Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland Audio, in partnership with IHeart Radio.

The federal minimum wage has been the same for more than a decade.

And you're kind of like, well, when you look at the numbers, had it just followed inflation from, say, 1979, it would be like $40 an hour, which is what it should be, you know.

But that's down to pushing, push and pushing, push in this idea of people being undeserving.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox.

So I believe it was January 2010. I remember being in line, the very long line that day at

Housing Court and tears started streaming down my face. I was trying to keep it together, but I was completely falling apart.

One of my greatest fears has always been becoming homeless,

and here I was holding an eviction notice in my hand

that the sheriff had put on my door and all my neighbors had seen.

And I was just crying and just kind of losing my, my, my, my shit.

I was 37 years old and couldn't pay my rent in a low-income building.

I was living in a government subsidized, low-income building at the time in Manhattan.

And the whole point of the building is to keep people from becoming homeless,

and here I was unable to pay rent there.

I just felt like all of the sort of narratives around being a piece of shit,

because I was poor and being lazy, even though I was working really hard at the time.

Like, a lot of it was unpaid work. So I knew I wasn't lazy, but I was still internalizing like

this narrative. And then like all the internalized racism too, it was just a shit storm of shame

and a shit storm of I'm not enough. And Brunay Brown tells us the shame functions

in two different ways. It tells us that we're not enough. And if we're able to get over that,

it says, you know, who do you think you are? You're too big for your bitches. And in that moment,

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