THE SUM OF US

“Finale: The America That's Becoming”

Season One, Episode Nine

Futuro Studios / Higher Ground Productions / Spotify

A note: This episode contains a reference to suicide. Please take care while listening.

Gail Christopher: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and I grew up on the East Side of Cleveland, which is an all-Black community. All of my neighbors and friends, my classmates in school, they were all Black. And we didn't have an opportunity, or we didn't interact with people of different races. It just wasn't done.

Heather McGhee: When Gail Christopher was 14, in 1964, she won a scholarship to go to an arts camp in Chautauqua, New York — not too far from Niagara Falls.

Gail Christopher: It was my first time away from home, and my first time in basically an all-white community. So it was a… it was an adjustment. So you can imagine going off to this encampment, into this community that was all-white, with the exception of some of the waitstaff and housekeepers, and one other African-American student was on the campus. Other than that, this was my immersion experience in white America.

Heather McGhee: Gail had a roommate, who was white. And she was from the other side of Cleveland — the West Side.  

Gail Christopher: We were roommates, and we had the top room in our little Victorian house, and we had bunk beds. And we became friends. We just got to know each other. I talked about my family, and she talked about her family. I learned, for instance, that she was an only child and that her father was a Cleveland police officer. She learned that I had siblings, and my father was a truck driver. And we just shared. We shared meals, we walked to and from the major venues and centers and just got to know each other very well. And then before I knew it, the summer was over. It was time to go home.

Heather McGhee: But right before she was to leave Chautauqua, Gail experienced something that would fundamentally change how she saw the world.

Gail Christopher: I was walking down the street heading toward our little Victorian home, and it was yellow. I'll never forget it. And I saw an ambulance in front of our house. And so I picked up my pace. I ran to the front porch, and our house parents were on the front porch. And they were carrying my roommate out on a stretcher. She was clearly unconscious. I asked the house parents, What happened? Why’s she — what's going on? And they told me that she had attempted suicide, and they were taking her to the hospital.

Gail Christopher: And so I ran upstairs to our room we had shared, for some reason, that was my impulse. And there on her bed, the lower bunk, she had left a note for me. And the note said, I'm kind of choking up as I tell this story, but the note said, Dear Gail… I've come to know you and think of you as a dear friend. But my father has taught me to hate Black people. And I don't want to live that way anymore.

Gail Christopher: I'll never know if they revived her. I never saw her again. There was no more conversation. But I know that's what she put in the letter to me. The idea of going home to that way of thinking and living was too much for her to cope with. Believing what her father had taught her, which was to hate people like me. You know, hate was a very strong word in the mind of a child. And I felt it when, I remember feeling that when I read that note. AndI remember feeling so sorry for her. My primary response was to wish that she didn't have to live with that kind of confusion and pain. 

Heather McGhee: Can you introduce yourself, please? 

Gail Christopher: I am Gail Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity, former senior adviser and vice president to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, chair of the Board of the Trust for America's Health, and mother of Heather McGhee.

Heather McGhee: From Higher Ground and Futuro Studios, I’m your host, Heather McGhee. And this is The Sum Of Us, a podcast documenting my journey around the United States, in search of hope and solidarity.

Riaz: GUESS WHO IT IS!

Heather: Who’s there?

Riaz: LOOK!

Heather McGhee: Who is it? I wanna see!

Riaz: LOOK!

Heather McGhee: You gotta tell me!

Riaz: It’s Nana!

Heather McGhee: Nana! Ohhh (falling sound)

Heather McGhee: Hi Mom. It took us so much longer — hi bud, are you OK? No, it’s not blood. It’s just a strawberry.

Riaz: Haha.

Heather McGhee: After all my trips to different cities and small towns for this podcast, my last trip was to Fort Washington, Maryland. I brought my 3 year old son and drove down to see Gail Christopher, aka Nana.

Gail Christopher: Did you see the pretty flowers?

Heather McGhee:  They’re beautiful. Did you just get those just now? Oh, Mom. You are so funny. Oh, look at the fig tree. It’s doing great. Came back from the dead.

Heather McGhee: I came to see my mom because she’s the person who helps me make sense of the world, and I needed to make sense of this journey I just finished. Traveling across the country to find stories of Solidarity Dividends, what we can win in communities when we come together across race and difference. I knew that my mom would help me better understand what I learned and the moment we’re in now. Because for the past nearly 50 years, her work has revolved around improving public policy for families. And in recent years, she’s focused almost exclusively on the need for healing from racism. It’s her voice that’s often in my head as I see examples of racism’s far-reaching costs in our society. But when I began describing the people I’d met and the victories they’d won, it took her mind back to this story from her childhood about summer camp.

Heather McGhee: So to me, Mom, this… when I first heard you tell this story, it felt like this was the moment that the seed of the emotional need for you to create spaces for racial healing was planted where you knew that racism cuts, it — it destroys, it can kill. And that we all need to be healed from it. Mom, did you, what did you think about white people before Chautauqua, before this immersion experience?

Gail Christopher: Well, I don't think I did a lot of conscious thinking about white people, certainly not white kids.

Heather McGhee: Now, I was fully on a path to live your same childhood, right? Because not much had changed from the East Side of Cleveland to the South Side of Chicago, a generation later. The neighborhood I was born in was, you know, almost 100 percent Black in Chatham, Avalon. But then I went to boarding school and that decision, which now that I have a child, I have to say, is very difficult to imagine. An 11 year old going ten states away to what was an all-white, virtually all-white boarding school, in western Massachusetts when I was 11. What was going on in your mind when you did that? When did you made that decision?

Gail Christopher: I was a divorced single parent, as you know, and you were a very gifted child. And initially, you came to me and said, Mom, can I go to boarding school?

Heather McGhee: I love this version of the story where this was my idea.

Gail Christopher: Well, no, it's — it's the absolute truth.

Heather McGhee: You didn't send me away. I requested it.

Gail Christopher: Well, and so, and anyone who knows you knows that's quite possible, as you tend to be the driver. So, so I think on some level it may have taken me back to my Chautauqua experience, which up until the end and the trauma of, for all I knew, losing this friendship and this roommate, up until that point, that experience had actually been life-changing in a pretty positive way for me. You know, it was art, and it was music, and it was people, and it was conversation, it was reading. It was just fun. But I was also thinking of the risks that you faced as a young Black girl in Chicago with me having to work three jobs in order to support us, and it seemed like an environment where you were protected 24/7 made sense.

Heather McGhee: And it was incontrovertibly one of the best things that ever happened to me. I went from being sort of understimulated at school and just bored to being really enriched and engaged. So it — it was a lot of what you remember about Chautauqua. Being in this idyllic, peaceful setting. And in terms of what it added to my life by way of getting to know and to love these other people, these other girls who were 11, 12, 13 years old, living together in a house. We really ended up turning to each other to  become each other’s family during those sort of tender adolescent years. So, you know, the person I spoke to as I was going to sleep every night was a Puerto Rican girl from Queens, from Jackson Heights.

Gail Christopher: Oh, yeah, Ida.

Heather McGhee: And you know, who I was brushing my teeth with every morning was a girl from Hong Kong. And who I shared my great love of female-driven fantasy novels was a blonde girl who lived in the next town over. And so it just, in a very similar to you in that season at Chautauqua, when you were sort of young enough not to have believed that we are so different and that there is this unbridgeable divide between us because of the color of our skin and our origin, I learned to love people from different races and see them love me and connect on these parts of our humanity that were just more important than all that divided us.

Gail Christopher: What you're saying is so validated and documented by the limited amount of research that we have in terms of how do we counter this propensity to believe in a hierarchy of human value? You know, how do we overcome our biases and our obsessions with this notion of because we're different, you know, we're less or more? And the evidence that's there says it's through meaningful relationships and interactions. This is how we overcome racism in America. 

Heather McGhee: My mom knows that in order to dismantle racism, we have to change laws and practices and policies. But she and this journey have shown me how much changing laws requires people to link arms with one another. To be in relationship with one another.

Gail Christopher: That's what you lived. That's what I lived unknowingly in this small town of Chautauqua.

Heather McGhee: It’s funny. In almost every single one of the stories on this podcast, a cross-racial friendship has been at the heart of it. It’s been the key to securing victories, to more people winning nice things, like clean water, higher wages, voting rights. But an authentic cross-racial relationship? When our society is so segregated, and there’s so much isolation and distrust? Well, it seems like a really hard thing to come by, like everything around us is set up to prevent us from forming these relationships. But sometimes, people beat the odds. They come together despite everything telling them not to. And I think there are some key factors that allow this to happen. That allow them to form the kind of relationships that change the world.

Heather McGhee: When I thought about the people I met on the road, how they came together, I realized there were some secret ingredients for making these friendships work. The first was self-awareness, particularly on the part of white people. I remember in Kansas City, Bridget Hughes, a white fast food worker, reflecting on what she’d been taught her whole life.

Bridget Hughes: I grew up in a very narrow-minded, traditional family that, you know, had some of these same views that are going on in society today of there is no commonality between me and a Black worker, or, you know, the Latino workers are taking all the jobs.

Heather McGhee: Bridget’s ability to question the attitudes she was raised with made her open to a friendship with someone very different from her. Being self-aware is not all it takes to build these relationships, of course. Think about Terrence Wise, the Black fast food worker in Kansas City, and he told me how hard it was for him to imagine becoming friends with someone like Bridget.

Terrence Wise: This was my first time seeing Bridget, you know, and I'm like, What is this white lady doing here?  

Heather McGhee: But Terrence showed grace. He worked past his suspicion to reach out across lines of difference.

<Archival> Stand Up KC: We got your back! Kansas City’s got your back! (Noise from protest)

(Protest sounds from Kansas City Star)

Terrence Wise: We was on strike somewhere, and I just grabbed the white worker's hand. You’ve never done that in your life. Hold a white man's hand. Talking about, you’re going to march or do anything together. That's when it really hit me, I think. But yeah, the movement changes you.

Heather McGhee: I myself have been in situations where I’ve had to choose not to get offended but instead to extend grace. I remember one time I was in a meeting, trying to plan a campaign about tackling student debt. There was a white guy at the table, someone who totally shared my commitment to the issue and who wanted to partner with me and my organization. Our conversation about debt led us into talking about the subprime mortgage crisis. Now, this guy’s a progressive, someone frankly I thought should have known better. But there he was, rolling off a litany of misguided stereotypes about the role that race played in the financial crisis, about Black borrowers trying to cheat the system, to get houses they couldn’t afford. And I also knew the danger of those stereotypes about Black people being bad credit risks; it’s that exact same logic that created redlining in the 1930s and that blinded regulators to the subprime crisis under their noses in the 2000s until it was too late. And cost the entire economy trillions.

Heather McGhee: So I exhaled. And I tried to remind myself that everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. And we’ve all been told wildly inaccurate and incomplete stories about one another in this society. So I looked this man in the eye. I corrected him with some facts. I knew he might get defensive. He might dig in to save face in the meeting or get panicked that he’d offended me. So I leaned over, and I touched his hand. I think it was that small gesture that almost sent a signal to his brain that told him he was still connected. So he ended up thanking me, apologized. I accepted his apology. And he asked me where he could find more information about race and the subprime crisis. I didn’t know then, but three years later, I would write a chapter about race and the subprime crisis in my book, The Sum of Us. That guy, he became a friend and an ally. I thought of him as I wrote it.

Heather McGhee: So often it’s the fear of offending people that stops us from making these cross-racial alliances. So my advice if you’ve ever stumbled is have a little bit of grace with yourself. When you’ve thought or said something offensive, try to hold it lightly. Look at it, and say, Look at that old story that came up. Who told me that? Where did it come from? Stay open to new information, and let the old story slip through your fingers.

Heather McGhee: Another lesson I learned on my journey upended for me one of the biggest maxims about organizing. In social change, there’s a principle called proximity, the idea that you’ve got to be close to the issue and the pain of those most impacted. Now, that’s undoubtedly true. But my journey also showed me there’s some truth in the flip side too: that sometimes you’ve got to come from away. When I arrived in Manhattan Beach, California for our episode on the beachfront property that had been returned to a Black family, I thought I was there to learn about a mostly white town proudly putting itself on the right side of history by embracing reparations. Boy, was I wrong. 

<Archival> Manhattan Beach City Council: This whole Bruce’s Beach madness is bringing inner city troublemakers here. We want the right kind of people here in Manhattan Beach.

<Archival> Manhattan Beach City Council: Are there racists here? Yes there are. But is Manhattan Beach racist? It’s not.

<Archival> Manhattan Beach City Council: This city should not issue an apology. That will only be used against the city by grifters who have glommed onto the Bruce family looking for a big payday at the expense of Manhattan Beach’s residents.

Heather McGhee: If it had been up to the leaders of the town, nothing would have changed. And the person who ended up spearheading a movement to right this historical wrong? Was a newcomer, a mom, from Harlem.

Kavon Ward: I just remember being upset, like I didn't know Black people actually co-founded this city because I see nothing but white people over here. I was just like, We should do something about this.

Heather McGhee: In Minden, Nevada, for our episode about the siren that sounded to warn Indigenous people to get out of town, the people closest to that intense sound seemed almost hypnotized by it.

(Sound of blaring siren)

Old Man: I like it because I know what time it is when it comes off. I like that. I think it's a good thing.

Bearded Man in all denim: Well, we're not shutting it down. Nah! That's a tradition out here. It's been that way.

Heather McGhee: Its clockwork dominance of their daily lives made it hard for even people who weren’t particularly attached to the siren to sort of snap out of complacency about it just always being there. The activism that woke everyone up came from a tourist, basically, to the region. And a man who had multigenerational family roots in the area but who had spent most of his life away.

Marty Meeden: How do I do a presentation about the siren to people that it's just an everyday occurrence to them. How do you educate folks to really understand the significance of what it means?

Heather McGhee: And in Maine, the whitest state in the nation, where everyone who's not born there is considered “from away,” it was Somali people who revived a dying mill town and helped rescue a family farm.

Charlie Hilliard: I said, Would you rather look out across that field and see Somalis out there hoeing corn and growing their food and making a living? Or would you rather look at a trailer park or a solar farm?

(Sound from Agrarian Trust)

Heather McGhee: The Somali Bantu people whose communal culture gives them the best shot at the cooperative farming model that might just save local agriculture in the U.S., those people came to Maine from halfway across the world. But then again, how American is that? It’s the collisions of cultures, the meeting of people, the challenging of assumptions and expectations that produces breakthroughs. Research tells us that it’s the discomfort, the friction of having your worldview expanded by people who see things from a different angle, that makes diverse groups better at problem solving.  

What I take from this lesson is that it’s okay to get involved in a fight that is not especially “your own” as long as you do it with humility and curiosity and always in service of the people who are most impacted.

Heather McGhee: My final lesson that I take from this journey is about history. Now, I’m not an historian. Honestly, I care the most about what’s going on right now and what we can do to fix it for the future. But it’s become clear to me that it’s impossible to see where we’re standing if we don’t know what steps we took to get here. And looking back to the worst parts of our history? Well, it helps us know what we’re up against today. There are these battles going on right now about monuments, about what history we teach and acknowledge.

<Archival> Douglas County School District: I am a crusader against indoctrinating children in CRT.

Heather McGhee: It’s honestly terrifying to me to see political campaigns to ban books and oust educators in this country just because they teach about sexism and racism.

<Archival> KXAN: In a letter to the Texas education agency, lawmakers pointed to Texas districts that recently removed books from classrooms after parent complaints.

Heather McGhee: It feels like they’re draining the pool again. The goal seems to be to scare white parents and the tax dollars that follow them away from an integrated public good; even cutting school budgets and defunding libraries for teaching our full history. For being too inclusive. So often, people want to cast the debate in zero-sum terms: It’s Black history versus American history. It’s tell the truth or protect children’s fragile psyches.

Heather McGhee: But I’ve learned that American history belongs to all of us. And the deeper you go into our history, the more you can find new heroes to celebrate. We can look to the people who stood up against injustice even when quote on quote times were different and it was easier to just go along. We can give people today a moral choice and say that there is a tradition of heroes that is as real as the tradition of oppression and injustice. And that you can’t understand one without the other. Teaching our full history allows us to ask: Do you want to be like the hundreds of students in the black-and-white photograph, yelling at Ruby Bridges, a 6 year old Black girl, as she tries to integrate a public school? Or do you want to be like the hundreds of white students who boarded buses for the South to register Black voters during Freedom Summer?

Heather McGhee: I began this journey with a knot in my stomach, worried sick about our country. But I’m ending it fundamentally more hopeful than when I began because I know that people making decisions made the world as it is. And that people making better decisions can change it. Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it. The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything we have in common from our schools to our air to our infrastructure.

Heather McGhee: My mother learned about the steep costs of racism to all of us when she was just a child, but for so much of my life I think I tried to avoid this basic truth. Tried to puzzle out our country’s problems in spreadsheets and find fixes fit for white papers. But now I see that we don’t really need more policy solutions, we need more people willing to come together to fight for them.

<Archival> Protect Our Aquifer: Memphis Sand Aquifer: We have to fight now, we have to fight now, because this cannot stand!

Heather McGhee: Because when we do, we all win.

<Archival> Stand Up KC: Everywhere we go! Everywhere we go! The people want to know! The people want to know! Who we are..

Heather McGhee: I set out on this journey to piece together a new story of who we could be to one another and to glimpse the America that’s becoming. Where yes, we grow more diverse every day, but perhaps the proximity of so much difference will force us to admit our common humanity. Since this country’s founding, we haven’t allowed our diversity to be our superpower. And the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. What these stories have shown me is that if it were, all of us would prosper. We are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.

CREDITS

Heather McGhee: From Higher Ground, this is The Sum of Us. Created and hosted by me, Heather McGhee, and produced by Futuro Studios.

Heather McGhee: Our producers are Cassim Shepard, Ryan Kailath, Emilce Quiroz, Joaquin Cotler, and Juan Diego Ramirez, with help from Liliana Ruiz, Sophia Lo, Susanna Kemp and Alissa Vladimir.

Heather McGhee: Our Senior Producers are Nicole Rothwell, Jeanne Montalvo, and Fernanda Echavarri.

Heather McGhee: We’re edited by Sandy Rattley and Maria Garcia.

Heather McGhee: Executive produced for Futuro by Marlon Bishop.  

Heather McGhee: Mixing by Stephanie Lebow and Julia Caruso with help from JJ Querubin and Gabriela Baez. Recorded at the Bridge Studio in Brooklyn, New York, by Urosh Jovanovich and Greg Tock.

Heather McGhee: Research by Lynn Kanter and Carolyn Lipka.

Heather McGhee: Executive producers for Higher Ground are: Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman, Anna Holmes, and Janae Marable. Jenna Levin is our editorial assistant.

Heather McGhee: Executive producers for Spotify are: Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, Julie McNamara, and Corinne Gilliard.

Heather McGhee: Our original music and theme song is by Thee Sacred Souls.

Heather McGhee: The Sum of Us. A podcast in search of hope and solidarity.

Sonic ID: Futuro