This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know what to think

I don't know what to say

and that's all right

and that's all right and that's okay

I don't know how many.

Hello everybody. Hello everybody, welcome to Factually.

I'm Adam Conover and, you know,

it goes without saying that you can't tell the American story

without confronting our country's legacy of racism. From slavery to Jim Crow.

We know that these dark periods are part of our history, but one of the myths that's often

told about America is that all that bad racist stuff is behind us that we had

Martin Luther King the Civil Rights Movement and Beyoncé and hey we fixed the

problem and now we live in a

happy post-race society where everyone holds hands under rainbows and gumdrop

trees. Now this myth is very obviously not true. Overt racism is not hard to uncover in American life.

If you don't believe me, just turn on the news or be a person of color in a Starbucks.

Racism is still with us folks.

But even if it weren't, even if we had somehow eliminated it,

a couple decades ago, we'd still be left living in a society shaped by policies created by

racists and for racist purposes.

For instance, on Adam Ruins Everything, we've talked about redlining.

The federal policy, which systemically denied access to home loans and other services to African American communities, which created the housing segregation

...