I first met Heather McGee nearly 20 years ago when she was hired as a researcher at Demos, the think tank I had helped create in 1999. Even back then, in her early twenties, Heather was a superstar, and sure enough, she eventually ended up running the place, becoming president of Demos in 2014. She held that position until 2018 when she left Demos to begin traveling through America to research and write her new book, “The Sum of Us: How Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”
Heather’s book makes the most powerful case I’ve seen yet about the costs of racism and racial division. What’s so unusual about her argument is that she doesn’t mainly focus on the costs inflicted on people of color. Instead, she zeroes in on how racism also hurts white people by undermining government and the ability of Americans to come together to solve our biggest problems.
I spoke to Heather not long after her book was published last month. In our conversation, we talked about the journey that led her to write the book and what she hopes to achieve with its publication. Over her career, Heather has worked to have an impact in different ways. Before she led Demos, she held several positions in the organization, including playing an important role in the complicated legislative battle to enact the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 after the financial crisis. Heather also served as a policy advisor to Sen. John Edwards during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Heather came to write “The Sum of Us” after years of being frustrated in her work to reverse the decline of America’s middle class. “We just weren’t winning over with common-sense economic policy proposals the majority of white voters,” she told me. “And it felt like we weren’t even speaking to the same stories that were animating their votes.” Heather believed that race was a giant “boulder” blocking the path of progress by dividing Americans, and that until we found a way to remove that obstacle, the kind of research and advocacy work that Demos and other policy organizations were doing would be unlikely to succeed. Her book is filled with examples of how white racism and a backlash to the civil rights movement led to disinvestment in public goods, hurting not just people of color, but also whites themselves. But Heather offers a hopeful vision of how things could be different if we can overcome racial division, build a strong multiracial movement and realize what she calls a “solidarity dividend.”
As we discuss in the interview, some of Heather’s thinking about how to build a strong multiracial consensus for change emerged from an initiative that she helped create at Demos called the Race-Class Narrative Project with Anat Shenker-Osorio and Ian Haney López. Earlier this year, Blue Tent published an interview with Haney López about his work and we’ve also written about how activists used the race-class narrative in Minnesota during the 2020 election.
Heather’s book is beautifully written, richly detailed, and packed with insight into the deep current of American political life. I hope you enjoy my interview with her—and also buy the book.
