined by Joel Anderson, host of the latest season of Slate's blockbuster Podcast Slow Burn. This last season is the podcast's eighth, and it's titled Becoming Justice Thomas, Joel. And the team's reporting on Clarence Thomas childhood, his youth, the people who impacted him and the people on whom he left an indelible impact are revelatory and certainly gave me food for thought as I think about the term that just concluded and Clarence Thomas voice within it. So, Joel, first and foremost, thank you for being with us.

[A]

Oh, absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on Dahlia.

[C]

I guess I just have a bajillion questions, having listened to the show, but the one that I am sort of stuck in, the thing that is so interesting to me as somebody who, you know, I've read Justice Thomas's autobiography. I sort of probably know as much of this material as a lot of people, and yet I'm just so struck by the sort of instability of his identity. You know, the idea that this is somebody who, you know, within the span of just like a very short handful of years, went from plans to be a priest at seminary to embracing deeply black nationalism, to pinging from that to reverence from Thomas Sowell and Ayn Rand. And it just feels to me like if I could knit together the whole narrative of the person that you offer. Joel is just somebody who's looking for a home, and he's so famished for home that he just keeps landing in these situations that are like, almost like parodies of, you know, political movements and intellectual movements.

[A]

Yeah, he's unmoored. When this all got started, I kept referring to him as a person without people. And that's how it always kind of felt to me, especially like, as a child, he had this very difficult upbringing. Not a lot of affection or love that was shown toward him. And so you can imagine in talking with people that knew him, that he was desirous of having people that appreciated him, people that wanted to be around him, he wanted friends. And so it makes sense that especially as a child, that you do the thing that your parents or your guardians want you to do. So that was where the priesthood thing comes in. Well, then he. That doesn't work out. He goes to school. He's school in the late 60s, this time of tremendous social upheaval. And what's cool than being if you're a young black man? What's cooler than being a Black Panther at that time? And the way that they talked and the way that they dress, and that is a way to draw people toward you. Well, that doesn't work out. He once decides, I want to go be straight and narrow. And then he finds himself in company with all of these Republicans who not only want to associate with him, but they also want to pay him. They also want to elevate him. They want to give him opportunities. And you could see how easily somebody that is just looking for somebody to welcome him in could be taken with that. The GOP pipeline today, and certainly 40 years ago was very seductive. There's a lot of money behind it if you're the right guy. And so, yeah, I think he kind of settled on an identity, which is not to say that he's not sincere in his beliefs, but certainly the way into that GOP machine was that they wanted him, they recruited him, and they cultivated him.

[C]

One of the. Through lines, through all of the episodes is this laughter, this, like, great booming laugh. And you have, like, several people actually try to do not great impressions of it. It's certainly something, you know, as somebody who watched him on the court, it's so arresting. And I think Lillian McEwan tells you it's not even real. Like, she thinks it's put on. Former girlfriend who really, really feels as though by the end, when he becomes a sort of conservative legal movement superstar, he's entirely. I think her word is masked. But I want you to tell me about this interplay between this huge laughter and this sort of, like, Bonhommey, you know, hail, fellow, well met. Like, I love life, Clarence Thomas. And then there's this kind of counter programming about his anger. His anger, his anger. You know, most notably at his confirmation hearing where he just tears a strip out of the Senate. Can you help me think about again, it's just such an extreme set of, you know, performed identities. Is he a rage monster, or is he just, like the cuddliest, warmest. I love my life, you know, gregarious guy.

[A]

I mean, it's tough, and I don't want to have to choose because I actually think he's both. And, you know, as somebody that is a Supreme Court expert, the people that know him well and have spent time away from him, you know, out of the robes, away from the bench, say that he is the warmest, nicest, kindest, funniest person that they've met. There's a guy. It's actually funny. In the middle of the podcast being released last month, somebody reached out to me via Facebook and said I wrote a letter to Clarence Thomas criticizing him for his legal opinions. And he wrote back to me and welcomed me into his chambers and then helped me with my law school references. And he was very nice, and he's been very helpful to me in my career. I'm not a Republican, but that's just who he is. And I'm like, man, he shows that side to a lot of people. But I think the people that he presumes are enemies or critics. That's where you get all the anger. And I think that anger, like, goes all the way back to his youth. Like, I think that anger is sincere, and it's like it's been honed over the years and he's figured out the people that he needs to deploy it against. But I really do think that it's both that he's a very fun guy, that he may indeed like hanging out in Walmart parking lots and hanging laughing and drinking beer with Harlan Crow, but also think that he has very sincere resentment of the people that have, in his mind, have made his life difficult. We can say a lot of things about Clarence Thomas. I do believe that he's had a difficult life and that he has been deeply wounded by the people that don't like him, that don't respond to this warm part of him.

[C]

So that actually leads me to another line that was really arresting for me. I think in your episode three, he says about eventually finding what you're describing as his people, his home, in the sort of Reagan extreme conservative legal movement. And he has this line where he says, at least they never smile at me. I know exactly what I'm getting, that he prefers the directness even when he doesn't agree with Reagan policies, but they're direct. And what he doesn't like is falsity. And that there's a way in which, in the end, Joel, he kind of throws in his lot with the people who, instead of, in his view, like nodding and winking about race and racism are just straight up, you know, we're going to tolerate you. Some of us are super racist. You are an instrumental part of the solution for us. And he prefers that to what he sees as falsity.

[A]

Oh, absolutely. You know what? I think that goes back sincerely to his grandfather. His grandfather, probably by most lights, like, politically, he's a Democrat, right? Or what you might consider mainstream black liberal in that time, but he has a lot of conservative beliefs. And the other piece of this is that his grandfather was extremely cruel to him, just very mean. One example, and that didn't make it into the podcast, is that when his grandfather was making deliveries, his grandfather owned his own business. So he delivers fuel, coal, oil, wood, to black families across Savannah and They would have to make these deliveries early in the morning in the very cold. And his grandfather wouldn't even allow him or his brother to wear gloves. He said it was better if your hands froze because they would callous and eventually they would get used to it. And I think that's in some ways sort of an analogy that he. He thinks that the people that treat you the worst are the people that at least complimentary of you are the people that are telling you the truth. Like, he thinks that harshness is a form of love or affection. And so you can see how he could look at these Republicans who, you know, a lot of people may say that they're racist, right? And he might look at these people and say, well, you know what? At least they're being straight up with me. Like, I know that there are liberals on the, on the Democratic side of the aisle, the liberal side of the aisle, but they're going to pretend at least. I know what I'm getting here. It reminds me of my grandfather, and that is a form of love. He's even said that, like, my grandfather told me the truth, and that's what he thinks about Republicans. So you could easily see how somebody might find a home with those people, because that's what he was used to. That's actually the way that he was raised.

[C]

So now I just have to ask you the gossipy piece, which is like, I need you to narrate for me meeting Clarence Thomas mom, which happens before the Harlan Crow news explodes, that, you know, Harlan Crow has purchased the house in which his mom lives. And I just, like, it's so amazing to hear that part of it where you clearly just are having this deep connected moment with her. And I wonder if you could just tell our listeners what, given what you had thought in your head, Clarence Thomas was all about, what that brought to the table and what parts of it, if any, surprised you.

[A]

Well, I mean, bottom line, the biggest surprise is that I got in the house in the first place, right? I don't know with the other mothers or the Supreme Court justices alike or anything. I doubt sincerely that you can get into their home. And so I'm walking up to the front door just totally expecting to knock on the door and to just get back in my car and go back away. But I think it's sort of a testament. I mean, some of this is race, class, all that other stuff. Clarence Thomas is not a man of a lot of means. Like, he didn't grow up with money. His family doesn't have a lot of money. And so they live in this very modest, very regular home. And as I'm walking there, I'm like, isn't it like, you know, Secret Service? Is that somebody gonna stop me from doing this? Like, I'm just. I'm like, surely I'm not gonna get close. And so I get into the home and they're just so warm. And I think that it really is just a surprise. I can't imagine that very many people have ever knocked on that door or even thought to do it. And so when I got in there and I didn't wanna lie about who I was, I thought that that might get me in more trouble. And yeah, his grandmother was just so warm. She reminded me of a lot of people that I knew growing up. You know, I don't know how close Clarence is to his mother. I don't get the sense, like there was a point in our interview, we're looking at the wall of pictures in their home and she's pointing to her kids and she says, myers, that was my boy. Myers is his younger brother who died in 2003. I think it was a heart attack. And she was very close to him. I don't get the sense that she's as close to Clarence. And so she's very unguarded. She's just talking about this. She talked about how she was closer to his first wife, Kathy Ambush, as opposed to Jenny Thomas, like that sort of stuff. There's actually another funny piece of this is that I'm sitting in the den with his grandmother. She's got her recliner on one side, she's got this little end table right next to her. And there's three pictures on there. One of them is of Clarence. I can't remember what the other one was. And the other one was of Kathy. And I'm like, wow, like, you're okay. She's like, yeah, Kathy. I talk to her pretty regularly. She's a sweetheart, I love her. I said, what about, you know, Jenny? She said, I don't know her that well. Like, you know, I could call her, she might not do the things I wanted to do, but just that sort of unguardedness with me was just shocking. Like you. I don't know if it comes through in the interviews, but I was over and over again. I'm just surprised that she's making these revelations. I'm getting. She's a 94 year old woman, right? But still, like, I was surprised and I think that it was just sort of the fact that nobody has ever come probably that often to show up at their house to ask questions about her son. I just think that we were all sort of taken aback by the moment and we were able to sort of settle in and get to know each other really, really easily.

[C]

You know, it's so clear that you see each other in a really deep way. That's what comes across like it's incredibly powerful and it's such a, such an amazing, arresting moment to have to really reckon with how much she loves him and how proud she is and how complicated it is and your presence in there as a proxy for all of us. It's glorious. Time now for a short break and more with Joel Anderson on becoming Justice Thomas. I do think I need to ask you, you know, since the arc of the, of the podcast and you know, obviously the affirmative action decision on which the term ends is this arc of, you know, and you put it, I think the same way really elegantly, Joel, which is, it's kind of your arc too, you know, that there are a series of events where he clear benefited from affirmative action. He insisted he didn't. It had nothing to do with getting into Yale Law School. It had nothing to do with his confirmation to the DC Circuit or the Supreme Court. And how confounding it is for him that as the beneficiary of that over and over and over, each instance of it makes him feel smaller and more full of kind of shame and judgment by the world and less and less judged on the merits. And I guess that's kind of the problem you wanted to tackle with the show. And it's something that, you know, you toggle into and out of your own reckoning with that. It's awfully hard, Joel, not to hear this entire show as just a psychic wound that's being played out like on the biggest national scale. Every single kid who might have been the of beneficiary of race based affirmative action loses that opportunity because Clarence Thomas found it wounding.

[A]

Yeah. And it really starts, it seems to me, at Yale Law School. I think there was a time in his life when he can sort of say to himself, I was an exceptional student. Not many people in Savannah, Georgia, where he's from, have ever had the academic record that I had. I'm able to go off to seminary and I do very well there. I go to Holy Cross. And he gets in via sort of an affirmative action program. But it's not explicitly labeled as such. It's just sort of, they can just say that's sort of a new program to welcome in an underrepresented class of people. Maybe we can just tap into this talent pool. It's not like when he gets to Yale in 1971, and there is an explicit program, a quota system even, to bring in black and underrepresented minority students. So when he gets there and people say, hey, look, you're only here because of that program, it totally erases every academic accomplishment he ever had before. And that really wounds him. And, you know, you asked me about, you know, my piece of this. I think that a lot of black students, black professionals who come through the system, especially, you know, in majority white spaces, you deal with that very early on, that people, especially like the 80s 90s, when this is very, like, a hotly debated issue that people are saying to me and other people like me, you don't belong here. Like, you wouldn't have gotten here but for that. And there's a couple of ways to go at that. One, you could be like me, which you're like, it does hurt a little bit, right? You're like, I'm pretty good. I think I'm smart. I think I'm capable. You know, maybe I didn't get in through all the other pathways, but, like, I'm here, I've excelled. I belong here. And no matter what I do, you're never going to think I'm qualified. I mean, actually, it's kind of funny because I just remember when Barack Obama was president, and I just, like, he felt to me like a brilliant person. Like, you can think whatever you want to think of him as a president, right? And his policies, whatever. But, like, in terms of his mind, his accomplishments, he seemed like a very brilliant person. Like, I always say, he could probably burn the eyebrows off your face with his intelligence, right? And people still thought that he wasn't smart, that he was not qualified, that he wasn't capable. And I'm like, well, if they can feel that way about a guy like that, but then who am I? You know, like, so it will never matter what I do, never matter what I accomplish. I'm just going ahead and I'm going to take advantage of these opportunities and succeed no matter what. On the other hand, somebody like Clarence Thomas, and he mentions it even in his concurrence, he found it demeaning, right? He finds this whole thing embarrassing, and it totally makes him question himself in a way. And instead of getting mad at the people that feel that way about him, he's taken that opportunity to get mad at people who have benefited similarly. And he just thinks That I was actually special. You all got in because of preferences, and there are a lot of people like that. Clarence Thomas is certainly not alone, but he chose among black people, I think, a fairly predictable pathway. It's just one. It's one of two. Not very many offers, but he went that direction. And, you know, Clarence Thomas chose that second pathway, and it's obviously gonna affect a lot of other people, but he doesn't care about that because he's saying, I'm helping you. Actually, I'm helping you from suffering the slings and arrows that I suffered throughout college and going forward. So you may not thank me for it now, but you'll thank me for.

[C]

It later, which is his grandfather. Right. And the gloves.

[A]

Absolutely.

[C]

I have to do this tough love so that you can someday stand on your own feet in a world that is hopelessly infected by racism, pain.

[A]

Cruelty is love in that household. Yeah.

[C]

The other thing that is unavoidable, again, counter programming Clarence Thomas is just psychic pain at this, you know, deep dignitary injury, which is affirmative action, is the women in this podcast who are narrating their own pain and narrating as black women. Largely a story that's really different from, you know, the guys who are like, he's awesome. He's amazing. Get a load of the outfit he was wearing. You know, oh, my God. You know, this is what he used to do, you know, on the Holy Cross campus in student, you know, debate. And then you have this really interesting, again, almost musical counterpoint, which is these women who are just saying, this is actually my pain. This is what happened. And you frame it, you know, really beautifully. As, you know, these are the voices we didn't hear at the confirmation hearing. But it is an amazing kind of exploding of the idea that there is only one person in pain in this conversation.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you know, Clarence Thomas feels victimized in a way that supersedes anybody else that may have come across his path. And I've tried to think about, like, where does this cause. It certainly seems that the conflict here is not just women. It's with black women. And a lot of people say, well, this goes back to his mother who, you know, sort of gave him up for his grandparents. And he has a lot more respect for his grandparents than he does his mother. Right. They were capable, they were strong, they thrived in spite of this discrimination. They showed me the way. Whereas this woman, she crumbled under the pressure of discrimination, racism, and she had to give me up. My grandfather was the one that was able to do it. And I feel like this resentment of black women sort of bubble comes up over and over again throughout his life. And he comes across all these, like, talented Black attorneys in D.C. in the 80s. Like, we talked to Sakari Hartnett, who worked for him at the eeoc, very accomplished civil rights attorney in her own right. His ex girlfriend, Lillian McEwen, who became some sort of a judge. All these women who just say, you know what? I had my own trials to get here. But he couldn't recognize that and didn't see that. And I really just think that's because he doesn't understand women very much and even goes beyond that. I think that he's a sexist, that he fundamentally doesn't have respect for the challenges that women have. He can't see that his grandfather may have had opportunities and the ability to go out and seek out his own professional opportunities in a way that his mother may not have been. You know, his mother was abandoned by her husband. His grandfather would not help his mother. It's not like there were all these other professional avenues available to her in the 1950s and 1940s. He doesn't recognize that pain, that struggle. And it's a consistent theme throughout his life. And so, yes, by the time you get to when he is in a position of power at the EEOC or when he's a judge and he's in charge of all these other women, he's just like, look, you all serve me. I'm the great man here. You all, you have no idea what I went through without any regard or any thought about what their own challenges may have been or the challenges he puts in their way himself.

[C]

It's funny, Joel, I was reminded when you made that point, both about his mom and his sister and his willingness to just devalue, that they didn't start life at the same advantages, relative advantages, with, you know, the caveat that he really, really had a very difficult and painful childhood. But that. But I was reminded of interviewing Anita Hill many years ago, who said in that confirmation process, he got race. I was left with gender. And that is less. It is less.

[A]

Yeah. No, that's right. That's absolutely right. And, you know, it's actually just really insidious because there's this belief, and certainly among a certain kind of a man that she wielded like, that she was trying to attack a black man, like an ascendant black man, that she was a tool of these white liberals to take him down, like, without total regard. Like, it's not just Clarence Thomas, I believe that there's all these other friends and Republican supporters behind him that say, oh, I mean, she was used. Like, maybe we don't hate her, maybe she didn't do anything wrong, but she was used. They have no, no sense of the pain that she went through. Or no, they don't even, like, I, you know, it's funny, John Danforth, the senator who ushered him through the process, who gave him his first job out of college, you know, he says, I would never believe Clarence would do that or whatever. And so I asked him, I was like, well, do you think that Anita Hill is just making all this up? He said, I don't know, I don't know. And I said, well, did you watch your testimony? He said, no. And they were just blind to it. They didn't even care. Like it never occurred to them to even interrogate whether or not these allegations were true or not. And I think this is a fundamental dismissal of women's pain.

[C]

Joel Anderson is a staff writer at Slate. He is co host of our Hang up and Listen podcast. He's also the host of season three and six of Slow Burn. And he has just wrapped hosting the latest, powerful, really superb season, season eight, Becoming Justice Thomas. Joel, it seems kind of perfect as we are all grappling with what to do with the affirmative action decision and the long, long trail that it took Clarence Thomas to get here talking with you. Thank you so much both for the show and for joining us today.

[A]

Oh, Dolly, again, I'm so glad I could join you today. So thanks so much and for all the work you do. Anyway, thanks. I'm happy to do it.

[C]

We are taking a quick break and when we come back, Heather McGee on the zero sum game that the Supreme Court is very fond of playing, a game that ensures most of us lose. And now to that even bigger picture. Equality, inequality and how the narrative of scarcity structured around race has pitted Americans against one another and how that same narrative has shaped the Supreme Court and its decisions. We're going to explore all of that with my Next guest, Heather McGhee. Heather is former president of Demos, which moved the idea for debt free college into the 2016 presidential debate, pushed for doddle Frank, argued for voting rights before the Supreme Court and helped win pro voter reforms in five states over two years. They also led research campaigns behind successful wage increases for low paid workers on federal contracts as well as at McDonald's, Walmart and other chain retailers. The reason Heather is here with us today is that her book, the Sum of what Racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together is phenomenal. The book was a New York Times bestseller, long listed for the National Book Award, and it was adapted into a podcast by Higher Ground in June of 2022. The young adult readers version came out earlier this year. One of the things I love about our audience is the number of young people who listen in. And if you don't have the adapted version of the Sum of Us Going into the fall, just run out and get it now. Heather holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University and a JD From UC Berkeley School of Law. She's chair of the board of Color of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization. She also serves as an advisor for Take Back the Court, a Supreme Court expansion group. So, Heather McGhee, welcome to Amicus.

[B]

Thank you, Dolly. I'm a huge fan and I'm really excited to be in this conversation with you.

[C]

So I think I want to start by saying that your work, your recent work, certainly in the book and the podcast, lives at the intersection of law, economic policy, politics, and justice. And at the heart of your work is this question that you posit, I think very simply as how is it possible that a country that figured out the formula for the American dream ran away from it? And why specifically, specifically the majority of white Americans continue to vote against interest for parties and ideologies that directly contribute to their economic decline and make them ever more likely to live the same life as people of color in this country. And I don't want to in any way oversimplify, but, Heather, your answer is, unsurprisingly, race. Race is it? Race is the reason.

[B]

Yeah. Dalia, I've spent nearly 20 years as an economic policy person. You know, I was actually not someone who, you know, fresh out of college, joined a racial justice organization. I joined an economic think tank. You know, for me, the most defining features of my political life were about the economy, were about nafta, were about the wto, were about just the massive dislocation of jobs that happened, you know, as I was growing up, that I saw all around me growing up on the south side of Chicago during the kind of rolling thunder of the inequality era under Ronald Reagan. And I went to law school and I went into think tank life hoping to solve inequality, hoping to make it so that more people weren't living paycheck to paycheck, that student debt would not be climbing, that we'd return to debt free college, all of those ideas. And, you know, I worked with mostly white male economists who shared my values and shared my mission. And it felt like we were always banging our heads against a wall because we were amassing all of this data to demonstrate that inequality was rising, that there were obvious handy solutions that we could deploy. And yet, even though sometimes those solutions seemed like common sense, they just didn't get a fair hearing in the halls of power. And then conversely, the political party and movement that was dead set against good jobs for working class people, that was dead set against a kind of set of public goods that would make every family have a sort of shot at a decent life, was winning hand over fist. And the ideology of kind of winner take all capitalism was being far more popular among American voters than you would think, given the fact that 1% of the population owned more wealth than the entire middle class, while half of adult workers were paid too little to meet their basic needs for things like housing and food. Right? Like, it just didn't make sense. So many head scratchers, why don't we have universal health care? Why don't we have paid family leave and child care? All of these things that ultimately I actually ended up quitting my job running a think tank. And it was kind of my dream job. But I just felt like we didn't have the answers, we didn't have the right analysis, so we weren't making the right strategic decisions. And I set out on a journey to try to figure out what was stopping us from having nice things. And it turns out that it really is, in a way that we hadn't really tallied the hidden costs of racism in our politics and our policymaking that is driving inequality.

[C]

And I think the number one reason, Heather, that your work came to speak to me this last term at the Supreme Court is that I think I said this already, but this was the zero sumiest term I've ever experienced over two decades as a Supreme Court reporter. This, this myth of scarcity, this myth that if other people, particularly people of color, get any goods or benefits or services, you are somehow diminished by my lights, filtered into virtually every major case this term. If your kid gets into Harvard, mine doesn't. If we protect wetlands on my property, I can't build there. I could go on and on. The entire term seemed like a string of scenarios that come out of your analysis about how persistently and consistently we have come to talk not just about politics, as you say, but about justice itself. And so it seems to me, and I know this is kind of the zeitgeist we're trying to claw our way toward in this conversation, every bit of your analysis refutes the idea that every time a person of color gets a benefit, I suffer. But I just wonder if you can, if you agree with my definition of what this past term at the court looked like, how this became the definition of what we do in constitutional law and statutory law at the U.S. supreme Court.

[B]

Well, that's such a keen observation, Dalia. I definitely felt it as well, looking at the arguments and the decisions of this court, this idea that we're trapped in a zero zero sum game and there's kind of a fixed pie of well being and if I get a bigger slice and then you must get a smaller slice, that zero sum game is really a predominant worldview in the US and it's much more commonly held by white Americans than it is by Americans of color, right? So you're seeing that kind of racialized worldview happening already. This is something that the social science has really been tracking. Basically, it's this story that has been sold over generations by a wealth, wealthy, self interested elite to the majority of white Americans to say progress for people of color has to come at your expense. And you see it in our sort of political rhetoric and you saw it obviously in the court and my book, the Sum of Us is really trying to identify that that zero sum thinking makes us root against our own team, right? Makes us feel like we're not all on the same team. And so a lot of the nice things that everyone should have. Many white voters have been primed to be against and resentful of a better life for anyone because it would upset the sort of racial hierarchy, right? This sort of myth that white Americans are sort of at the top of a racial ladder of human value. And there's this really jealous guarding of your place on that ladder, even if it's unconscious. And it makes you sort of resent mobility or even the presence of other people see it as a threat, right. Obviously we also know this idea as the great replacement theory, right? TUCKER Carlson, the January 6th ideology of really fearing a more diverse America. And the social science tells us that once white Americans are made kind of aware of demographic change, the presence of more people of color in their community, they become more conservative on things that shouldn't necessarily cue to race, right? About like drilling in the Arctic and the minimum wage and health care, right. And all these purportedly race neutral things. The moment for me, Dalia, that this like burst onto the Supreme Court reasoning in a way that just made me infuriated was a case that you haven't mentioned, which is very near and dear to my heart, which is the case on student loan debt. Right? And so you saw Justice Roberts say, like articulate this zero sum view. And I love to bring it up when I'm speaking to people across the country because it's so easily refuted. So basically he was saying, like, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, like, I don't agree with this. You know, I don't think it's fair that somebody who took out student loans would have the opportunity for debt cancellation when somebody who graduated from school and took out, for example, a small business loan to start a lawn care business doesn't. Right? So it's very zero sum, right? It's like pitting neighbors, generational peers against each other and saying we shouldn't do the good thing for person A because it isn't exactly applicable to person B. And here's where that's so stupid, because first of all, it's factually wrong. The government provides massive amounts of debt relief for business owners, right? The PPP loans which were forgiven and meant hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to business owners. So if that's, you know, lawn care business owner kept people on during the pandemic, they could have gotten a whole bunch of free money. And you didn't see student debtors saying we hate PPP loans for lawn care owners, right? So first of all, there's that. Second of all, if the lawn care business owner actually, you know, if they went belly up, right, if their business failed, they could file for bankruptcy protection, right. And be able to discharge their debts. That is actually not something that student deb debtors are able to avail themselves very easily at all. It's tremendously difficult to discharge your student loans in bankruptcy. So student debtors don't get PPP loans for their student loans. They don't get bankruptcy protection. But then just fundamentally, why would you set up a zero sum argument as if it's somehow bad for someone with a lawn care business to have more people in their community be free of 10 or $20,000 of student debt? It's actually like the stupidest example you could give because what is the number one reason that young people are finding it hard to buy their first homes? Student debt, right? So if, if I'm living in a community and I want to see more first time home buyers who have enough disposable income to hire me to take care of their lawns, what do I actually want? I want them to have that student loan debt cancellation. So it's this knee jerk view that we should resent one another's, that we should be cheering against fellow Americans, that it just isn't the way the economy works, it isn't the way society works, but it's a part of the sort of racial imagination. And the fact that black borrowers are much more likely to have to go into debt because of the racial wealth divide, which is the result of largely explicitly racist policy over the 20th century, means that even though Justice Roberts didn't say it was a white lawn care business owner and a black student borrower, those racial sort of characterizations have been all throughout the student loan debt debate because it is a raw deal for black borrowers in a really significant way.

[C]

I'm mindful, Heather, of one of the things Justice Ginsburg used to always say, which is that when people thought she was bringing cases in her early days at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, and she would find these males, male defendants.

[B]

Right.

[C]

It was supposed to be a party trick where she'd find the male defendant who was denied benefits, you know, who couldn't stay home and take care of his ailing mother, who couldn't take care of his newly orphaned son.

[B]

But what RBG didn't get into nursing school, right?

[C]

Yeah. And what RPG actually said was like, dudes, this was not a party trick. I was trying to set people's minds to thinking that it would benefit men to stay home and take care of, of ailing children, ailing parents, to have a spouse who was the primary breadwinner because we would all be lifted up. And that we often tell the wrong story of Justice Ginsburg, which is that she was somehow pushing men down, when in fact, what she was, I think, trying to do was allow men to have fully realized, you know, moral, ethical, professional lives in the same ways that she wanted women to. And I think that story has been obscured in the sort of mythology of RBG and what she was trying to do and what one of the reasons I love your book is you persistently tell the story of, dude, we lift each other up. When we help each other, everybody benefits. And it does feel as though, as you say, we keep running into this brick wall of if anyone is lifted up, I must by definition be suffering. And I wondered if you would talk just for one minute about Hinton Rowan Helper, a book written in 1857 by an unapologetic, unrepentant, white, racist Southerner who was nevertheless, I think, making the point that you're trying to make here, which is that chattel slavery is actually not good for white people in the South. I suppose if you were directly involved in the plantation economy, it was, but for everyone else, there was no benefit. And it seems to me like starting the conversation there at the ways in which the story we tell about enslaved people is that it benefited all whites is just wrong.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, so this was a. An amazing discovery that I found in the research for my book. It was a very popular book at the time, you know, in the sort of Civil War era. And it was this white southern racist who nonetheless made this pamphlet that went. Went viral for its time and was really relied upon by the Lincoln administration and by some abolitionists at the time. His claim was that the south, except for the people he called the oligarchs of the lash, right, the plantation class, they were really suffering because that level of inequality, right? So obviously, slavery created this massive system of inequality among white people where you had these white people who were able to mass really untold wealth and do so with free labor, with stolen labor, they were able to create more assets by raping black women. Right. All of this, this crazy formula for just plutocracy came at the expense of the development of the entire section south. Right. And basically what he did was he counted how many schools, libraries, and other public institutions had been set up in free states compared to slave states. And it was an astonishing gap. In Pennsylvania, there were 393 libraries. In South Carolina, there were just 26. So there were all these examples across this disparity between the south and the North. And here was basically the way that that worked was that if you are a. A wealthy person, you kind of tax yourself to create the common good because you need to, because you need educated workers, because you need systems of commerce and trade, you need streetlights and roads and all of that. In the plantation system, you needed none of that. And in fact, therefore, there was always this short changing of public goods in the south that meant that white people in the south were impoverished and were locked out of decision making by the sort of plantation class. And, you know, I'm sitting here as a descendant of enslaved people. I'm not going to say that there weren't psychic benefits, civic benefits to ordinary white people under chattel slavery, but there were real economic costs. And that today, the way in which the south has seven out of ten of the most impoverished and least educated states in the Union, it is really about the legacy of the underinvestment in public goods and the systems that were set up to create that Massive inequality. And so why did I include that? Right? I included that in the sum of us because I wanted us to question the role that racism plays in shortchanging our public goods and really expand the aperture to see that in a society with weaker public goods than we should have have. We all pay a cost. Not an equal cost, obviously, but we all pay a cost.

[C]

And it self perpetuates. Right, Heather? I mean, the point is the more disinvestment there is in education, in health and public goods and services, the more apt you are as a poor white person in the south to say, and now they're taking away my stuff. What little there is is being taken away. So it's utterly self fulfilling. You know, the famous metaphor that is the lodestar for the book is the parable of the filled swimming pools across America that as soon as there is sufficient organizing and will to integrate swimming pools, the idea becomes we'd rather fill in the pools, we'd rather make sure that nobody swims rather than swimming together. And I think what you are obviously arguing here is that that is so much more acutely felt if you have been denied public goods and services your whole life.

[B]

That's right. I mean, I think that the scarcity model makes people obviously more selfish, right? If you are not used to having a decent life, if you are not used to being able to send your kids to a well funded public school, if you're not used to the kind of safety net that means that if you get sick, you don't go bankrupt or have to avoid seeing a doctor, then any conversation about the improvement of people's lives is seen through that zero sum mentality. The drained pool is really, as you say, the central metaphor in the book. Because it was such a big light bulb moment for me when I discovered that this wasn't an isolated event, that it wasn't just Montgomery, Alabama that closed its entire Parks and Recreation Department for a decade rather than integrate its parks and public pools. But rather this happened all over the country, not just in the Jim Crow South. So much so that the Supreme Court took it up in 1971, right, in Palmer v. Thompson, because people across the country were arguing these cities are closing their public pools in the face of desegregation orders from your courts. And at that point, and this is why, as a good progressive, I never have too much faith, faith in the wisdom of the Supreme Court. You know, in 1971 in Palmer v. Thompson, the court found no constitutional offense in a city draining its public swimming pool rather than Integrating it. They just said basically, you know, Negroes were hurt just as much as whites and whites were hurt just as much as Negroes. And, you know, we're gonna pretend that there was no racial animus here, even though everybody knows that there was. And basically, we're out of the business. Right. We are out of the Brown business. It's 1971. Good luck on your. You know, I have to say, Dalia, this is part of why I've had a real kind of awakening around the role of the courts in the past 10 years or so. Obviously, I went to law school. That was a very sobering experience to dig into our constitutional history in that way. And I just fundamentally believe that the courts need to play a smaller role in deciding these questions. I think we've given too much to the courts and the way in which they can create minority rule and have more often than not sided with the wealthy and the powerful against justice against the people, means that when we keep perfecting our democracy, as I believe we always will be, we're going to very much change the shape of the Court. I think we need to expand the Court, and I think we're going to minimize the role that it plays in subverting the will of the legislatures and of the people.

[C]

Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. And I think you also make this spectacularly true point, which is that we like to think of this golden age at the Court, the Warren era, and how, you know, they did everything right and that somehow lasted into perpetuity. And as I often say, it lasted about six minutes. And, you know, at its zenith, here we are in 1971, still getting it wrong. And I think that the magical thinking about the Court as a protector of minority rights, you know, it had a good run for a couple of years in there, but it's simply not been what the Court does and what the Court can do to protect actual minority rule, which is to say the prerogatives of white slaveholding men 200 years later somehow gets minimized next to, oh, but we got Gideon versus Wayne. Right? Oh, we got Brown v. Board. And so I think your point is an important one. Let's take a brief break and more now with Heather McGee on her book the Sum of Us. I do want to help you remind people that neoliberalism is as much a culprit here as is conservatism. And that one of the things that you. You are really clear about in your book is again, at the high water mark of, you know, the New Deal in the attempts to rectify centuries of oppression and racial discrimination, we're still getting it wrong, right? Whether it's the GI Bill, whether it's housing and redlining. We had Richard Rothstein on the podcast in 2019 talking about the original sin, in some sense, of redlining and housing law, that over and over again, these programs that were supposed to lift up everyone were allowing white families to acquire wealth and leaving black families behind. It's not just the vestige of chattel slavery you argue. It's not just the vestige of Jim Crow. It's that good liberal programs were withholding, building opportunity that gets us to where we are today.

[B]

That's right. And that's really why I use the public pool metaphor. It's sort of, listen, we had these beautiful public pools, nearly 2,000 of them across the country. But they were kind of just like a glittering reflection of this deeper ethos that came in the New Deal era that said, you know, government should actually ensure a decent standard of living for people and attend to the quality of life of her people. And it was really reflected in all of these economic public goods, from Social Security to the GI Bill, this massive investment in housing, the creation of the subsidized home ownership scheme, you know, even our labor laws that all helped to create the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And like the public swimming pools, that was all of it in one way or another, segregated and racially exclusionary. And I go through that in the book. There's this sort of like passage on page 20 and 21 where I kind of delineate all the free stuff, stuff that mostly white Americans got on a racially exclusive basis throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. And, you know, this idea that, that kind of social contract that said, yeah, good jobs, high union jobs, great public benefits, a lot of it was sort of invisible. And through the tax code, a lot of things just made seem free, like college, although of course, government picked up the tab. That all really splintered in the wake of the civil rights movement. And it was sort of like once the public pools were integrated, the majority of white voters would rather drain the pool of public resources rather than integrate that because they'd been taught that there was something wrong with people of color. Right? And so public goods were only supported by the majority of white voters for a public that they believed to be good. And once the public included everybody, there was this turn away from government, this injection of a really anti government conservatism into the common sense of people who used to have no time for it. Right. In the New Deal era in the 40s and 50s. And that really created the massive political realignment. So that of course we know that Lyndon Johnson would become the last Democrat running for president to win the majority of white voters to this day, after he became the civil rights president and signed the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights Acts into law. And nobody wins in the bottom of a drained pool. Everybody has suffered. Not equally, but everybody, but the very wealthy have suffered, as we have failed to remember that collective action is the only way we've ever had nice things in this country. And that collective action in a more diverse society is gonna take multiracial collective action. And that maybe that's okay. Right? And maybe we should support our fellow Americans getting the things that they need and not be resentful of one another's and be willing to come together and look collective solutions. You know, you see it in healthcare. Unbelievable. Totally unjustified opposition to Obamacare. That has been the majority white opinion since the first black president signed it into law. When if you, you know, disaggregate, what are the actual policies that are so odious to the majority of white voters? Like none of them. Right. None of the actual policy planks and features of the Affordable Care act are so upsetting. The largest share of uninsured people in this country are white. But when the Roberts court used a states rights legal theory to strike down the 50 state Medicaid expansion, you saw a new Mason Dixon line of healthcare where most of the former Confederate states refused to expand Medicaid and most of the former non Confederate states said, yeah, sure, we'll take free money to give our people better health care and take the jobs and economic security that comes with that. And so it was again, another kind of drained pool politics around health care that ends up impacting white Americans as well. Right. And the court played a significant role.

[C]

So many of the drain pool policies that you lay out have the fingerprints of the court on it. And I think it's really, as I said, important not to think that the court is out to do anything. But I'm hearing a filament of hope, hope in your voice. And I just want to quell it for one quick second before we get to all the hope, because this is both the book and the podcast are ultimately incredibly optimistic projects. But I do want to just linger on this one thread that you're pulling on, which is mistrust of government and justifiable and legitimate well earned mistrust of government. Government, particularly among people of color. And one of the things that I am again mindful of just marrying my beat to your beat in some sense is the degree to which the anti government rhetoric now comes from the court's conservatives. Whether it's, you know, Neil Gorsuch maligning public health, whether it is, you know, Justice Thomas maligning people who are tasked with handing out gun licenses. The COVID conversation, the famous cliche, right, I'm from the government, I'm here to help, is anathema to all of us. It feels as though the yeoman's work here is going to be fostering a sense that despite the rhetoric we hear throughout the political system, and certainly, again, I think throughout our church jurisprudence, that the government is the problem is that you really do feel like we have moment after moment after moment in which government, if it is creating, you know, cross coalitional, cross racial, thoughtful conversations, government actually can do tremendous work. But I'm just wondering if we're too late, Heather, if the fundamental sense that government can solve the problem can never be re earned because across the boards, everybody says government is the problem.

[B]

You know, I think when you dig into the public opinion data, you see some reasons to make some distinctions that are really useful, right? That there's a question of whether or not you wish government would do more for you to help you and your family. And that has been at a high watermark for a while. The pandemic and the sort of, you know, late stage capitalism and awareness of inequality has really shifted that from where it was in the Clinton era and in the Obama era. And then when you look at it generationally, it's funny that people for whom government has done so much, from free college to the GI Bill to, you know, know, regulatory systems that created clean air and water and high levels of taxation, right? The oldest Americans, they're like, yeah, no, government should do less, right? As they sit there with their fat Social Security checks. But younger Americans are saying, absolutely, government needs to do more and government needs to regulate guns. Government needs to regulate pollution. Right? Government needs to save our lives and save the planet. And so you do see those distinctions. Now you also see that there is a real frustration with government corruption and with government incompetence and government bureaucracy. And I write about that in the conclusion of the book, that those of us who believe in public solutions need to make sure that we are delivering public benefits. Well, and I think I finished writing the book in November of 2020, and I do think that the way we were able to get so much aid out the door and deliver things during the pandemic at scale that we, you know, were just unthinkable before has really shown us that government can right that we can do big things, as Biden likes to say. And I think it is going to change our expectations for a long time. You know, it's all very well and good for justices to be anti government when they are the government, right. When they're paid by the government, when their pensions are with the government, when they have more power, power than most of the planet. And so it's. I always take it with a grain of salt, right. And when they're often very happy for government to do things on behalf of corporations and for them to use the power of the government in the form of the judiciary to make it easier for polluters to pollute and for corporations to union bust and for wealthy people to carry their privilege forward for generation after generation in terms of admissions into college and all of.

[C]

So here really, I am going to invite you to step into the hope because I think the book really lived, as you said, on this fault line between optimism. You know, you were writing the summer that the George Floyd protests were really, I think, profoundly reshaping the national conversation around race voting that was happening despite Covid, the election of President Biden, and then, as you say, pinging into genuine despair around January 6, the rise of authoritarianism, the kind of overt transphobia, racism, misogyny that we are living in right now. I think you better than anyone has captured that sense that to give in to the despair around that is, is in some sense to enable it. And so I know you say this over and over again, but people are starved for hope, Heather, and you have the same experience with audiences that I do, which is people standing in line to just say, hold me, give me some reason for optimism. And I know that the podcast followed on to that and there was a lot that you thought about, even post Dobbs that wasn't in the book. But I would love it if you could give our listeners one of your multiple, multiple, multiple kind of case studies in which actual work across racial and religious and gender and political partisan lines redounds to the benefit of everybody. Because I think for a lot of people, as you say, that's an imaginary proposition. But, but you lived in it. You live in it and it's absolutely true.

[B]

So I wanted to do more with the ideas and the sum of us after I finished the book, particularly the idea of the solidarity dividend, which is this term that I coined to really explain that there are real gains that we can unlock, but only by coming together across lines of race, like cleaner air and higher wages and better funded schools. And I thought, you know, everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. So we've got to tell more stories that are not the zero sum that stories of us actually all doing better when we all do better, and people coming together across lines of race to take on powerful interests and win. And so that's what the Some of Us podcast is. It's a documentary that tells eight new stories of cross racial solidarity and people winning against the odds. There is an episode that talks about the often unsung religious coalition, the interfaith religious coalition that won us Roe v. Wade and how much, much contrary to, you know, the way the religious right has hijacked morality around abortion care. It was priests and pastors and ministers and rabbis who actually created the underground network before Roe, who set the strategy for Roe, and who are back at it again and winning in places like New Mexico and creating shuttles from Texas to New Mexico. So that's a beautiful story that I just loved to report. And it was right before Dobbs. We knew Dobbs was going to happen, obviously. But the story I really want to tell is one of a coalition that was created in Memphis, Tennessee. Now, Memphis is a highly segregated place. There's basically like black Memphis and white Memphis. There are neighborhoods that are 99 and 98% black and white. And it is a place where a couple of years ago you had a big oil company wanting to build a pipeline. And so where did they aim to site the pipeline? Right? Whose land did they target for eminent domain and to try to get them to sell it, to destroy this community, to create this pipeline underground and put it at risk. Of course it was black Memphis, right? And we know the story of environmental injustice and how black people are twice as likely as white people to live near toxic sites. And that that's the way these sacrifice Z work, where communities that don't have the political and economic power to say no, not in my backyard, end up suffering the most. And so I traveled to Memphis and I talked to these amazing people who could really count and name the people who had been lost to cancer because they lived near that much pollution. And yet there was also, what is often part of the story that we don't hear, the way in which sacrifice zones can't ever truly contain the costs, right? Where if a community says, sure, put the pollution on the other side of the Tracks. What they're usually saying is don't worry about controlling the pollution at all. Don't mitigate the risks because we don't care about those people in those communities. And so what ends up happening is those communities that have sacrificed sounds, even the white parts of those cities and towns have more pollution than they would in integrated places where there is no sacrifice zones and where people are able to come together and say, no, no, no, we're not going to have excess pollution for anyone you polluter. You've got to pay. You've got to control it. The story that I tell in the, in the episode two of the podcast called the Sweetest Water in the World is about this unlikely black white coalition that was led by a young man who at the time was working at a nonprofit as an assistant, an administrative assistant. And he was home during COVID He caught wind of this pipeline threatening the black neighborhood. And it's funny because he had actually read the Sum of Us. And so he started saying, there's a solidarity dividend that we can gain here if we make white Memphis and black Memphis aware of each other's struggle and realize that many liberals in white Memphis were focused on the water, right, because there's this amazing sand aquifer that would be threatened by an oil pipeline and make them realize that to stop the pipeline you had to both protect the land of the black community, which was, as the oil company said by accident, out loud, the path of least resistance. You had to protect the path of least resistance in order to protect what the Sierra Club environmentalists were fighting against, which was the pollution of the water. And it was a beautiful cross racial coalition, really in many ways fueled by the racial justice energy of 2020. And the young man who led Memphis community against the pipeline is Justin J. Pearson, who ended up running for state legislature and being one of the Tennessee three who tried to give voice to student and young protesters against gun violence and was expelled from the legislature only to be reinstated. So I love that story because they were able to stop the pipeline. They were able to elevate the leadership of this generational talent. And it really is with an eye to cross racial solidarity. And the fact that I was able to find so many stories of hope, of unlikely victories, means that they're happening. The fact that a majority of voters support expanding the Supreme Court and that when they're told that Republicans have held the majority of the court for 50 years, which is, I think, not common knowledge, it becomes even more intense, the support, I think that says something that says that we're not going to be bound by the sort of restrictions that politics as it is, want to impose on our health, our clean air and water, our reproductive freedom. People are willing to fight for something more for each other.

[C]

I love that as a place to land. Heather and I also really want to point up that you spent the bulk of your career doing congressional testimony and legislative, you know, initiatives, and you have moved into this world of narrative storytelling in no small part, because I think all those people who want hope need to actually see the thing that you're describing, which is these solidarity dividend stories that you are telling over and over again are ways to get involved that when people say, I don't know what to do. And Heather McGee, what should I join? Who should I give money to? What you're saying is actually be a part of this story, which is in some sense much easier than Reinvent the world.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. We created a companion guide to the podcast. It's on the someofus podcast.com because each and every story that we tell in the podcast is just about an ordinary person, right? Justin J. Pearson was literally an assistant at a nonprofit, right? He was 23 years old. The stories we tell are of stay at home parents, of retired school teachers, of people who are just going about their lives and say, you know what? I'm going to do something. And the way I'm going to have more power than doom scrolling is to organize, to begin to ask one other person and one other person and one other person to join with me. And I find the stories of ordinary people who do extraordinary things to be the most inspiring content that we can have. And that's why I wanted to put together the Some of Us podcast. And it really is a testament to the power of democracy, right? And the power of citizenry in the most expansive definition of the term, that we do have the ability to change the future.

[C]

Heather McGee is former President of Demos. Her astounding book, the Sum of what Racism Called Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together was a New York Times bestseller. It was adapted into a Spotify podcast by higher ground in June 2022. The young adult readers version came out this past year. And Heather, whatever the story is that you are telling, I emphatically want to be in it. And I'm so grateful for your voice, especially in a moment when I think, think that feeling powerless only makes us more powerless.

[B]

That's right. That's right. Thank you so much, Talia.

[C]

And that is a wrap for this episode. Of Amicus. Thank you so much for listening in, and thank you so much for your letters and your questions. You can keep in touch with [e-mail] or you can find [e-mail] Amicus Podcast. Today's show was produced by Sara Burningham. Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate, and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We will be back with another episode of Amicus in two short weeks. Until then, take good care.