Hey, everybody, a great, great one today for only the second time. Heather McGee is with me.

The first great, great one was my first podcast with Heather. It was on her brilliant book,

The Some of Us, which is just out in paperback.

The Sum of Us is a beautiful, powerful book about a lie and a truth.

The lie is the one that the powerful, wealthy, white establishment has been telling poor

and working class white folks forever that whatever helps black people hurts white people.

The better blacks do, the worse whites do.

That our economy, that cultural status is all a zero-sum game.

That's the lie.

The truth is, and Heather's training is as an economist, the truth is that we're all in this together.

As my friend Paul Wellstone used to say, we all do better when we all do better. Hence,

the title of this, and I can't say this enough, this powerful, brilliant book, The Sum of Us,

the Some of Us. And in the paperback, in an afterward, Heather gets into critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic and legal framework that a few legal scholars in the late

70s started working on to explain why the civil rights victories of the 60s hadn't yield more progress

for black Americans in economic gains, in education, housing, health care, and employment.

Critical race theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice.

It is embedded in laws and policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities.

The term critical race theory has been co-opted by Republicans as a catch-all and rallying cry to silence any discussions

about systemic racism, ban the truthful teaching of American history, and reverse progress

toward social justice, and it has become a political weapon.

Glenn Yonkin won the governor's race in Virginia last year by pledging to end the teaching of

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