How the Story You Believe Impacts Everyone with Heather McGhee

Aurora: Thank you for joining us today and spending this moment with us.

Heather: Great to be with you both.

Kelly: Would you mind sharing your name and pronouns and a little bit about your journey?

Heather: Sure. My name is Heather Cherise McGee. I knew she her pronouns and I was born on the south side of Chicago. I grew up in a family – My parents were divorced. I primarily lived with my my mother, who was and is today my most tremendous role model and hero. She was a healer and an advocate and a force for good on the south side of Chicago and then the world. I never really questioned that I would try to make the world a better place with my life. That just seems like an obvious choice for me, it seems like what what you did, right? And I was very lucky to have a model of that with my mother as how you could sort of use your heart and your mind to change the rules that shape opportunity and to make people’s lives better in ways that reached beyond the individual and looked at the community level. So my first jobs, my internships were all in advocacy and public policy. I remember, you know, writing letters in high school to the NAACP and the National Organization for Women and saying, you know, “Could you please, you know, help me help others.” And I eventually made my way to an organization as my first real career job in 2002 called Demos. And “Demos” is the Greek word for “the people” and the root word of democracy. And it was a think tank that had just started about the year before. And they were hiring their first employee in the economics program, an entry level position – someone who was going to help advocate and research around issues of debt, consumer debt, personal debt, student debt, credit cards, mortgages, payday loans. And that to me felt like it was right on the money of the kinds of everyday concerns that the families that I had grown up with and my own family really cared about, and that very few people in politics or even in academia and policy were were concerned about. So I was thrilled. And I got the job. I started working there when I was 22. And 13 years later, I ended up becoming president of Demos, that same organization. It was – it was wonderful. I’m now a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, still using my time to do research and advocacy to address inequality.

Aurora: Heather, share with us – you know, Demos, his has been at the forefront of so much research and so much examination of our policy, the shifts in our economic market. Can you can you kind of share with us sort of your view of what’s transpired for all of us in the last 20 to 25 years and then bringing us to how inequality is a core or continues to be a core factor in 2000 and 20?

Heather: Absolutely. You know, I start this question by thinking about how easy or hard is it for your average working family to get by and get ahead. And the answer to that question for the entirety of my life. You know, again, I said I was born in 1980. I say that not just to be transparent about my age, but also because, you know, that was really an inflection point year when the rules began to change to actually undermine the middle class that had been created through deliberate construction over much of the 20th century, in the 30s, 40s and the 50s and the 60s. And then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we really started seeing a bunch of different rule changes. I grew up and I’m sure most people grew up thinking about people getting ahead or doing well because of who they were and how hard they worked. And of course that’s true, but it’s also true that the rules of the game can make it easier for some players efforts to be rewarded or not. And when you’re looking at, you know, big questions, can a guy without a college degree go get a job that ends up giving him health care, retirement benefits, vacation time, you know, a way to save? Can that same guy with, you know, not much income, but, you know, a steady paycheck, buy a house and then have some savings leftover to send his kid to college? Right. Which was, you know, the kind of picture of the American dream. That wasn’t because that guy was so different than that same guy today. It was because the rules were different. We had high levels of unionization because of the labor laws that we had. We had tax policy that made sure that the wealthy contributed their fair share. And the work of working class people was was not taxed as high as the wealth of the already wealthy. We had a minimum wage that was high enough to keep a family out of poverty. We had housing laws that made it easy for people to get safe loans and downpayment assistance. If that guy that I’m talking about happened to fall into a bunch of different categories, all of which I will say advantaged white men and excluded black and brown families. So those are the kinds of rules that help create the middle class that we, you know, sort of really associate with the American dream. And pretty much every single one of those rules changed over the course of the 80s and 90s to the point today where if you look at my generation and younger, it takes two working parents to be able to have that kind of economic security. And still then the big rocks in American life, the cost of child care, health care, whether you’re able to save for retirement. And do so you know, it’s pretty much gone for for younger workers. The idea of having a pension where the corporation, you know, save some of your money in pools, the investment, you actually get your own 401K that you have to fund and it’s as risky and volatile as anything else on the stock market. The cost of college, which is something I hope we come back to in this conversation place, has skyrocketed because we’ve we’ve gotten rid of the public support for public education and so it’s been privatized and shunted onto individual families. All of these big rocks that a family has to sort of pile up in order to maintain their security have become just really insurmountable. And that’s because of rule changes. And when you layer onto that race and gender and the understanding that that white male middle class dream, that was very much the the creation of public policy, now that we have women who want to be head of households and are, you know, are calling the shots in their families and are, you know, contributing more than their fair share in families, those rules have gotten less protective of economic security. Now that we have more people of color and immigrants who are in the population and demanding a voice in our democracy, those rules have changed. And a big reason for that is that the people writing the rules largely haven’t changed. Before this most – this most diverse Congress that we’ve ever seen that came in largely on the activism and volunteerism of women organizing in the 2018 midterm elections. 90 percent of America’s lawmakers at the state, federal and local level were white and two thirds of them were white men. So, you know, we just have a society where we have not – our policies that our rules have not kept pace with, who the population is and how we live. And the only people that are continuing to benefit from those rules are the people at the very top, the people who are already wealthy and powerful, who have seen their wealth skyrocket over the last two generations. And now the richest 5 percent of Americans own two thirds of the wealth. And the least well-paid quarter of Americans are underwater, owing more than they own.

Aurora: And so, Heather, what were what were the tenants? What were the key sort of tipping points that changed the rules? What what shifted in what we believed? What shifted in what we.

Kelly: Desired?

Aurora: Desired. What shifted in the narrative that we either bought into or didn’t buy into?

Heather: You know, that’s really at the heart of the question because I’ve talked about some of the rule changes, right. The fact that we’ve made it harder for workers to unionize. Right. It used to be at its peak that a third of the workers in the country were working on a job that was covered by a union contract. And what does that mean? Right. It just means basically that just as, for example, you know, and a homebuyer may bargain with the seller for the price of a house workers who are not the executives get to say, “You know what? There are hundreds of us here working and we want to say to the boss, we’d like a raise,” or “We want there to be certain safety protections,” or “We want to have our hours work in a certain way. And in fact, there are more of us here and we’re more important to the work than just the couple of people who are making decisions. And so we should have a seat at the table and be able to bargain equally.” That is about as democratic, about as freedom inducing as they come. It is as American as apple pie and yet it has become an economic pariah to, you know, the people who are setting the rules. The idea that ordinary people should be able to have a say in their pay and their benefits – that idea has fallen out of favor. It used to be that you had the Henry Ford’s of the world and the sort of titans of industry, you know, they had to be forced to the bargaining table. But they understood that there was some benefit. Now we have a full scale war in the C suites against the idea of unionization and a lot of propaganda in the rest of society saying unions are for yesterday. You know, unions don’t don’t have a place in the modern era.

Kelly: Yeah. It’s just the negative connotations of organized crime. Then, you know, the picture and stories that are behind the negative pictures and stories that are behind the word union.

Heather: That’s right. And instead, you should be thinking of unions as – you know, they’re a bunch of unionized grocery stores. So you’ve got you know, well usually women behind the checkout counter who have health care because they have a union or, you know, janitors in some places in the country where they’ve fought justice for janitors campaigns, where you’ve got people who work all night cleaning in some of the hardest, most thankless work there is who get to come home and send their kids to school with a full lunch because they’ve been able to bargain for, you know, 13 or 14 dollars an hour instead of seven. And I’ll just say that as a woman and as a person of color, unions matter even more to us because unions end up actually fighting against pay discrimination that is so rampant in our economy, because if you have a contract, it’s harder for a boss to say, “I’m going to pay you less than a man for the same job,” because there are rules about that. So women and people of color have a big stake in seeing collective bargaining. Those labor laws changed. We also had a minimum wage that was high enough to keep a family out of poverty. And it is not today. You know, I think about the fact that workers are working harder. Our productivity has soared. Right. You know, the actual value of our work has actually increased, but wages have been flat. And it used to be that as productivity increased, wages increased. And now what’s happened is that the gains from that productivity have basically, at most corporate employers, gone to the stock price. And the problem is workers don’t share in that stock price, right. Less than half of Americans own any stock at all. And most workers are not, you know, benefiting from what happens on the stock market. So we’ve got a bunch of different rules. S lso one of the rules changes that we made was to stop increasing the minimum wage and to let the tipped wage the wage for restaurant servers, airport, you know, attendants and other tipped workers get frozen since 1991 at just two dollars and 13 cents an hour. Now, the the non tipped minimum wage is not much better at 725, but two dollars and 13 cents an hour and employers are supposed to make up the difference, but that rule is is largely flouted. And so you’ve got people, mainly women in that in those industries who are working for tips and bringing home poverty wages and subject to abuse from customers because they depend on them instead of on their employer for their take home pay.

Heather: So those were the rule changes. Aurora, you asked another question, which I think is so important was were there changes in beliefs and the narratives behind those rule changes to support those rule changes? And on the one hand, I will say no. The American people, generally speaking, actually want a higher minimum wage, including the majority of Republicans. The American people want higher taxes on the wealthy and investments in things like roads and schools, including the majority of Republican voters. So in some ways, the beliefs and desires haven’t changed. And mostly what you see on some of these basic economic questions is a major disconnect between the donor class of both political parties and the elected officials who are either from that donor class themselves – right half of the Senate are millionaires themselves – or are dependent on wealthy people to fund their campaigns. And so you just have different economic priorities and different desires, right, among the people who are sort of calling the shots versus the majority of American people. So on the one hand, you can say, you know, and I think this is something that, you know, we really fight out in politics is do the voters actually want a more progressive and fair economy or are we really divided on some of these basic questions? On the other hand, there was something that changed and I alluded to it when I was talking about that archetypal guy, you know, without a college degree who could go in and get a job that would set him up and his children up for life. It’s it’s very important that that archetypal guy was a guy and be white. He looked like of his employer. He looked like the people in the C suite. He looked like the people writing the laws in the statehouse in Washington. There was a social contract between white men that made it easy for average, not exceptional white men to have a decent, if not great life. And I think Donald Trump taps into that both on the gender piece and on the race piece. And he he’s not wrong to say that there was a time when it was really great to be a white guy. And he’d like to go back to that time. And he’s talking to people who are saying, “Yeah, I’d like to go back to that time.” Now, the problem is, where’s the blame that he is assigning? And I would say that it’s he’s mostly assigning blame on immigrants and people of color for what has changed in the American economy. But if you go back to those rules, I was talking about tax policy, collective bargaining, minimum wage, the rules around whether you could afford a house or afford college, whether you had health care benefits or retirement benefits. It wasn’t immigrants writing those rules. It was wealthy, powerful people who were either corporate executives or board members and in many cases, policy makers writing the public rules. And so what has changed? I would say is that we’ve had a very long campaign of scapegoating. And fundamentally, there has been a whole lot of white anxiety around the changing face of America. The integration of America, the idea that, you know, for generations white Americans were told that to be white was to be normal and good and hard working and that to be anything else was suspect, was dangerous, was criminal, was unclean, was lazy, was unworthy. And then suddenly everything started to change. So those classes of people who, you know, every part of public life told you we’re bad. We’re suddenly expected to, you know, be in your school and, you know, working beside you, you know, holding political office, getting promotions. And, you know, as a black woman, I have a very different narrative, but it’s very clear that that narrative as dominant and that it didn’t altogether go away with the rules that changed around the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. And so we’ve got now some racially polarized politics.

Heather: We don’t have to fall for the the lie that says that, you know, there’s no place for government, that government just is taking from worthy people and giving to undeserving people. That lie has been bought by the majority of white people. Right if you looks at public opinio polling they say that government does more for black people than it does for white people, which is manifestly untrue.

Heather: That lie has eroded support for the things we have in common and actually made it harder for the average white family to do all those things. I was talking about – to save for the future. Right. To afford child care. To afford to send their kid to college. I mean, I think about the crisis in student debt, which is something that we’ve worked a lot on at Demos. That is something that absolutely impacts the average white middle class family because white families are still sending their kids on to college and can afford to more than families of color. It’s sort of disproportionately a white problem, the crisis of rising tuition. And yet it’s a problem of government cutbacks. It’s a problem that we have wrought by having state governments. Cut taxes and cut spending and shift their spending from higher education to prisons. And what we’ve seen is that the amount of money that it costs to sending a kid to school hasn’t skyrocketed in terms of the actual cost. What skyrocketed is the amount that individuals and families have had to pay because the government has cut back. So we’ve seen this stealth privatization of public state colleges, community colleges and state universities and that has been driven and accepted by an anti-government narrative that, you know, like it or not, know it or not the majority of white people are buying into. Because that it’s it’s been sold very, very, very aggressively and suddenly for for more than a generation now.

Kelly: I think back when I went to Penn State, it was $9400 and now it’s over $30000. And my dumb ass thinks that these, you know, college tuitions just keep on going up. Just keep on going up. But the narrative is really. Can you repeat it again for the people in the back?

Heather: It used to be that state budgets provided the majority of the cost of educating a student at state schools. That’s why it was a public school. There was always some cost sharing, but it used to be the majority was public money. And what happened was that states cutback shifting more of the cost onto individual families. And then the federal government provided loans to allow people to do that. And so you get now the majority of students taking out loans. Those loans end up costing far more in the end than the amount borrowed. And you’re starting to see fewer people per, you know, per generation able to go and complete college, which is the exact opposite direction that we need to go in a knowledge based economy.

Kelly: Mm hmm.

Aurora: Yeah, I mean, I was sharing with with Kelly. You know, I went to school by hook or by crook – tons of loans. And guess what? A lot of grants. And still graduated with a ton of debt. You know, I just look at, you know, not only is this an issue that obviously disproportionately affects white people, but it also affects people of color and poor people. Right. Because that the access that access to pull yourself up from the bootstraps, quote unquote, that access to education, which for many of us has been the ticket to shifting our generational stories and histories, is becoming less and less.

Heather: That’s right. And there’s another way that the generations play into this. I say that, you know, student debt and the rising cost of college is in many ways a white problem because, you know, most white families are able to send their kids to some collehe. And it’s, you know, the degree holding population is higher among white families. But it is absolutely disproportionately burdensome on families of color and particularly black families. And here’s how that works. First of all, I think about myself and one of my coworkers, my coworker Tammy came from an emblematic white working class family in Ohio. Her dad was a steelworker. Her mom worked sometimes and sometimes was a homemaker. She went to the state school in Ohio. And yet somehow, A) when she went to school in the 90s, the tuition was still low because Ohio was still paying for the majority of the cost of funding. And B) her dad had because he was in a unionized job, you know, had a few savings bonds and stocks and, you know. There was an inheritance there that he was actually able to pay the $5000 and she was able to pay the rest, you know, working as a waitress during the summers. They had, they owned a house – she grew up in a house that she owned because white people were allowed to buy houses in the suburbs where she grew up. And if you look at my family, my parents didn’t own a house until I was out of college. And there was no savings. There was no intergenerational wealth. There was no, you know, separate, difficult of deposit or, you know, aunt that, you know, passed down $5000. The white working class family has more wealth than a very educated black family. And specifically, the household wealth of somewhat of a family that’s headed by a white high school dropout has the same amount of wealth as a black family that’s headed by a black person with a college degree. Because that’s not about education. It’s not about bootstraps. It’s not about how hard you work or how dedicated you are to playing by the rules, which is the narrative. It’s about whether or not your grandparents were allowed to buy property or excluded from buying property, whether in fact, they were given basically a house for free in terms of, you know, a downpayment grant and a 30 year loan that allowed you to pay your mortgage off over 30 years at a low fixed rate, which happened en masse to white working class people in the middle of the century and explicitly excluded through racial covenants and government policy that no black people could so do. And so you have this racial wealth divide. That’s not about what we do now, but it’s about what the government did a generation ago, two generations ago that makes it so that today, black students have to borrow more to go to college because they don’t have that wealth to draw on and they end up, you know, spending more to pay it off afterwards because of discrimination in the labor market. So there we’re getting, you know, lower paid jobs and taking off, taking longer to pay it off.

Aurora: That’s it. That’s it. I know that one of the themes that you speak about in a lot of the body of your work, Heather. And I think this is important. I’d love it. Is a way that you can connect these dots, which is the social contract, right. And how the social contract in America shifted when, as you pointed out, the beneficiary of a lot of our programs was the white male. And as our demographics have continued to shift and will accelerate, shifting not only with the millennial population but also Gen Z, how that social contract and the role of government will continue to not only disproportionately harm people of color, but as will continue to harm white people and where our freedom and the pursuit of happiness and the beliefs that we have as Americans are actually really much more intrinsically linked.

Heather: I think it all comes down to this: Do you believe that, generally speaking, your average person is good, industrious, hardworking, that they can, you know, that they’re going to do the right things and contribute if they’re just given, you know, a shot and some safeguards from exploitation or not? Policymaking sort of flows from that. And the way that bosses treat workers sort of flows from that. And I think you saw a rule making that reflected that social contract that said, “You know what? I see you. I recognize in you something of me. And I’m going to make sure that you don’t fall off a cliff. I’m going to make sure that, generally speaking, your work is rewarded. I want you to have a good life. I assume you’ll do good things with it.” And the problem is, at that same time, there was such a negative narrative about women and people of color and immigrants that once women and people of color and immigrants. All right – and I say immigrants, because in 1965 we had the Immigration Act of 1965, which which changed the color of who was immigrating.

Heather: You had these other narratives that there was something wrong with you deficient, that you were so unclean that you shouldn’t have access to the same water fountain, that you were so incompatible with American democracy that we should exclude you from the country like we did the Chinese, or that we should see you as a threat and intern you like we did the Japanese or that you you were too irrational to hold power as we did with women. And so suddenly, policies became more punitive, right. The social contract became became less generous. We kind of took the brakes off of allowing corporations to exploit people in many ways, as we did in the financial sector. And we stopped creating policies that would make the average family, you know, guarantee them a certain amount of security. Whether there’s retirement security, health care, child care, which was increasingly necessary as women were going to work. Most of governments just sort of turned a blind eye to needing to really support that in any real way. And it’s just become a more go alone economy. And so without that social contract, what we’ve seen is a massive underinvestment in public schools, in public colleges, even in our roads and bridges and our water systems. You know, I try to think about what it would be like if we had to create the interstate highway system today. It’s like the high speed rail that President Obama proposed. It was you know, it was seen as some suspicious, terrible government boondoggle when, you know, it’s about as old school Republican ideas you can get. But it’s because the idea of doing things together and if government spending has become so toxic and racialized and feminized that we don’t have that contract. And the problem is everybody depends on those public investments, not just people of color. It’s like the story has become that all of government is welfare and that a welfare is only for women and people of color when that’s not even true about welfare. And it’s certainly not true about government.

Aurora: Exactly. Yeah.

Kelly: And then I just start to get the scaries, it’s like where does it go from there?

Heather: We’ve already had the scaries, right? You know, we have places all across the country where, you know, the sewers are backing up in the pipes and where the water is not drinkable, where the schools have asbestos. You know, raining down and the kids are going to school in crowded classrooms and in trailers. We already have a generation that is being asked to shoulder an unprecedented financial burden just because we’re not willing to pay for college out of the enormous wealth that our country is still created, right. It’s not that our country has gotten poorer.

Aurora: Not at all.

Heather: It’s, in fact, the exact opposite, but it’s that we’ve decided that, you know, our people are not worth investing in anymore. I think there will be a turnaround, because I think if you look at young people and young people’s values, it is all about the common good, is all about protecting the planet. It is all about investing in each other. I just hope that, you know, there’s still something left by the time that young people get a chance to be the ones writing the rules.

Aurora: Well, you’re helping write the rules. And at least pointing out the data and the quantitative facts that are connected to the qualitative storylines, narratives, perceptions that people are either choosing to buy into or not. But you’re helping us at least understand what the real facts are.

Heather: Yeah. I don’t want to leave folks with the sense that there aren’t good rules being written every day, right. I mean, I have been able to be at the table in these bright moments when the stars aligned and good things happened in Washington in state houses. You know, we helped create the Credit Card Act of 2009, which put safeguards on credit cards for the first time in generations and have led to over 50 billion dollars in fees alone being saved by people who have credit cards. I was there at the table helping to write the Dodd-Frank Act, which helped create Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned 12 billion dollars in, you know cheated and swindled money from banks and lenders back to the pockets of everyday families. I’ve been there at the table as we’ve written laws to make our democracy more responsive. To do things like paid family leave in the state of New York, the most progressive paid family leave act that we’ve seen. So change is possible. I mean, that’s the one piece of hope that I have when I see how much our economic circumstances really do have to do with the rules then it’s possible that the rules can be changed in a democracy. But I’m gonna be very blunt about this, the majority of white people are voting in a way that aligns with an ideology and a belief system that ultimately, you know, in its current form is stripping our country for parts and selling it to the highest, highest bidder and is creating a threadbare safety net, is attacking the most vulnerable, is, you know, writing checks for them, a massive kickback in terms of the Trump tax cuts that did little to nothing for working families. And is driving, you know, a trillion dollar deficit for the first time and not because we had an economic crash, but because, you know, we just wrote a bunch of checks to people who are already wealthy and didn’t need it. And it’s really going to be incumbent on white people to see their fates as linked with the rest of us and to recognize that when you shred the safety net and when you shred the web of mutuality that connects people in a society, ultimately anyone can can fall through those gaps. And that’s what’s happening. It’s happening in rural white areas. It’s happening to, you know, middle class families that feel like they’re drowning, even though they’re working very hard and feel like they’ve done everything right. And I think it’s going to be incumbent upon women. Women who have been the most powerful force in our democracy over the past three years, from the biggest protest ever waged in this country with the Women’s March to the Me Too movement to the record number of women running for office and winning in 2018 – All of that fueled by women’s activism. Women are on fire and white women are are on fire, too. I think it’s it’s really important that there be a major shift in women’s leadership and in a recognition that a more diverse country with more women’s leadership is not something that we need to fear, but we need to embrace.

Kelly: Yes, yes, yes. To your point and to our point, fostering racial solidarity is a I think of utmost importance right now.

Aurora: Yeah. I think the way that I also think of it is, you know, I tend to think of it as it is a shift in mindset. It’s the “service only to self” mindset to a “service to all” mindset. And that when I do come from a place of service, that that doesn’t to your point, devalue the size of the pie. It actually makes it bigger.

Heather: But I think us white people have been sold a bill of goods where we have drank the water that says “I’m the most important and I have to watch out for my own.” But I don’t think we realize and I think to your – you have a lot of points about this, heather, I don’t think we realized how much our racism impacts us and what we are.

Heather: I’m writing a book right now – almost finished with is and it will be out in January of next year – that’s specifically about the costs of racism, not just to people of color, but to white people as well. And the way that racism leads to bad policymaking and bad decision making. It makes for bad economics. It’s poisoning our environment. And it also has spiritual and personal costs for white people as well.

Kelly: Oh, I can’t I can’t wait to read that. Do you have any teasers for us on that? I mean, quantifying and qualifying this is important. We get asked it on a daily basis. Yeah.

Heather: Yeah. I mean, much of what I’ve talked about is in the book. But, you know, the central parable at the heart of the book is the story of the many towns, not just in the American South, that had grand public swimming pools as these sort of, you know, big public goods that everybody, you know, the boss and the worker could, you know, meet at on the weekend. And it was a big social feature of many towns and cities that started to. Be built in the 1930s and 40s and in the 1950s and 60s, when integration orders and desegregation orders came down from the courts or from advocacy by black families in these towns, many towns decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than let black families swim alongside white families. And that meant that, of course, white families lost a tangible asset. That meant they had to start – That’s where you saw this sort of advent of the backyard pool and the private swimming club and all these things that cost more and didn’t function in that sort of socializing community building way. But it was a time, in many ways a microcosm of of what we’re doing across the country.

Aurora: And may I add, it made it a lot less fun.

Heather: That’s right. There’s so much joy to be had there in in really embracing the communities that we live in. I mean, as you two know, there’s sort of nothing more special than finding human connection with someone that you’re not, quote unquote, supposed to connect with. The finding that spark of humanity and commonality and then learning about the different places you come from – that’s that is one of the most beautiful and revealing parts of humanity. And we have that opportunity in this country. And so often white families are resegregating or moving into, you know, private developments and and and gated communities in the name of safety. But it’s really locking out a piece of their own humanity.

Aurora: If you could ask our audience, our listeners, what would you ask them to opt in to?

Heather: If the listener and I’m reaching at this moment is a white woman or someone who’s in a relationship, you know, in close relationship with white women, I would ask your listeners to opt in to take leadership of changing the political beliefs and fears of other white women in your circle, because it really is the complicity of of white women that is allowing this political movement that seeks to divide us and then profit for their own gain. That is making it harder for white women to raise their families more expensive, to not have any government support for for childcare or for the cost of college, that keeps attacking the little health care protections that we have, that is keeping the minimum wage low, which is a women’s issue, because women are the majority of people working under them and working at the minimum wage. If there are reasons why, you know, racialized fears, other ideas about kind of “well, the stock market’s doing well,” or, you know, whatever it is that that makes it better. That is excusing the kind of political status quo that is putting babies in cages, that is allowing the climate to continue to warm at levels that is going to make our children have a worse life. Really look look closely and ask the questions, you know, what do you believe? It’s not that often that we we realize how much power we have. And I think white women are holding the power and are the key to changing our society for the better.

Kelly: Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Heather. Our last question goes to you. What is the intergenerational wisdom you’d like to impart?

Heather: Well so I’m like a millennial grandmother and my I was born a man the first year millennial grandmother.

Kelly: Yeah, I’m right. I’m right ahead of you. I’m seventy nine, right. Exactly.

Heather: So I feel very much betwixt and between all these generations. I’m not Gen X. Not quite millennial.

Kelly: Agreed!

Heather: I will say that even though young people today have seen a cascade of failures by the political elites and those who have been entrusted with running the show. The financial crisis, wars in the Middle East that we had no business starting and no plan to get out of, you know, climate change unabated. Don’t succumb to cynicism. That would be my advice. You know, it does feel in many ways like the center is not holding and that, you know, the emperor has no clothes, but it’ll soon be your turn to lead and you can piece it back together and piece it back together in a way that is new and in a way that is more fitting with the values that we aspire to in this country and less holding over many of the beliefs and the fears and the hatreds that that have come with this country as well. Step into lead. Raise your hand and say, “I’ll do it,” because that’s the only way we’re going to change.

Aurora: Beautiful. Heather, truly an honor, thank you for making the time. And thank you for sharing such insight on how we can all do better. And dare I say, we must do better. Yes.

Heather: Thank you. And thank you, too, for having this conversation. And for your friendship and for modeling what cross racial solidarity looks like. I think it is the most important value that we can cultivate in our society today.

Aurora: Thank you.

Kelly: Thanks, Heather.

Kelly: Wow, well my mind is absolutely blown.

Aurora: Heather is a force of nature.

Kelly: And she;s got a lot in store. She’s got a Ted Talk coming out soon AND her forthcoming on will be out in January 2021. We’ll link her socials in the show notes.

Aurora: We know you probably have a LOT of thoughts on this. So find us on the social @THE-OPT-IN and let us know what’s on your mind.

Kelly: And really thank you all for being here with us. We want to keep giving you powerful conversations that hit on topics from spirituality to politics! We’re so happy you’re joining us on this ride.

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: Talk next week.

Aurora: Bye.join