YouSaid · the spoken record

Heather McGhee

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-12-30
most recent: 2019-12-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That it's hard to get to a commonplace. But I don't think it's impossible. I think Americans put a man on the moon and vented the light bulb in the solar panel and the combustion engine and we could do these things.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. So I fundamentally believe that, and I think you're sort of alluding to what could the reparations conversation be? First, it needs to be a truth commission, right? First, we really need to get closer to a common narrative. And I think that's really hard right now because we have a sort of racial resentment for profit factory in conservative media, conservative corporate media, you know, which will try to fight tooth and nail as they do every time. I remember when Michelle Obama said, you know, that, you know, she was living in a house built by slaves, you know, the right-wing media went crazy. Bill O'Reilly was on talking about how slaves had potatoes. I mean, it just was like, you know, just it makes, there's such an investment in denialism”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think first we need to recognize that we can't move forward while still telling ourselves lies about who we are and what we've done. It means that we'll always be locked in this fight about what the truth is instead of, you know, joining arms and rolling our sleeves up and having some American sense of pride about moving past it, right? I mean, we could actually say and not in a way that feels hollow, but really atones and is true about what we've done. Yeah, Steve.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think part of the problem is that we approach, the American mindset is often falls into a zero-sum trap, where progress for one group is coming at the expense of the other. And that's because that was the way a brutally enforced racial hierarchy would have it be. People become the wealth of a nation, right? That's pretty zero-sum. But that's not where we are anymore. And yet we still have this zero sum mindset. And so I do believe that When we talk about there's been a vested interest. On a personal level, on a political level. To just diminish the role of slavery, of Jim Crow, of redlining, of mass incarceration in shaping the America that we know today, you know, not to mention the near genocide of indigenous peoples. I mean, the list could go on.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of inequality, right? There's a disparities when you talk about inequality. But what I discovered over the years was that race wasn't just an accelerant of inequality, it was a driver of inequality. And so many of the Stories of just bad economic policy making and self-sabotaging economic policymaking and predatory economic policymaking, exploitative were really driven by Buy, you know, racist attitudes”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And I mean, that deindustrialization, you know, which was followed by the growth in crime and loss in public sector resources, which then hit the other half of families that are often, you know, you'd often have a man working in the steel mills and a woman working in the public sector in some way. And it was sort of this one-two punch. That's the economic problem that I kind of started out in my career to solve, which was why is it so hard for working families to get ahead? And David, I will say that over the course of the 10 years, the first 10 years of really working at a class organization, right? My organization was founded by a handful of white men. It was 75% white, and I became president of Deimos. And, you know, the goal was to address inequality. And race was a sort of accelerator.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started out as an economic policy person. You know, those questions I talked about in terms of my childhood, the kind of big economic story that was happening. Know in our politics, which was really scapegoating, I think, single moms where the real economic story that was happening in my backyard was the closing of the factories and the incredible. Economic dissipation. This is how”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in the 19 late 1950s and 1960s, when what was a segregated town or community or public resource then is forced to integrate. And then you saw in towns across the country, not just in the American South, towns deciding to close their public pools, their public parks, their public schools, white parents pulling out of public infrastructure and public schools, you know, the growth of private schools and segregation academies and parochial schools. And ultimately, I think everybody loses out. White children lose out from the gift and the resource that is learning in a diverse environment. White parents have to pay a lot of money to avoid what is public. And of course, students of color who are left behind are not invested in in the way that they would. Have been had the commons remained kind of a white's only space. So I think as”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, some are and some aren't, but it's not the answer, right? I think a many ways we've been trying to find an answer to get away from the public school, to close the public school, to charter out of the public school. For me, I think the disinvestment, the disengagement from not just public schools, but the public period that has happened over my lifetime. I was born in 1980. I think it started under Nixon, but really accelerated under Reagan has been one of the saddest parts of American politics and American policymaking. And the book I'm writing right now about the cost of racism to us all really, you know, one of the chapters is about how racism starves the public, how you have a very close correlation between a community becoming more diverse, whether it's”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Re equalize the local and state funding of public K through 12 education so that your zip code does not determine how much educational resource is poured into you by your neighbors and your family. And I do think that for-profit charter schools are, you know, I've seen them over the course of my lifetime become a way for wealthy people to tap into what is a massive spigot of public funding. And I'm very cynical about them. And I also see that, you know, the data is out that charter schools are not better just because there's something someone can opt into in a way that a neighborhood school isn't, you're not necessarily getting better outcomes. Some are.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, K12 education has not actually been an area where I've done a lot of policy advocacy. I'll just say that from the outset. I've been more focused on the funding of public higher education. And debt. But I do believe that we need to”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gain the knowledge to be able to see where those levers are and gain the power to be able to change them, but also to be able to pull back the curtain for everyday people and reveal how the things we take as common sense are really about public policy choices. And in a democracy, we can make different choices.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government has a really strong role to play in creating opportunity. It does in invisible ways very often. You know, the fact that there is a tax policy that allows for the wealth of a community to be cordoned off and fund its own schools when people two blocks away are being shortchanged and having what was recently calculated as white students have 23 billion dollars more in educational funding than black and people of color majority school districts. Those kinds of invisible policy levers are the things that shape what, you know, we knew growing up is just their good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, good schools and bad schools. And it's been my goal to not only, you know,”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I spent most of my career working at the think tank demos, where the goal is to create in America where we all have an equal chance in our economy and an equal say in our democracy. Inequality, the inequalities of opportunity, of outcome.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was, you know, every dime she made was going to go to her children, right? That was very clear. And it was always clear that you just had to spend your time trying to make the country and your community better. I never really seriously entertained anything else. And so. Any conversation about the educational opportunities that I had was always against the background of trying to make schools better and fairer for everyone. Yeah, that was just part of the discourse”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think my mom worked her tail off and was entrepreneurial, always in the social justice space, right? Always about public health and community health. She created Multicultural education program that train teachers in how to teach about America's diverse history in the 1980s, and she would fly around the country, you know, training teachers on this and selling this curriculum. She was just... Totally ahead of her time. No kidding”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that woman sort of demystified it for her. And it seemed like the perfect solution. It would be a really great private school. And I would, you know, be taken care of 24-7. It ended up being a wonderful experience for me.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very strange story. I think my mom was, I think she was kind of desperate to, she was a single mom who was a workholic and still is to this day. So she was, you know, she was traveling like I travel, right? She was going, you know, three different planes a week. It just wasn't working out in terms of having someone sort of be there for me day in and day out. And I was also precocious kid and she really was looking for an educational sort of solution, right? I mean, as all parents are. And I think she was on a nonprofit board meeting with this white. Woman who was like, you know, there's such a thing as boarding school, which is just totally not on the radar, you know, of black families in the Midwest in generally speaking, you know.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then I also, when I was just 11, was at that first boarding school in junior high. And so I was roommates with people who were. Not black. That was in the western part of Massachusetts, a tiny school called Bement. So one of my roommates was Puerto Rican. One was there.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've only recently started to make sense of it and sort of retell the story of my life to myself, where the role of Mary, my white stepmother was important in that way, in my sort of history of racial thinking, right? I think that it was easy in some ways because it was a child relationship, right? I was a child. And though we know the research tells us that children, you know, as young as five and six years old already have sort of racial stereotypes, you know, they're already so exposed to them that they start to mimic them. It's also easier to create a relationship. You know, when you're young. And then, you know, my stepmother and all of her brothers and sisters are these aunts and uncles and I had white cousins, you know.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and there I went. I had learned about the East Coast, right? And New England and families with big names and just a very different world than the one I had grown up on in.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in the public schools. Fourth grade. My mom moved to Evanston. We left the south side for me to get a better education. And then when I was in junior high, I went away to boarding school, which was a really completely unheard of thing for someone to do. Yes, I went to a smaller boarding school for junior high and then went on to Milton Academy in Massachusetts.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Chicago Very Catholic social justice type of orientation. And so I got to know this white family very young. And I do think that, you know, shaped my kind of ambition for what I thought, you know, the relationship I thought black and white people could have, which is not something that the city of Chicago taught me about by any means, right? Not something the school system taught me about, right? My very segregated school system”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. Where are you finding this information? So my dad married this wonderful woman named Mary, boy even now McGee when I was six. And so my parents split up when I was two. So, you know, I went from having this, you know, pretty all black. You know, in the sort of first half of my childhood to suddenly having this white extended family. And I loved my stepmother. My stepmother loved me. And it was a very positive relationship. And she's one of nine children who were part of this social justice movement in the 60s and 70s that moved to this white, you know, nine children family to the west side after the king riots. It's just one of those only in Chicago stories of, you know, this white family kind of becoming a, you know, doing...”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hearing the sort of discourse about, you know, the reason why we need to reform welfare or the reason why, you know, the economy is not working the way it should is because of, you know, single moms and the sort of decline of the black family and all of that. And I just couldn't square the kind of welfare queen image that was in the media and that my mother would reference with, you know, the black women I knew working two and three jobs, you know, making a way out of no way. It just, it didn't square. And it was sort of the first kind of unjust economic storytelling that I ever heard. And it stuck with me for a really long time and sort of punching through those economic myths has been a really important part of my career ever since.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was. I mean, my, you know, they had shared custody, and I did every other week and every other, you know, every other Wednesday and every other weekend with my dad. But, you know, the identity of single mother was something that my mom very much identified with. And she was the breadwinner. She was the person who had my brother and me most of the time. And it was also a period of time where black single mothers were being vilified. So there was a lot of conversation around our kitchen table about, you know, the sort of role of the single mother, right? She was also doing work with a lot of single mothers in public housing and in early childhood education. And we were a very politically active household. And I just remember”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandmother was a social worker. My mother was a holistic health practitioner who worked in the public housing on the south side and the west side. So I grew up with it in my bones. I remember there's a picture of Harold Washington in your office. And I remember having his headshot my mom gave it to me when he was elected and it was in my bedroom and I remember looking at it and crying when I found out he died. It's a very vivid early. That was it.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally a great migration story. My mother's family came from Alabama to Cleveland and Chicago. My father's family came from Mississippi and Louisiana to Chicago. And, you know, I grew up in Southside in the 1980s, which was very, it was a very thick kind of black middle class working middle class community where it really felt like everybody was in some role that was somehow trying to turn the wheels of progress forward, you know, my actually my grandfather was a police officer in internal affairs in Chicago PD in the 60s, if you can imagine that in the 70s.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was born, the apartment we lived in was an apartment building that my great grandmother owned that I recently found out she had bought on a contract loan, which is those terrible predatory loans where that were sold to black people before we could get traditional mortgages where you just paid and paid and paid. And if you missed a payment, you just lost the whole. So”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has been so great, David, just a phenomenal program you have here. I joke that if I'd had this. When I was an undergrad, you know, I probably would have run for office already and have my ducks all in a row. Well, we'll get to all of that.”
2019-12-30 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 362 — Heather McGhee · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source