Plain English with Derek Thompson12 Elo 2022

A New Way to Think About Racism in America

Several years ago, the writer, researcher, and policy advocate Heather McGhee traveled around the country to report on how racism in America holds us back from policies that would benefit everybody. In her book The Sum of Us, she explained how racist fears have made us all worse off. For decades, many voters and politicians have fought against policies that would have gotten them better jobs, better benefits, and more upward mobility—because they were afraid that those policies might also help non-white people, and especially Black people. She made another point that struck me. Progressives sometimes talk about racism in a way that is pretty helpful for their causes. “Progressives often end up talking about race relations through a prism of competition—every advantage for whites, mirrored by a disadvantage for people of color,” she wrote. “The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air, and better-funded schools.” Today’s guest is Heather McGhee. In this episode she talks about her new podcast The Sum of Us; the indelible metaphor of a drained pool in Alabama; how progressives talk about race; and why many laws today that might not seem explicitly racist still sustain racial inequality. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Heather McGhee Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(405)

The Single Smartest Case Against AI Doom

With new breakthroughs in math and biology alongside reports of AI agents escaping and hacking systems, suffice it to say AI has had an interesting few weeks. How worried should we be about it all? D...

25 Syys 1h 1min

The Truth About Mississippi's Education "Miracle"

Education outcomes have been getting worse across much of the world, with reading and math scores falling to historic lows. The U.S. has seen some of the steepest declines in decades. But, why does ...

18 Syys 56min

Why Experts Keep Getting the Economy So Wrong

Expert economists keep making predictions about America’s financial future, and those predictions keep being … wrong. Over the past few years, we’ve heard warnings about a recession, inflation, tariff...

15 Syys 58min

What’s the Point of College?

Trust in American higher education is near a historic low. Tuition has soared, and the payoff for a college degree is now in question as graduates face a weird and challenging job market. Simultaneous...

11 Syys 56min

The New Book That Scares Big Tech

In the late 19th century, a railroad boom fueled by easy money, speculative investment, and new technology helped kick off one of the worst financial crises in American history. Sound kind of familiar...

8 Syys 59min

AI Slop Is Breaking the Internet. Can We Save It?

So many people seem to hate AI, and it’s not just because it might displace millions of jobs, destroy the world, or deepen distrust in big corporations and government. The reason might actually be sim...

1 Syys 56min

Why Everything Is Going to Keep Getting More Expensive

For much of the 21st century, the U.S. economy was built around cheap money. Today, though, interest rates are rising, and borrowing is getting much more expensive. At the same time, the federal gover...

25 Elo 41min

Higher Education’s Age of ‘Insufferable Hypocrisy’

It would be an understatement to say that higher education is in crisis, as it faces attacks from both the current presidential administration as well as issues of its own making, like diversity polit...

18 Elo 1h 2min