Heather McGhee, Ibram X. Kendi, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad discuss the critical need for deep historical reckoning, the false zero-sum game that has developed on what is at stake in our communities, as well as the ways that racism as a system hurts all of us.
In this special episode of Untying Knots, hosts Erica Licht and Nikhil Raghuveera share a discussion from the 2021 Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on October 14-15th 2021. The conference brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, and organizational leaders to address whether organizations have lived up to the statements, commitments, and promises they made to racial equity a year before.
Heather McGhee, author and former President of Demos, and Ibram X. Kendi, author, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, kicked off the conference with a JFK Jr. Forum discussion co-hosted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, IARA’s Director, moderated the conversation which engaged the critical need for deep historical reckoning, the false zero-sum game that has developed on what is at stake in our communities, as well as the ways that racism as a system hurts all of us.
You can find Untying Knots episodes, including more discussions from the 2021 Truth and Transformation conference, wherever you get your podcasts, and, on the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project website: https://ash.harvard.edu/iara
Notes:
Untying Knots, co-hosted by Nikhil Raghuveera and Erica Licht, explores how people and organizations are untying knots of systemic oppression and working towards a more equitable future. Each episode features special guests and a focus on thematic areas across society.
This podcast is published by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center in collaboration with the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center.
Music:
Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5025-beauty-flow
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
About the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project
The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project believes in working at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address intellectual and practical questions as they relate to antiracism policy, practice, and institutional change. In order to create and sustain change, the goal of this project is to promote antiracism as a core value for organizations by critically evaluating structures and policies within institutions. The project aims to analytically examine the current field of antiracism with a lens on research and innovation, policy, dialogue, and community involvement.
Our vision is to be a leader in institutional antiracism research, policy, and advocacy, and propose structural change in institutions and media centered on antiracism work in the public, private, non-profit sectors and digital space. This work will focus on researching existing organizations that conduct antiracism training and development while analyzing their effectiveness and promoting best practices in the field. Additionally, we will study the implementation of antiracism work among institutions that self-identify as antiracist and promote accountability structures in order for them to achieve their goals.
About the Ash Center
The Ash Center is a research center and think tank at Harvard Kennedy School focused on democracy, government innovation, and Asia public policy. AshCast, the Center's podcast series, is a collection of conversations, including events and Q&As with experts, from around the Center on pressing issues, forward-looking solutions, and more.
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Ibram X. Kendi:
For the individual, the question is, "Are you challenging the structure? Are you challenging the system, or are you reinforcing it?"
Erica Licht:
Hey, everyone. You're listening to a special episode of Untying Knots. I'm your host, Erica Licht.
Nikhil Raghuveera:
And I'm Nikhil Raghuveera.
Erica Licht:
We're really excited today to share with you a discussion from the recent Truth and Transformation Conference that we held on October 14th to 15th. The IARA convening, which is the third iteration, brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, organizational leaders, and many others. And we gathered to address this question of whether organizations have lived up to all of the statements, commitments, and promises they made to racial equity a year ago.
Nikhil Raghuveera:
And to kick off the conference, we were joined by Heather McGhee, author and former president of Demos. And Ibram X. Kendi, author and Andrew W. Mellon professor in the humanities at Boston University, for a JFK Jr. Forum discussion. Co-hosted by Harvard's Institute of Politics.
Erica Licht:
Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, IARA's director, moderated the conversation, and it touched on many subjects, tightly connected to all three of their work and scholarship, including the critical need for deep historical reckoning, the false, zero-sum gain that is developed and what is at stake in our communities, as well as the ways that racism as a system hurts all of us.
Nikhil Raghuveera:
As a reminder, all views expressed by our speakers are their own.
Erica Licht:
Thanks for listening.
Setti Warren:
Good evening. I'm Setti Warren, executive director of the Institute of Politics here at Harvard Kennedy School. Welcome to the John F. Kennedy Forum and welcome to the third annual Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at the Ash Center here at the Kennedy School. This year's conference is entitled, Reflecting on a Year of Promises. At this year's conference, we'll look back at a year of promises to improve diversity, equity and inclusion. And we'll ask, did organizations keep their promises, what additional work needs to be done? In addition to kicking off this year's conference, tonight's panel also introduces a new speaker series entitled, Reckoning With the Past, Rebuilding Our Future. The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at Ash, in conjunction with the Institute of Politics, wants to critically examine a year of promises of institutional antiracism change and American history of oppression towards, and resistance by, indigenous people and people of color.
Setti Warren:
Before I introduce this amazing panel tonight, I'd like to announce a land acknowledgement. We wish to acknowledge that the land at which Harvard sets and we are meeting today is the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people, and is a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations. Now onto this amazing distinguished panel. I'm going to introduce each one of them and then we'll get into the conversation. First, it's a real pleasure to introduce Heather McGhee. For nearly two decades, Heather helped build the nonpartisan think-and-do tank, Demos, serving four years as president. Under Heather's leadership, Demos moves their original idea of debt-free college into the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, argued before the Supreme Court to protect voting rights in January of 2018, and helped to win pro-voter reforms in five states over two years. Her most recent book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, spent 10 weeks on the New York Times's bestseller list.
Setti Warren:
Her 2020 Ted talk, Racism Has a Cost For Everyone, reached 1 million views in just two months online. In 2021, she will launch two original podcasts on the economy, and one on how to create cross-racial solidarity in challenging times. It's also my honor to introduce Dr. Ibram Kendi. Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the national book award for nonfiction, making him the youngest ever winner of that award. He also has produced five straight number one, New York Times bestsellers, including, How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism. In 2020, Time Magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Welcome Dr. Kendi and Heather.
Setti Warren:
And last but not least, my friend Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Dr. Muhammad's scholarship includes the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, criminal justice in modern US history. He's co-editor of Constructing the Carceral State, a special issue of The Journal of American History. And he is contributor to National Research Council study, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Dr. Muhammad is also the author of Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin best book award in American Studies. Dr. Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Suzanne Young Murray professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at Harvard Kennedy School. Welcome to all of you. It's an honor and pleasure to introduce, and I look forward to the conversation. Dr. Muhammad, I'll turn it over to you.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Setti. It's a pleasure to be in your house tonight, the Institute of Politics. This is the virtual forum and I know we're not talking about the place where the Lakers used to play, but here we are in Cambridge. And so, I want to get this conversation started by setting the frame that we're thinking about here. We saw for the first time in US history, the largest racial justice protest ever in the summer of 2020. We saw 15 to 25 million people in hundreds of counties. The vast majority of those participants were white Americans. They skewed younger, but they came from every walk of life. And indeed, just to illustrate how powerful this moment was, some of the most intense battles over the future of racial justice in this country were in overwhelmingly white cities like Portland, Oregon, which animated so much of the politics in the presidential race of 2020.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And so here we are with an opportunity to at least benchmark where we've come since that moment. And while the frame of this conference of which my two friends and collaborators in the work of education and justice, more generally, have decided to join us this evening, which I'm very grateful for. I am desperate to find out how you all are thinking about how to measure change in this moment, because I think it's really important in a country that is almost allergic to historical reflection, where time passes very quickly, we have a chance to set a frame that I think will give people a real sense of how to think about progress. So that's the big frame, we're going to reflect on a year of promises. And so, I'm going to open it up with a question to Heather McGhee. So Heather, you've written this really terrific bestselling book. It has this incredible argument about the fact that racism cost everyone, but not quite everyone. And so, I want to give you a chance to really describe this fabulous book. What did you and do you want readers to know about what you've written?
Heather McGhee:
Well, thank you so much. Thanks to Setti and to the entire IOP team at Harvard, and to you, Khalil, for inviting us. It was an offer we couldn't refuse, I think, to be in conversation here this evening. So really, really pleased. And thanks to everyone who's tuning in, a year and a half now into a moment of many conversations, public conversations, about racism with folks like us and you're still at it, and I really appreciate that, because this work is ongoing. The intervention I was trying to make with my book, and I'm kind of chuckling a little bit to myself, because I had the honor of speaking with both of you early on in the first week of my book tour. And you both were kind of like, "What are you doing here with this book? How could you be so audacious as to try to do this thing here?"
Heather McGhee:
I was trying to make an intervention that I felt was really important in the conversation about economic justice and inequality, and the often race-blind, class first way that progressive and center-left economics folks think about how we got into the inequality era and what are the dynamics that have created this yawning chasm of inequality in a country that used to have the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. And then, I also wanted to make probably a gentler intervention into the field of racial justice, where I felt like there's much bad faith on the other side, there's so much selling of the idea of a zero sum, that every inch of progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people, that I wanted to make sure that we, who want to see all families thrive, and we, who want to see this nation live up to its highest potential and want to live in the beloved community, that we are also in our communications, maybe inadvertently, falling into a similar trap of making a zero-sum argument, that basically racism is great for white people and terrible for people of color.
Heather McGhee:
I didn't want us to be doing the job of marketing racism to white people inadvertently by talking about all of its many attendant privileges and benefits, without actually being honest. And I think this is where the truth part comes in. If we are truthful about the extent of racism in our politics and our policy making, and how much it has accounted for the dysfunction of the United States, the self-sabotage, the draining of the pool, as I talk about in the central metaphor of The Sum of Us, the story of what happened to so many of America's publicly funded swimming pools that were segregated and then were drained instead of being integrated. If we're honest about the ways in which the central animating force in the politics that shifted us from the era of shared prosperity into the inequality era, and that continues to bedevil our progress is racism, then we have to be honest about the fact that it has a cost for virtually everyone. And Khalil, you're right to say it's almost everyone, because I do think that there are people who are profiting mightily from selling racist ideas.
Heather McGhee:
And that the colonial plantation elite at our founding invented these racist ideas in order to profit from them. And in many ways, the descendants of that elite today, those who want to continue to keep the rules of our economic system rigged in their favor, are using racism as their most handy weapon to divide the working and middle class from each other, to cleave white Americans away from any willingness to be a part of a collective action that would keep them shoulder to shoulder with people of color, and to undermine the two forces of countervailing power to corporate power, organized labor and government, because those are things that in a multiracial America have to be coalitions of the many. And so, that's really the intervention that I wanted to make into the class conversation to see how racism has always been the weapon that has undermined class solidarity and enriched the very wealthy. And then, an intervention into the race conversation to acknowledge that there are ways in which racism has a cost for everyone, and that we have to have a message of mutual interest if we're going to create an enduring anti-racist governing majority in America.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I'm glad you identified the beneficiaries of the system, because I think it's a really powerful critique that we are not all just floundering about with this thing we inherited. And I know that Dr. Kendi has a lot to say about this, because his work, Stamped from the Beginning, charts the epics in which the reconstitution of responses to change that I'm going to let him describe, is something that I think means that we're not really just talking about some original sin. We're talking about an ongoing challenge. So, Dr. Kendi, talk to us a little bit about one, how history helps to inform what Heather just described, how do you mobilize historical understanding to help people think differently about what's at stake in the present?
Ibram X. Kendi:
Sure. Well, first I also want to thank Setti for that introduction and it's truly an honor for me to be in conversation with each of you. You're both scholars and institution builders who I admire. But Khalil, to your question, I think that historically, just like currently, those who are trying to, through their policies and power, maintain inequity, injustice, don't want to start the conversation there, talking about racial inequity and injustice. And when we start the conversation there, we ask questions like, "Why is it that the native people are three times more likely to be impoverished than white people? Why is it that black people have died at twice the rates as white people from COVID-19? Why is that black people die at three times the rates of police violence than other groups?" The answer to that question is an historical answer. And so, it's not just the result of present policies and practices. It's not just the result of the past, present... Past policies and practices. It's the cumulative typically effect of those historic and current policies and practices.
Ibram X. Kendi:
And not just the effect of those policies and practices, the inequality itself, the inequity itself, the injustice itself, has been normalized by racist ideas over the course of history, that have constantly changed based on historical conditions, based on racialization, based on new policies that need to be justified. And so, you have policies and ideas constantly changing and remaining the same, and that change over time, one needs to understand in order to really grasp the causes of inequity and disparity in our time. But one also needs to understand through lines. The role for instance, as you write in your book, The Condemnation of Blackness, just the tying of blackness and criminality from the founding of this country, that it's fundamentally remained the same, but the way it's been tied, obviously, has changed. And so, I just think that having that historical understanding is absolutely critical to trying to figure out why these inequities and disparities exist and persist. And what it also does, I should say, is that we know that at every course, every point in history, there were those who were engaged in anti-racism. There were those who were challenging these structures, and systems, and policies, and ideas.
Ibram X. Kendi:
And I'm mentioning that, because even when we look into history and analyze and uncover policies and practices, people are like, "Well, those folks were just products of their time." As if there weren't people challenging them in that time. As if there weren't people in 1831, like Maria Stewart, challenging sexism and racism in her time. It's... Anyway, don't get me started, but I...
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. No, I think that's a powerful point you make over and over again in Stamped. So I'm curious, the part of the tone of this conference, and the reason why we are so excited to have you both, is that you both have a lot of conversations around these issues, and you both spent the last 24 months to varying degrees, and I just picked that timeframe because that captures the moment we're in, thinking really about tough answers to difficult questions. And so, what are the sticking points? Where is the resistance? Just kind of help illuminate, what do people get stuck on? What can't they get past? Let's hear a little bit about that, because I want to make sure that our audience has an opportunity to maybe get a little closer to some of the challenges that you face. Everybody who's on the side of being anti-racist is like, "I'm with you, but I can't convict X, Y, and Z." And so, maybe just humanize the work a little bit for those folks. Heather, why don't you start us off?
Heather McGhee:
Sure. I think the biggest thing that I hear is that the scale of the disinformation right now, and the turbo charging of the zero sum, us versus them, rhetoric on the right, means that oftentimes those conversations that are happening across ideological divides are happening with just wildly different reference points and sets of facts. And I think that's always been the case to a certain degree and our massive historical illiteracy has meant that, usually if you're trying to educate someone about race, you're bringing in new facts that they didn't know. But right now, with the degree of just wall-to-wall Fox News and OAN, and the way in which social media, particularly Facebook, has been taken over by the conservative meme factories, it just means that there's just a totally different universe. That the majority of Republicans believe the big lie that is that. The big lies that Donald Trump is the rightful president of the United States, and there are thousands of false facts and pieces of information that people have to put together that story, that the three of us have no access to.
Heather McGhee:
People will say names of places and things that mean nothing to us, and I'm not even mentioning QAnon and even deeper conspiracy theories. But all of them have a significant capture on the white evangelical imagination right now in this country, so that's one of the biggest challenges. People are saying, "I want to give this book to my uncle. I want to..." All of this, but it's really hard because they're just so in the rabbit hole, and it feels like the work is not just typical organizing work of empathy and place taking and all the things that we know to work, but rather more like, honestly, the types of deprogramming work that is more the work of professionals who work with people who believe in cults. And I say that with a very heavy heart, because we're talking about tens of millions of people. And that comes back again to the deep level of cynicism that a very narrow self-interested elite has taken to be willing to spend billions of dollars and creating an alternative information ecosystem for their own economic and political gain. It is a scary time. So I think that's the biggest challenge.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm scared. Ibram?
Ibram X. Kendi:
When I first read Heather's book, I knew took a lot of courage for her to write that book, because the orthodoxy of those who are engaged in this work is to say that only people of color are being harmed by racism. And so, even though she clinically and empirically demonstrated the ways in which white people too are harmed, it was very difficult. And I'm saying that from the standpoint of one of the major sticking points I've had to face is, in my book, the orthodoxy is that only white people can be racist. And I think one of the sticking points that I've found is this predominance of white people saying, "I'm not racist," and the predominance of people of color saying, "I can't be racist." And it creates this environment in which we have clearly racism, but every individual is claiming that it's not them, for different reasons, obviously. And one of the reasons why... I think another sticking point tied to that is this conflation of the term racism and the term racist with a T, and people tend to define these terms interchangeably.
Ibram X. Kendi:
And what I try to do in my work is to talk about how racism, with an M, is structural inherently, systemic inherently, and institutional inherently. And so, an individual, for instance, can't practice racism. You're talking about a body of policies, and ideas, and power. But a person, an individual person can be racist. An individual policy can be racist. An individual idea can be racist. And so, I think the pushback, you've had white people saying, "I'm not racist because I don't have power." And then you've had people saying the same thing, and really... Because they think at an institutional or structural level, when for the individual, the question is, "Are you challenging the structure? Are you challenging the system, or are you reinforcing it?" And so, I think that's been a sticking point for many people, but the greatest sticking point, and the sticking point I've personally most been attacked on, has been how I ended up defining a racist policy. And so, I defined a racist policy as any measure that leads to racial inequity or injustice. Period.
Ibram X. Kendi:
And what that means is I completely took out intention and racial language, and essentially stated that we should just focus on outcome to determine whether a policy is racist or anti-racist. And it completely removes the whole construct of a race-neutral policy. And so, as you would imagine, I've just received a whole bunch of pushback from people on the left and the right for a number of different reasons. And I think it's a sticking point because if we're not going to define a policy as racist, that is maintaining or leading to inequity and injustice, then how are we going to define our policy as racist? I just don't understand any other way to define it.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. I mean this is [crosstalk 00:27:01].
Heather McGhee:
I do.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Okay.
Heather McGhee:
I mean, may I?
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Oh yes.
Heather McGhee:
Because I think the alternative is what Charles Murray has just doubled down.
Ibram X. Kendi:
Exactly.
Heather McGhee:
[inaudible 00:27:10] book, which is to say, "Listen, I'm going to tell the hard truth, black people are just inferior."
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. Yeah. I was in a conversation earlier today with Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker staff writer, and someone I'm very close to, and we were reflecting on lots of different things, but one of the things we were reflecting on is that Roland Fryer in 2005 had given an interview to Stephen Dubner for The New York Times Magazine, so a big profile of him. And he was talking about how economists have to be able to ask the unpopular questions, have to face the science as it is. And he said, "If there's a question..." No, "If there might be a reason to believe that there are intelligence differences between blacks and whites, that are linked to genetics, then we ought to be able to ask those questions." So here we are. It's like the question then becomes these carryovers from the enlightenment construct that reinforced racism and science as two things that would help to advance civilization remain embedded in the DNA of both the academy and, I would even dare say, most particularly within the field of economics, because it prides itself on getting at a certain truth that only really repackages very old racist ideas.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And this is not the entire discipline of economics. I'm saying that it tends to be in this framing of a kind of empirical positivism, and this is to some degree why we see that the relationship of economics to decision making in our political culture is so strong and has been so dominant over the past 40 or 50 years. Do I have that wrong? Because you're the one who's been talking to economists about this.
Heather McGhee:
No, you don't have it wrong at all. It is the dismal science. It is. I'm not going to go on a tirade right now. So I'll say two things. One, economics as a field is a great lesson in the power of organizing and the ability to influence and capture a pretty small set of institutions, and from that flow an amazing amount of power. So to me, economics is power studies. It's strategy studies. How did the field get to be that way? Why did some ideas in economics become seen as out of the Orthodox? How did law and economics become twined in this way? And how did that serve to reify a market fundamentalism just at the time when the previous model of economic paradigm that had predominated from the New Deal era up until the civil rights movement, was being dethroned and delegitimated in large part because it relied on too many public goods for a diversifying public. And so, that's one of the things I think about economics, but I also think that there's a way in which... That was the field that I grew up in and that I did my work in, and that as an economic policy analyst, and researcher, and advocate, I often felt like we had to jump through hoops to explain the economic benefits of any public interest regulation or public program.
Heather McGhee:
And then, it just didn't matter, often. That ultimately, we can... So many of the things that we are fighting for around racial justice and economic justice, so many of the investments that we want to see, so many of the reforms would be great for the economy. And we know that the racial economic divide costs the economy trillions of dollars a year. So it's not just that economics as a field has been warped, but it's also that ultimately it's just about power. And you can bring all the studies from McKinsey, and Citigroup, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, literally all three of those left-wing organizations have put out papers in the past two years, calculating the racial and gender economic divides in the trillions of dollars of cost to GDP. Does that mean that there's suddenly now a uniform sentiment among the economics profession and elite, that we need to do everything we can to narrow those divides? No.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. Yeah. This is a question that we're going to take up, actually, on a panel tomorrow, so I hope folks will want to time in. Ibram, I want to pivot this question just slightly in this way. So you've just written in The Atlantic about the backlash to critical race theory, but you've used a focus on what you call the second assassination of Martin Luther King, because so much of the argument against so-called critical race theory teaching, which of course is not happening in any school and hasn't been ever, is trotting out King as a paragon of color blindness. And therefore, the real people who are the racist in this conversation are the people who are literally "assassinating" King, or doing a disservice to his legacy. So here's the two-part question. One, if facts don't matter, the actual King that you write about in that essay and that I teach, and the one who spoke for himself about what to make of the country and the civil rights movement, not the one that we want to imagine he didn't actually say these things.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
If facts don't matter, then what are we really up against when the same people that Heather's writing about is people who lose in a racist economy that could work better for white people and black people, at least in terms of people who aren't part of the 1%, when the same people in this moment, across the board, not just the white nationalists, but moderate centrist, don't want to protect themselves against a raging pandemic and are willing to essentially die or kill their loved ones around them. I mean, I'm just trying to wrap my head around how much can we actually fight with knowledge and positioning the truth of history, like Dr. King's actual words, against the self-interest of a kind of freedom, that means I actually have the freedom to kill myself if I want, so leave me alone. I don't want to sound too dour about it, but help me think of this differently if I have it wrong.
Ibram X. Kendi:
I don't think you have it wrong. And I think Heather was specifically talking about power, and obviously power is going to do what's in power's self interest, and power is going to create an alternate reality if that benefits power. But I think you're also talking about everyday people. And I think it's important for us to understand you have these racist ideas that are being produced by power and consumed by everyday people. And everyday people want to believe that they're not racist. They believe that King was the ultimate not racist. And so, one of the ways to wrap ideas that are deeply racist in a way that they can be consumed, is to say that these were acting out King's philosophy and ideology. But those people who then consume those ideas, part of what happens to them, isn't just that they look at inequality as normal, they blame the inequality on people of color and their inferiority. But the ideas themselves also teach them that they're not racist, and that the ideas that they have are truth, are facts, aren't theories.
Ibram X. Kendi:
But then, ultimately, I think what happens, and this is what I wrote a little bit about in How to Be an Antiracist, is in many ways these people become addicted to these ideas. And so, when you're talking about people who are facing an addiction, it's hard to just talk to them through rationality. It's hard to talk to them through facts. And then also, what's happening when people are addicted to something, they're harming themselves, they're harming other people. At the same time, they think they're helping themselves. And I think that... So when you have this combination of people who are addicted to racist ideas and who thereby are harming people, and power, who are mass feeding those people those ideas out of self-interest, and they know those ideas are false, because they know the data. I mean, it creates, obviously, a very difficult situation.
Ibram X. Kendi:
But what that means is we could actually stop the production. We can actually turn off the holes that are addicting these people by transforming power, by taking back power, by eliminating inequality, by creating justice, by showing these people after two years, that actually Obamacare was going to help them, by showing them actually, it's probably good to use an analogy from Heather's book, to have actually a pool in your neighborhood to swim in. I think that's probably the best way to draw these people out of their addiction.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. I've used the addiction metaphor myself, and I think it's compelling. And I think you're right about that. I suppose what you're both saying is that you have to deal with this problem at both ends of the spectrum. At the power end, which Heather talks about amongst elites and what you've emphasized here about where the pipeline of racist ideas originate. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, maybe with how we educate children at very young ages, as you've written a book for children, for babies, even, about how not to be a racist baby. I know that this drives conservatives crazy, but in a world of non-facts or alternative facts, child development specialists know that children at young ages see difference, and they simply map that difference onto the cultural structures of our society. And so, it's not that they're "racist," but it is that they are being socialized into the same racist ideas and bigotry that we all live with.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
I'm going to start taking a couple questions from the audience. And the first one I have here is one I'm interested in your thoughts as well. So Brian Daniels, from our registration platform Whova, asks this question, "How do we hold companies or organizations accountable in the long run for their commitments and promises to help bring about equity within their walls and in the communities they serve?" So this is right at the heart of this conference itself, so since you won't be here tomorrow with us, you have first dibs at answering that question. Heather, why don't you lead us off? Yeah.
Heather McGhee:
I think this is where organizing is really important. We're setting a vision. What exactly is it that we want companies to do? What are the goals? How do we want our institutions to become more diverse? And having those goals that go beyond a statement, a statement of solidarity, a statement about outrage at the murder of George Floyd, a statement that black lives matter. That's really what we're talking about. And so, for example, Color of Change, which I'm on board of, has a whole series of initiatives called, Beyond the Statement, that is targeted at various sectors. The tech sector, Hollywood, there's a string of other ones that are coming online, where they've worked with insiders in industry, usually in black insiders, who are saying, "This is what really needs to happen and here's how you go beyond the statement." And it's a series of actual commitments and things that people can do, that companies and institutions need to do to really put money, and most importantly, institutional change, behind the statements that they have made.
Heather McGhee:
And so, I think, in any arena, whether it's government or it's the academy, having a vision in the set of demands that's real is a really important step, because then you get to organize. And if there isn't... If you don't have that, then there's no way to hold anybody accountable and there's also, for the people in power who are trying to figure out desperately what they're supposed to do to be off the hook, there's no way for them to make progress either.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Kendi, do you want to jump in there?
Ibram X. Kendi:
Oh, I think she answered it.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Okay. All right. Well, we're going to take another question. It's a question we've already answered to some degree, but maybe just a chance for clarification. So the question is from Lilan, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, Khan, "How do we open a conversation with people who think we are in a post-racial society and do not believe that white privilege continues to persist in a systemically racialized society?"
Ibram X. Kendi:
Well, I think if they're asking about someone who was close to them, a family member, a friend, then I think if they're arguing that the nation is post-racial, it's important to even take a step back before you argue, "No, actually it's not," to sort of ask them to define what is a post-racial society. Ask them to define what is a racist society. Ask them to even define what is a racist policy, what is... Because typically when people make these claims, they actually do not have a working definition of the very thing they claim doesn't exist. And so, that's what makes it hard for you to actually come in and say, "No, actually there's widespread structural racism." And they don't have a working definition, or their perspective on what structural racism is may be very different from you. So I would encourage you if it's a person that's close to you, to really engage them on defining terms and really work with them to define terms in a way that can give them the lens to see this society, because otherwise you're going to be speaking a different language trying to have a constructive conversation.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah, you might even... Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Heather McGhee:
No, go ahead.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
No, no. I was just going to joke and say, "You might even have to go to college to get the language necessary." Because we have a political party that thinks that college is a form of liberal indoctrination and that hardworking white people should stay away from college.
Heather McGhee:
So is in the [crosstalk 00:43:16].
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Right. Go ahead.
Heather McGhee:
So one thing I would add to Dr. Kendi's really good point there, is that we are generally, as a society, deeply ignorant of the depth of inequality in our society. Most people assume that our society is much fairer than it is. And so, I think you can come from a place of assuming that someone's been woefully undereducated about the depth of the inequality. And there are some statistics that are very helpful to go against the narrative and the assumptions of racial progress. One of them, that I like to deploy, is that a black college graduate has lower average wealth. So wealth, home equity, saving, stocks and bonds. Lower average wealth than a white high school dropout. So a white high school dropout, on average, has higher household wealth than a black college graduate. So what that does, of course, is it confuses us. It immediately destabilizes us. That's not right. That's not fair. That shouldn't be. And it then allows you to have a conversation about how history shows up in your wallet.
Heather McGhee:
It allows you to have a conversation about what could compose a family's wealth and how much the government subsidized the creation of white wealth for the grandparents of that white high school dropout, and literally denied and barred the production of black wealth to the black college graduate's grandparents, and how that then makes a difference in whether or not the parents of those graduates, of that graduate and that high school dropout, owned their home or rented. Whether they had to go into debt to start a business, or they were able to use their savings. And then, whether they had to go deeply into debt to go into college or not. And so, all of that, I think, for that story, I've seen helps people take it up to the structural and to policy, because we're so individualistic in our frame. So, if there's racism, that means that I've done something wrong and that should be protected at all costs, so I will deny all other evidence that might suggest that I've done something wrong.
Heather McGhee:
But in saying, "The government did this," and in making the link between something that was done in the past to the finances of a family today in a way that people really understand... People really understand. I mean, I remember when I first went to Massachusetts for school and started to get to know a lot of white families of means, and it was just amazing how there was always some money lying around somewhere. There was just always people just inherited things left and right and I just didn't know. I didn't know we rode like that. I didn't know that's what happened to people who were like 17, 18, 19, 20, 25 years old. And that's just a difference. And so, I think people really understand that, even people who... My former colleague, Tamara Draut, and I always used to joke. She was daughter of a steel worker, but she had GM stock. She's a white working class, through and through from Ohio. She went to public college in Ohio, but there was an inheritance there. There was a union pension that helped her move through the world. So anyway.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah. Well, on that point, I had this conversation with my in-laws recently. They're both long since retired and they both worked government jobs, and I pointed out to them, this was a conversation about Bernie Sanders, his wealth, relative to Bloomberg, if you recall that. How dare him critique Michael Bloomberg's wealth when he had a million dollar home in Vermont sort of thing. And I pointed out to them, I said, "Look, you retired with guaranteed retirement benefits through a traditional pension plan. You make about a hundred thousand dollars a year, or $80,000." I wasn't sure quite what it was, but I said, "That's kind of like having a 2 million endowment sitting in the bank. So you don't have to worry about managing that endowment, but that's the equivalent of it." And so, people today actually don't have that because they're now the subjects of the vagaries of 401(k) plans, which takes much longer to accrue.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
But the point is that if you were part of that great era of equality between 1940 and 1960, and you were able to get those pension benefits, and black people were always last hired and first fired during that era, and couldn't even spend those dollars necessarily with the kinds of homes that would accrue generational wealth transfers, and so on and so forth, then what we're really talking about today is an economy that is still based on pricing people whose assets were born out of racial privileges and preferential treatment in the credit markets from a long time, not even a long time ago. My mother was born in 1950, so this is not ancient history. Okay. So, we're going to take a question from Anan at the college. Anan, the floor is yours.
Anan:
Hi, thank you so much, Dr. Kendi and Ms. McGhee for joining us tonight. My name is Anan. I'm a senior at the college, and I had a simple, but I guess difficult question to answer, at least for me. The pandemic and the election have exposed a lot of cracks in American society. And one thing I think it's highlighted for all of us is that race is intertwined in everything. And when we talk about race, at least with older family members or more conservative people on the spectrum, there's the common response sometimes to get is, "Why are you playing the race card?" Or, "Why are you always making it about race?" How do we respond to something like that?
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Don't all rush to answer.
Heather McGhee:
Thanks for being deferential to each other. Thank you for the question and congratulations on being soon to graduate. I think that Dr. Kendi should take this one.
Ibram X. Kendi:
So again, I think really depends on who it is, but if it's an older family member who's going to be concerned about respect, you may want to take a different approach. But if it's just somebody who's around your age... I mean, one of the interesting things you can say is like, "Whatever it is that you just talked about." Whatever variable they just... Why are you making it about that? That's one thing to say very quickly. But secondly, I actually say that I only actually make things about race when there's actually racial inequity and injustice, or there is a structure that is emerging out of racism. It just so happens that this is a nation that has widespread racial inequity in almost every sector. It just so happens that many of our ideas suggest a racial hierarchy. So I'm not actually making everything about race. I'm making only the things about race that have to do with racial hierarchy, or racial inequality, or racial injustice.
Ibram X. Kendi:
It just so happens that that's just a vast majority of our rhetoric, of our policies and the effects. And what that does is that that repositions it to, I'm talking about race when there's racism, because that's essentially what you want to convey. I'm talking about race when there's inequality, I'm talking about... And so, if it's not about race, what is it? And then, when they say, "Well, it's that black people are inferior." Now, why are you making it about race? That's a different type of racial formulation. You're just... Your racial formulation is a racist idea. My racial formulation is that the problem is a racist policy.
Heather McGhee:
Yeah. I also think, just remembering, again, how much people tend to see things through an individual lens and feel like because... Yeah, that there's individual lens. And so, reminding whoever you're talking to of the extent of the racism and government policies throughout our history, including today. There are so many examples in criminal justice, in housing policy, in the way we fund our schools, based on the property values of the neighboring properties, which are themselves distorted by the racism and how we allowed people to be or own, or have property. And when you're having that conversation, I feel like things get... People are a little bit less defensive because they assume they're not being blamed for generations of racist policy. Dr. Kendi, you think no? You think they're not? They're still defensive?
Ibram X. Kendi:
No, I agree. And that's unfortunate.
Heather McGhee:
Listen, I think if you're trying to communicate, you have to be aware of how people hear things and how people emotionally react to things. So you want to not give away the little things. Where if you're really trying to educate, as I think everyone here is, then you want to be in a place where your listener is as open as possible. And so, to get to a place of curiosity about the world, that's a very different and open place than being in a place of defense about their own moral way. And I mean, I just want to be clear. This is hard. It is hard to be a person living in a society that is as venal as our society has been for so long. It is hard to hold in your mind and your heart, both being an American and the weight and the enormity of the depravity of what this country has done.
Heather McGhee:
It's a hard place to be for all of us, not just for white people, but I can only imagine how much anguish there is at accepting the real truth, because there's been so much invested in selling the lie of American innocence, in justifying all of the depravity. I try to think about... Okay, so lynch mobs thought they were doing God's work. The thousands of people who watched it as a spectacle, thought they were watching a justice be done. And if we can't do the exercise of trying to understand that mentality, then we can't identify the rhymes of that mentality in our current society. And if we just say, "Okay, that was just evil people from an evil time. And we can't possibly... We have to put that in a different category of humanity." I think then we're missing out on being able to see the same tropes, the same blood lust, the same disregard for life, the same cruelty in our prison-industrial complex, in our weapons and carriage of war.
Heather McGhee:
And so, I think it is really important to have a sense of radical empathy and to... I don't know, just to understand that there's a lot that we have to hold in order to really face the extent of this country's history. And that it's challenging for us. We're in a very challenging time, I think, all of us as a nation, and I want to make sure that those of us who want unity, and justice, and peace are as inviting to the fence sitters as the people who want to just keep us divided for their own profit.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And just add, you have to also ignore the gallows and/or lynching scaffold that someone erected and brought to the capital and calls for lynching, Mike Pence. I mean, he's like... Along with the Confederate flag flying through the halls of the Capitol. Like I say to my students all the time, you don't have to make this stuff up. It's right in front of us. So the only thing we have to do is close our eyes, don't listen and don't speak about it. But otherwise we have to see it for what it is. Listen, I am so honored to have you both here with me tonight. This is a special event for all of us. Really grateful for your work, for the ideas you shared, for the work that you continue to do. I can speak a on behalf of the dean who's joined us here on the Zoom, Doug Elmendorf, your ideas, and the way that they shape and help our students understand the world they live in, have had a big impact at the Harvard Kennedy School of which we are all benefiting to emphasize Heather's point in particular.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
I want to say that we're at the beginning of this conference and I'm grateful for my team, who's helped put this together at the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project. Thanks again. Doug, if you want to close this out, it was a pleasure to be here this evening with everyone. Doug, the floor is yours.
Doug Elmendorf:
Thank you so much to all of you. To Khalil, to Ibram, and to Heather. I'm very grateful for your spending the time with us tonight. I think it was educational for me and for many others. Thank you.
Heather McGhee:
Thank you. [crosstalk 00:58:16]
Ibram X. Kendi:
Take care everyone.
Heather McGhee:
Good night.
Erica Licht:
Untying Knots is hosted by Nikhil Raghuveera and Erica Licht. It's a program of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center, and a collaboration with the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center. We'd like to thank the Robert Ward Johnson Foundation for supporting our convening, as well as our speakers, Heather McGhee and Ibram X. Kendi for joining us.
Nikhil Raghuveera:
We're going to be releasing a number of episodes from this gathering. So stay tuned for more to come.
Erica Licht:
Thanks for listening.
Nikhil Raghuveera:
Music is Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod.