Race is used as a tool. It encourages people to see others as the source of their problems instead of the real culprit, our economic system. Heather McGhee gets it.
Heather McGhee nails it!
Heather McGhee appeared on MSNBC with host Alex Wagner. She discussed her most prescient book, the New York Times bestseller, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”
Heather points out something about race economics we often discuss on Politics Done Right.
“There’s a huge amount of political and therefore economic profit to be made by convincing white voters that anything that is good for other American ones, even and including them, is somehow a threat,” McGhee said. “Right? The idea, the zero-sum idea that we can’t all progress together, that in fact, progress and people of color must be a threat to white people.”
Heather used Biden’s student loan forgiveness as an example. She points out that most of the recipients are white. After all, the country is still predominantly white, and the policy provides assistance across the board based on income.
“ And yet conservatives want to break a working-class, multiracial coalition to make white voters side with their color instead of their class,” said McGhee. “They want to profit economically from that rigged political system. And so they keep sort of hammering this point, this lie of the zero-sum that we can’t all be beneficiaries of government in the public interest.”
She nails it. We have an economic system that is biased towards a few. They get most of our economic spoils. Race is just one tool they use to have us fighting each other, whereas we lose the incentive to fight those who are responsible for our problems. Please listen to the entire video clip where I provide additional commentary.