DEI? You’re Fired! with Heather McGhee

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Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the weekly show program.

My name is Jon Stewart.

I am coming to you on, well, today is Wednesday, April 16th.

You'll probably see this tomorrow, I guess, Thursday, April 17th, because crack team, they turn this shit around on the double.

And believe me, it's no easy task given the general audio and visual flubs that are my podcasting style.

Very frequently, just to give you people a hint of the behind-the-scenes issues, I have to be told at the beginning of every episode, please try not to keep kicking your desk because

people then begin to think there are mild earthquakes in your region and it may be slightly disturbing.

Speaking of mild earthquakes, folks,

the interesting thing to me, so how

fucked up?

Do you have to do something that can turn our attention from a global economic meltdown,

self-caused, an economic punching ourselves in the dick of these tariffs.

What would you have to do to kind of divert the attention from that?

And what you would have to do is hold

maybe one of the most chilling Oval Office meetings.

I can't even begin to describe when the president of El Salvador, Bukele, came and sat with President Trump.

There is a gentleman from Maryland that they say is a terrorist and is MS-13, but they've offered no compelling proof of such other than

I guess he has a Chicago Bulls hat, which, by the way, as a Knicks fan, I am not against sending people to prison camps for being fans of the Chicago Bulls.

That's how the police don't misunderstand.

I just want due process for these types of actions.

But the thing that I found I think

most chilling was the enjoyment, the pleasure that they seemed to take

in flouting whatever due process or whatever safeguards have been put in place by a system.

They are there to protect bad, to make sure that bad people and good people are offered the same kinds of rights.

That's the whole measure of a functioning society, a good good society, is that we are secure enough and strong enough to provide for our most vulnerable, that they are provided the same rights and regard that everyone is.

That's the point.

And to see

them

gleeful about this individual's deportation to a horrible, legendary prison in El Salvador where his family has not even been able to have any contact with him to see that with no real proof that he's done anything other than be in the country, I guess, illegally, which, if you think that should be the punishment for someone seeking asylum, well, I don't know what the fuck to tell you.

And to see

the ghoul of ghouls,

Stephen Miller, just get fucking hard talking about it,

it's shocking.

But in it,

the buds of the resistance are starting to flourish.

And where do they come from?

Harvard.

We don't, no, none of us want to take their side, but it's, yes, Harvard, finally, an organization has stood up and said, oh, you know, I actually think this is so fucked that we're actually going to risk huge financial penalties to stand up on principle.

Thank God.

You know, I was going to go go to Harvard.

A lot of people don't know that.

I was going to go to Harvard, but they

had a test to get in.

And,

yeah, so then I didn't end up going because it was

because they had a test and it was really hard.

So I went somewhere else.

But this, you know, look, aid and comfort wherever we can get it.

And I think it could be the beginnings of other organizations finally realizing that there is no gain

in subservience to immorality.

And let's hope.

And our guest today, boy, she has written about the perils of immorality and what it does to a society and the way that it erodes it.

And I'm so excited.

I haven't spoken to her in.

God, it's got to be a year or so.

So I'm delighted that she was able to join us today.

So let's get to her.

So we're going to bring in our esteemed guest.

I'm so delighted to have an opportunity to speak with her again, ladies and gentlemen, Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us.

Heather, John,

what

the hell

is happening?

Well, you know, I wrote this book, The Sum of Us, and the central story was when many

white townspeople, officials decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them and i feel like that's what's happening to our entire country right now it is like we're draining the pool we're all in the bottom of the drain pool that's right it does feel like there is an awful lot of cutting our noses to spite our our faces and i you know there's so many different things to begin with.

So let's start with, in that regard, the attack on American universities.

Let's just start there and we'll move along.

In order to keep people from teaching about slavery or gender,

they are willing to sacrifice American ingenuity in research and education and the value of all that, not just to the country, but to the world.

Are you surprised at how easily they dismiss the contributions of

these institutions?

No, it's a really good question.

I am because,

you know, they're going to get cancer too, right?

Well, they're going to give it to us, Heather, that's for sure.

That's for sure, right?

But, you know, I mean, they are in vulnerable human bodies.

Maybe Elon Musk isn't because he's mainlining some kind of, you know, asteroid juice or something.

But,

you know, certainly the octogenarian in the White House is in a vulnerable human body and his, you know, kids and family members, right?

But more broadly, right, the Republican Party, they just do not appreciate how much the foundation of their daily lives depends on public goods.

Public goods that have been invested in, you know, and catalyzed through research in universities, in partnerships with, you know, private companies, and then, of course, things like, you know, making sure we have clean air and water and a public health system and all of that.

And so I am shocked at the short-sightedness, the meanness, the

commitment to just

dominance, right?

Because this is what this is really about, right?

It's using race and gender as the wedge, as the cudgel, as the sort of excuse.

But what Donald Trump is trying to do is exert his control over every institution of civic life.

And that is straight and simple out of the autocrats playbook.

And that's where we are right now, as political scientists would say.

And it is a purposeful control, Heather.

The thing that's interesting to me is it's not mere flattery.

It is truly purposeful in the sense of realigning what they believe to be the values that the country should uphold.

And what I found so interesting, you know, I was listening to them talk about manufacturing and bringing back manufacturing, the resilience of it.

And I've yet to see somebody suggest that it isn't a good idea to bring back some manufacturing or to try and make the country more resilient.

But they talk about it in terms of we've lost masculinity.

And I keep thinking to myself, so wouldn't that be some type of affirmative action?

Are we DEIing

male jobs?

Do they not understand

they're willing to pull trillions of dollars out of the economy to readvantage men?

What?

What's happening?

Yes.

I mean, let's be clear, affirmative action

was invented for white men, right?

I mean, we had for most of our history until the mid-1960s, we had a system where every part of our policy structure, our economic incentives, the rules, written and unwritten, were set up to allow white men to flourish and everybody else, you know, to ask for permission to merely, you know, have a job and have a family, right?

It was the default setting, the default setting of America.

That's the default setting.

Yeah, that's right.

And I mean that literally, right?

I mean, in the book, I write about all the different policies that explicitly say that you cannot get a mortgage if you are in this neighborhood with a high Negro concentration.

Please run those through.

Run through the explicit policies because this is such an important issue, Heather, because they keep talking about manufacturing was hollowed out because of policy.

So we have to, and I hate to use the word reparations, but we have have to repair the damage of these policies.

So please explain specifically some of those policies that excluded people from building equity.

So the Social Security Act, right, which made it so that people could retire with dignity.

It excluded the two job categories that most black workers were in.

This was a compromise between the Jim Crow delegation to Congress in the New Deal, right?

The domestic work and agricultural work.

We had at the beginning beginning of the 20th century a massive investment in housing right most many of our houses right and apartment buildings and everything were built through this huge influx in the first half of the 20th century in housing that working people could afford and then on top of that something really unprecedented which was the idea that there should be mass home ownership so the government made a system where we have this thing called a mortgage right where you could be a working person and just pay off something over time and own property that would be the basis for intergenerational wealth, right?

That was all government planning, and it was all based on the never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much of a credit risk.

And so, literally, like the progressive FDR federal government drew maps of the entire country and

surveyed them down to the block level for their racial and ethnic character and said the areas with a high Negro concentration, for example, do not lend in these areas.

Levittown, something I think you're familiar with, right?

Other,

all right, it's just one example.

What is that sound?

That's amazing.

Heather, it's just because that's the one, you know, and I talked to O'Reilly's whole like persona comes out of that.

Like, I'm from Levitt Town, hard scrabble people that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and did the values.

And you're like, right.

And you know, black people weren't allowed to live there, right?

Yeah, right, right.

Those

GI bill homes that were built and paid for by the government excluded specifically black people.

Yes.

The language in the deed said these can be sold or leased only to people, quote, wholly of the Caucasian race, right?

No octoroons may apply.

Can I tell you something?

And you got to test.

You got to do the pinprick and you got to make sure.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

Right.

So that's example.

And housing, of course, is very significant because that's how we build our wealth, right?

That's how we have intergenerational wealth.

And that's a lot of why today, if you are a black college graduate, you have less wealth on average than a white high school dropout.

Say that again.

If you are a black college graduate, you may have a higher income, you may have a better job, right?

You've done all the things, you've gone to college, but you will have less household wealth, like your assets, things to rely on, your home equity, stocks and bonds, et cetera, than a white high school dropout.

And that's entirely history, history showing up in your wallet, right?

But, you know, this

administration literally banned the word historically from

being eligible for research grants, right?

They're actually canceling history so that we don't know that and we return to a privileged-based economy.

so that they and people like them can be the only ones to thrive.

And my point overall is that that is is not good for anyone, right?

We need diversity in order to thrive.

We need economic, racial,

gender diversity as a way to innovate.

And we are simply,

if everything they're trying to do goes through and is maintained by the Supreme Court, I think that our country will economically, not just morally, but economically, be shoved back a generation or or two, we will lose our place at the top of the economic pyramid.

So this is the argument, Heather, that I think is so important, which is to separate the moral component from the practical and pragmatic component, because I think so often the morality of it is centered.

at the argument and people forget that this is also

a practical argument.

So

here's their counter.

We need to live in a meritocracy and to advantage, you know, okay,

there was slavery and Jim Crow and you weren't allowed to buy houses and you were excluded from certain places.

So we're going to give you two points on your college application.

So we're good, right?

And then the other people went, two points on a college application.

That's so unfair.

That's not America.

The argument against it is always, oh, you're going to, you want to reach out and bring in people of color to be pilots.

Oh, don't they have to learn how to fly planes?

As though it's only

race or gender or that that's what diversity is.

How do you

talk about that

with people who believe that?

And how do you not help them understand that opening up these supply lines that have not been used

is actually increasing competition.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's two ways to do it.

One is where you simply can remind folks that a system where only white men were allowed to hold top positions or not even top positions, you know, like, you know,

a machinist, a manufacturer, right, like a you know, a pilot, a driver, et cetera,

was itself a formative of affirmative action that diminished competition, right?

If you didn't have to compete with anyone but anyone who looked like you,

and, you know, increasingly now the majority of the country is not sort of eligible for various reasons for these jobs, you know, that was its own kind of affirmative action.

And then we saw, once we

unleashed the power of competition, we saw our country's innovation and prosperity really,

really explode, right?

And

I think that that's one way to talk about it in terms of competition, right?

People should have to compete.

But the other thing, you know, that I would say is that it took a lot of work to hold back women and people of color and immigrants who come to this country from non-white parts of the world, right?

And that's because there is a ton of grit and excellence.

And black women have the highest average degrees right now in the country, right?

Immigrants create jobs twice as often, right?

I don't know that it's really about

being worried that things are going to get worse if they're competing with these other groups, but rather perhaps a fear of losing, right?

And that's just real talk.

Like a resource guarding, the sense of.

Yeah, it's like hoarding resources.

I'm saying basically, maybe the fear is not that uh the the black pilot will be you know worse but rather that maybe the black pilot will be better right that someone who has overcome all of these challenges right certainly not how they're framing it i mean do you remember the plane goes down uh just recently right after the inauguration in in dc and the first thing they did yeah is come out and say the reason this happened is because of our DEI policies.

For God's sakes, there might have been a lesbian air traffic controller, or there might have been.

John, that's just message discipline.

It's just message discipline, right?

Because what it was was a head fake away from the cuts that they were making to the FAA.

Right.

Right.

Away from the fact that.

So you think cynical, purely cynical.

Oh, absolutely.

They don't believe any of this shit.

Well, some people do.

Some of them do.

Right.

Some of them are believers.

But again, everything we believe comes from a story we've been told.

So if you live in the right-wing,

message ecosystem, right, if you're on Elon Musk's Twitter, which used to be this great

platform for the world and is now like a white supremacist message board, then yes, right, that's what you've been taught to believe.

But it's not true.

And more importantly, we still live in a privilege-based society.

I mean, and look at, you know, for example, the law firms, right?

So the administration had these shakedown executive orders to all of the top law firms, which were retribution and trying to get hundreds of millions of dollars of free work for right-wing causes and, you know, for Trump and, you know, et cetera, right.

And the attack was: cancel your DEI programs because they're illegal and they've run amok.

I want to be clear that in all of the law firms in the country,

there are only less than 3% of the partners are black, right?

There are about 50%

of the

law firms, the big law firms, the ones with a lot of lawyers and that are really elite, 50% of them have no black partners, right?

And so what we're saying is this is like still an industry where white men are dominating.

And yet the administration is using the excuse that diversity has run them up

to literally just shake them down for money for their causes.

It's all about the money.

Yeah, they got, I think, $900 million of pro bono, which reminds me of like, it's like a lifetime supply of turtle wax.

Like, who's going to use 900 million?

Oh, they could do a very, well, first of all, lawyers' hours are very expensive.

Maybe I haven't had a lawyer in a while.

So this is rigging, this is trying to rig the marketplace of ideas, right?

So,

you know, lawyers, very educated people who know the Constitution, who know the law, are not flocking to defend these crackpot legal theories.

And so they literally have to force them to do it, right?

This is same thing with the attacks on universities, right?

In the marketplace of ideas of rigorous scholarship,

what the administration is trying to do with these shakedown executive orders is say you have to hire scholars who are conservative.

Not you have to hire people based on their identity, right?

But you have to hire scholars who are conservative.

And, you know, I mean, these are institutions where,

sure, there may be a

plurality of people who have liberal thoughts and ideas.

Right.

And not necessarily activists.

They may, you know, there's a difference also between ideologue activists and people that just lean left.

Freed a lot.

Yeah.

Read a lot.

People that listen to the radio on everybody.

People that learn history.

And so, what they're saying is, you know, for example, the attacks on these Ivy League institutions that are shakedowns for

money and for rigging our whole civil society

not only to a conservative bent to say, you know, put the thumb on the scale and say, you, if any department doesn't have enough conservatives from the White House with a stroke of a pen, I have to, I have the power to change that.

Or I will remove all of your research grants for pediatric cancer.

I mean, truly,

it is

so disgusting.

It is so nefarious.

It's wild.

We're going to take a quick break.

We shall be right back.

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We're back.

Heather.

You know, I just spent the last two days with a

scholar

of autocrats, right, who studies this stuff.

And they're from Harvard.

I actually won't name them because

of the attack.

Why are you hanging out with these elites, Heather?

Why the elites?

Well, I mean, listen, if anybody else has studied autocracies from across the world, I'd be very happy.

Right.

And this is the playbook, right?

It is to go at the parts of society that have the power to mount a defense to total control and to bring them to heal.

And I think that's the piece that

is scarier than anything else about what's going on right now is that we in many ways have moved into

what political scientists would call right now a competitive autocracy, meaning there are still elections, right?

It's not like a military coup,

but it is an autocracy in the sense that we have someone in office who wants to

rule by signature, right?

I mean, he's got a majority in Congress.

By the way, he has signed no legislation.

Right.

Zero.

It's insane.

Zero.

He's got the Congress in his party.

They will do their lick spiddles, right?

And yet,

he still wants the feeling of being able to just sign a pin and change American law firms and change American universities and change American media and cut

hundreds of billions of dollars, fire tens of thousands of public servants, flouting the separation of powers.

And ultimately, that's about his control.

Even the tariffs, John, really, I think, are, because there's something, you can have an industrial policy, right?

In fact, Joe Biden's industrial policies brought manufacturing back to the highest level it had been since the 1970s.

But the way, the chaotic form of these punitive tariffs is really just about him exerting maximum control over companies, industries, and world leaders, and then asking them to beg for permission to be, you know, accepted from

these tariffs.

I remember even right afterwards, he was at some dinner, and it was so stunning to see all the chaos that had been created.

And he's up there in his tuxedo going, they're all kissing my ass.

All these countries, they're kissing my ass as though,

you know, that was the goal is to make sure that they paid tribute.

Has it surprised you that corporate entities and educational entities and law firms have been so supplicant, have been so subservient, have

done this so easily.

It was when Harvard said, Yeah, we're not going to do that.

And you thought,

oh my God, I'm going to have to take the side of Harvard.

But when they did that, you thought, well, is that only because they have an endowment, or is this the beginning of a bulkhead?

You know,

were you shocked by how quickly

Apple and Amazon and they were all at the inauguration.

Everybody bent the knee.

I mean, so I was less shocked that some of the world's richest men

were

willing to stand behind someone who had made it very clear that if you weren't behind him, you were in his sights, right?

They have so much to gain by cozying up to him and flattering him.

And of course, let's be very clear, everyone at that income and wealth level has to gain from the tax cuts that are barreling their way through Washington, which is the number one goal, obviously, of Elon Musk.

It's about clearing the way of these pesky vaccines for children in Africa and lead pipe mitigation in your neighborhood.

Removing regulation, removing anything that would stand in their way, right?

Exactly.

In order to justify massive tax cuts, right?

right?

So it's about the tax cut.

It's about the fact that he is very easily flattered.

And so, for example, smartphones.

Whoops, smartphones are all of a sudden, you know, exempt from the tariffs, right?

So that made sense to me.

What didn't make sense was the law firms.

Huh.

The law firms didn't make sense.

The law firms didn't make sense because, first of all,

the executive order, the shakedown executive order, was so illegal on its face.

And that is their job to determine that, right?

So they didn't wait for the litigation to go through uh and of course there are some law firms that have signed on to you know to to litigation to take it all the way to the supreme court to get those shakedown eos uh uh nullified but what what was the shakedown heather is it because i i still don't quite understand

what he was threatening or or why i know he was going to say oh i'll strip your security or i'll make it harder for you to get clients but i the why of it is what is he saying they've done

very good point he's saying that one or more of their partners there's a few things basically they've defied him right so one or more one or more of their partners or people who work there at some point was part of a litigation against him right so you have people who were u.s attorneys who were part of litigation against him and is he suggesting that that is an illegal act that they undertook Absolutely, because he's the law.

You just get, that just, just did not go well with my spine right there.

John, you got to know what time it is.

Can I just say something about why it's easy for me to say that and accept it?

And it's kind of harder, I think, for many people in this country to wrap their minds around what time it is right now.

Please.

So we've always been taught, I think, that there's such a thing as autocrats and dictators.

And we go to war against them, right?

Those are in foreign countries that don't believe in democracy like we do.

But black people in America lived under autocracy for most of our history.

Black people in the deep south, in many places, live under a version of autocracy today, right?

And so

a world where

there is a law that is the effective law that is

used and enforced through violence, the threat of violence, being willing to take resources away from from a community.

Right.

Economic damage.

Exactly.

That's what has been done to black America.

That's Jim Crow America, right?

And so we're not as shocked that this would happen in America, right?

And I think it's really important

for everyone in this country to know what time it is, right?

To learn from the resistance and defiance movements all around the world, but also the movements that end the Jim Crow autocracy in the United States, to learn how to be vigilant, to not be surprised, to know that they're strength in numbers, to know that if you give an inch when you don't have to, they will take everything, and to know what their vision is, the kind of world that they would like to see.

And it is a world where a law firm that has been around for 120 years has represented conservatives, corporations,

civil rights lawyers,

the whole thing, can be brought to heel

for

essentially,

A, having a DEI program, right?

That's a diversity program.

That is in the executive orders usually.

But as I said,

it's not doing much.

It's not like it's been taken over by communist, you know, trans black people.

Right.

Because these law firms are still mostly white men at the top, right?

As I said, you know, like just a few percent of black lawyers are partners at these big law firms.

But most importantly, for

violating the law, which is do not cross Trump.

And then, of course, strategically, if I want to be a dictator, first destroy the lawyers

and bring them to your side.

Second, capture the media.

Third, disrupt the university.

Next,

who's going to be there to file the lawsuits, right?

Right, exactly.

So you need, and to intimidate the judiciary as well, right?

When the judges who are in the same class as these big law firm partners are looking around and seeing the people who usually come, you know, and go to trial in front of them yielding without even putting up a fight, that influences the judiciary.

So this is all about a sectoral approach to bring the entire society under heel.

And I know for some people hearing this, it may sound like, oh, you know, she's crazy.

She's saying that, you know,

her hair's on fire, right?

Like she's exaggerating.

She's exaggerating what's going on.

But I really want to implore you to just think about the sort of through line across all of what Trump is doing.

You know, they didn't break the law.

They broke the the law that says, you know, Donald Trump is the law.

And they use the law, Heather.

I think

what's what's so interesting in this moment is how thorough they've been in using the law and the history of this country.

I feel like

one of the mechanisms that they utilize is catastrophizing the moment that we were in to justify emergency powers.

And then they're going through and they're saying, let's use the uh Alien Enemies Act from

this era.

Let's use in 1950s, There was an emergency tariff construction use that was used for that.

Let's use what Roosevelt might have used in the 40s.

So they've actually,

they've gone through and they have built their own

justification and infrastructure through the history of this country.

They have used it

historically.

Yes.

Now, obviously not Donald Trump, who doesn't read, but

how fun was it watching him him go, I'm going to use the illegal aliens, you know, like, but you just wanted to say, like, who told him about that?

So obviously, right, there's an entire

right-wing infrastructure folks who put out things like Project 2025 who have been looking for

all the different moments in our history when the executive, the White House, had the most power possible.

Right.

Generally under emergency powers.

Yes, that's right.

Right.

And what is the emergency today?

The emergency today is that there's too much diversity.

There are too many immigrants of color.

Right.

It's a racial emergency.

Let's just be real.

Right.

And so this is why it really is drained pool politics.

It's saying that there's too much diversity in our country.

And so we have to actually just, you know, drain the pool and get rid of government.

It's a reset.

It's a reset, right?

But of course, it's a reset that is going to cost people white, black, and brown, native-born, and immigrant

their jobs, right?

He's destroying tens of thousands of American jobs, just himself, much less the knock-on effects of things like tariffs and the tax cuts that are skewed to the wealthy while actually raising them by about $1,000

for middle-class families.

It's costing American lives.

We are going to see kids poisoned by lead because of the cuts to the EPA.

Kids dying of measles.

Kids dying of measles.

People dying of diseases that were research funded by, in part by the American taxpayer,

has already been frozen, curtailed, threatened because

he wants power.

over the institutions, the universities that partner with them, or because they've said something like

female in the grant proposal.

Right.

Sorry, that's who gets breast cancer.

But that's what's been so wild to watch is the way that they have manipulated what some of this research entails to make it seem as though it's whimsical diversity porn, that it's literally just universities going, oh, we've got all this money, but have to give out at least half of it to wheelchair-bound lesbians.

Like they're making it seem utterly arbitrary and based on guilt.

That because what it does is, I mean, yes, there are a number of grants that are studying, you know, lung cancer in minority populations, in rural populations, in underserved.

I'm like naming words that are disqualifying now, right?

Right.

And the only reason why that is,

the only justification for that being something that you can cancel without any kind of feeling or sentiment or sense about it is if you just totally dehumanized those populations, right?

Because they, we get lung cancer too, right?

And if you're in a country, in a society that is about 50, 50 people of color and white, it should matter

if

people are dying and getting sick because of diseases that can be cured, right?

It's really, the dehumanization is what happens first.

And then, of course, you're right, John, that it is just an excuse to exert control.

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And I think they've done something even more insidious,

which is to suggest as common sense

the idea that if a black person or a woman or

anyone who is not of the default setting has a position, that it is a position that has been gained through the manipulation of a system.

I have a friend whose daughter is brilliant, black woman, young, you know, just getting out of college.

And what he was is,

she's summa cum laude.

And you know what the like fucked up thing is?

No one's going to believe it.

Is the way that he set it up is

she is only there by the grace of liberal guilt.

She is only there because the lack of meritocracy put her in that position and elevated her and gave her the thing.

And it was so clearly upsetting to him, the idea that that her achievements would now be cast in that type of

negative light.

And I want to see if we can sort of

their objections to that is somehow they keep saying we want to get back to that meritocracy.

But when

was that?

Like,

what are they talking about?

And how do you address that idea that these people who are achieving things in spite of

their circumstances are now being viewed suspiciously?

Yeah.

I think it's really important.

You know, I was touched by the sort of anguish that you cited from your friend.

My thought when you were saying it was they'll think that until she opens her mouth, right?

There is a way in which

as a black woman, myself, who

was a nerd and skipped a grade and

went to schools that nobody like me should have been able to go to and thrive and graduate at the top of my class.

And

I associate myself with the black women who did the math to return the moon landing, right?

the black people who, despite literally being not allowed to hold any positions of power in society.

I'm talking about, you know, the first three quarters of the 20th century, you know, invented the furnace, the gas mask, the, you know, the stoplight, the filament in the light bulb, you know, the satellite, the GPS technology, a black woman, right?

Like all of these things that are you, are you serious?

Because that is the only thing that allows me to

work.

It is the only thing that allows me to get places now, even reasonably on time, is I need to thank whoever that is.

So I need to write them a thank you note.

You do, you do, right?

I mean, I'm just saying like there, there is this counter.

And I know

I'm very happy to, you know, sort of argue about the meritocracy, but in some ways, I just want to

say that there is

the other truth that has to be, at least for people who are the targets of this kind of dehumanization and diminishment,

a real knowledge that is at your core, that the entire society had to be structured to hold you back or else you would fly.

Like, you just have to know that,

you know, as I said at the beginning,

there was a system that used every part of society to prop up one identity

and to oppress and hold back everybody else.

And that when we are given an equal playing field,

we fly.

Boy, Heather, that's such, you know, look at what's happened now in education.

So,

years ago, they thought, well, women are being held back.

So, let's encourage them.

Let's encourage them to get into STEM.

Let's encourage them to get education.

And now, the big talk is, hey,

what about boys?

They're getting their asses kicked by women, as though

women have been so advantaged now that boys can't compete on that level.

It's too skewed.

And so they're, it's so interesting to me to watch them say, so we must repair the damage that's been done by equality.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, that is sort of what.

That's what they're saying.

Right.

That's what they're saying.

And so they have to take, it's such an interesting thing to watch, but it also gets to the point that somehow there are metrics to a meritocracy that are not subjective, That somehow hiring in the good old days was not subjective.

That it was, no, it's based completely on qualifications, which everyone knows is nonsense.

College applications are subjective.

Hiring is subjective.

Everything is.

Other than things that are literally math.

Like if you watch a dude score 35 points a game and get 11 rebounds, that is unassailably objective measures.

But as far as who you're going to hire,

of course it is, oh, he was recommended by Johnny, and Johnny's a good dude, so I'm going to get him.

Or I talk to him and I feel comfortable with him.

I feel comfortable, right?

The like me bias, right?

So what is diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, right?

It is, it has been,

and ever since, you know, the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the 70s with the feminist movement brought in women and gender into this.

An idea

that

we as a society and workplaces individually, and the research has continuously borne this out, we do better

when you really have the best and brightest.

And that means everyone in your society is able to come through the door and participate.

It's like, you know, it's like if you have a problem, right?

You have a problem that you're sitting with and you have only one identity, one group of people with the same general set of background and assumptions, and you know, and where they come from and the way they see the world, you can only see part of it, right?

There's this whole other part of it that someone who came from a different set of circumstances would be able to see, and together,

you solve the whole, right?

And that has what has been borne out.

Literally, more diverse juries remember more facts.

More diverse teams come up with breakthroughs in problem-solving faster.

More diversity in the classroom creates better educational outcomes, not just for the kids of color, but for the white kids too, right?

We have reams and dreams of research about this.

And yet,

this

formula, which I think is America's superpower, and the idea that we could keep optimizing for that, keep making workplaces more diverse,

which by the way is popular with over three-fourths of the American public, right?

The idea of diversity in workplaces, it's like it's it's it's actually common sense.

And by the way, too, diversity is also, as you say that, race, gender, but also veterans.

Veterans, thank you.

Or people in a might have a disability.

Like all there's so many different metrics to that.

I mean, this anti-diversity regime is not stopping with affirmative action in schools, which already the Supreme Court did away with.

It's coming for the breastfeeding rooms in your offices, for veterans hiring programs, for, you know, right?

It's coming for

all of the systems that make the world more inclusive and accommodating.

And so often, this is the way drain pool politics goes, right?

It's like, it's supposed to be an attack on the least of us, but in the end, it's an attack on almost all of us.

You know, Heather, I want to ask you:

were there excesses in the DEI?

Because everything that you're saying, and my experience with it as well, has been that.

Even to the point of like, if I'm putting together a writer's room, forget about

women or people of color, all that.

Like, I need a couple of people who are really good short joke writers, but I need a couple of people who are more absurdist thinkers, or a couple of people that are more like you design something so that everyone doesn't bring the same skill because then you have no reach.

So what happened

that suddenly made this the driving force in many respects of an utter transformation of American politics?

Was it the seminar?

Is it me too?

Is it the idea that I can't even look at a woman?

Is it the idea that, oh, now I have to think about if someone in my office might be gay, so I can't do the voice I like doing?

Like,

what drives this?

Because I've always looked at DEI programs as what

the hierarchical system allows you to do.

Rather than attack what are the real issues of communities left behind and do the real work of building equity in places that had equity removed.

by literal legislation, they make sure that there's somebody who has an office that says diversity, and they make you sit through an hour once a year.

Like, what is going on?

So, I want to say two things.

One,

Trump got 49 and some change percent of the people who voted, right?

And 80, 90 million people didn't vote.

So, right.

And even of the people who voted for Trump, the idea of canceling diversity programs across the country is not overwhelmingly popular.

So,

this is a faction using this as an excuse.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't way more people who are,

you know, sort of susceptible to the anti-diversity arguments than I feel comfortable with.

And suspicious of diversity, really suspicious of it.

Yeah.

Of those programs.

So, I think two.

So, one, I want to just like put it in its place, right?

We still have polling that shows that diversity and diversity programs are largely popular in the country still, right?

But you had social movements, you know, the movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, Me Too,

the Movement for Marriage Equality and for inclusion on gender and sexual identity that in a very short period of time

signaled to,

you know, a lot of influential people that they needed to hurry up and get on this train.

And so I do think you did see people who were not true believers in the idea, right?

I'm talking about like C-suite executives, right?

Who said, oh boy, George Floyd was murdered.

The whole world's attention went to it.

I got to put out a statement.

I got to, you know, bring that person in the diversity office that I haven't ever wanted to invite to a meeting in and ask them what to do really quickly.

And just as quickly, as soon as Trump was elected, they were willing to drop it, right?

So that's why, you know, all the black people I know haven't been to Target, right, since they dropped their DEI, right?

You know, and we've got these like economic boycotts of Target that are happening, whereas, you know, Costco and Delta have stood fast with their DEI programs and they're doing better financially, right?

So there has been a like, it was a fad

of

some you know, sectors of our society and they dropped it just as quickly.

And that's a shame, right?

Because I do think the companies that have really meaningfully seen it as a part of their growth model before George Floyd was murdered by a cop and, you know, and still after Donald Trump won 49% of the popular vote, right?

Those are the companies that are going to continue to thrive in a diverse America.

The ones who weren't being performative.

That's right.

Do you think, Heather, that is it a misunderstanding of what diversity initiatives mean?

Is it a poor design of those programs within the workforce?

You know, what they would say is it demonizes white people.

It makes them all seem guilty of something that they had nothing to do with.

It's giving jobs out.

If I'm up for a job and a person of color is up for a job, I know I won't get it because the playing field is now tilted the other way.

You know, that is the prevailing wisdom

of the backlash.

Right.

And still, big big law firms only, 50% of them have no black partners.

But every black person who's ever gone up for a job is going to get it.

Okay.

So.

And in the NFL, they have to interview at least one black person.

They just have to.

Right, exactly.

That's why there are so many black head coaches.

Yeah.

So

the thing I'm joking about, obviously, is that the bias still persists.

And so this idea that a white man can't get a shot anymore is just not borne out by the numbers.

And I think it's really important to remember that because if you think because you have to state and remember the discrimination that exists the like me bias that people have who are in power and most of them are white men

that bias exists the the bias that comes from social distance like I'm just not familiar with that person's jokes their hairstyle the the school they went to the references they make it makes me uncomfortable I'm a little bit scared of these people that I didn't grow up you know barbecuing with, and that I, you know, lived in a very segregated neighborhood and went to a very effectively segregated school or private school to keep away from people like that.

And now all of a sudden, you know, I'm looking at their application and woe and behold, research shows that if people on an application for a job have a black name, a black sounding name, right?

They are much less likely to get a callback, even if they have a ton of degrees and experience, than someone with a a white-sounding name with less of that, right?

So if you don't recognize the bias still exists, it can feel arbitrary.

Like, why should a black person get a job?

You know, why, you know, but it's important to remember that.

It's important that we still have a lot of ways to go in this country for anything approaching full equality, and that full equality will be great for everyone in the country.

Do you have at hand sort of the idea of

here's some DEI programs that I think have been really effective that have done it the right way, that haven't used sort of pro forma shame or,

you know, sort of just finger wagging and are designed in a way to effectuate the proper change without creating that resentment.

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's two things.

One, I think that, you know, any kind of

change, being made aware of something that you were like willfully lied to about can be uncomfortable.

But of course, discomfort is where learning happens.

That's what, you know, somebody who's a science teacher would say, right?

You know, it's just, it's uncomfortable to be learning something new, and that should be okay.

I just want to say that from the outset.

But I also think that there is

a way in which,

because there's so far to go, because,

you know, when I first wrote my book, so that was, you know, leading up to 2020,

10% of high school seniors could accurately say that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War.

How many?

10%.

Come on, Heather.

Right, come Come on.

So we have so far to go.

So imagine, right, that 90% of high school seniors, they graduate, they go into an office, you know, and someone at the Black History Month thing is saying something and they're like, what are you talking, right?

What do they even say?

It was

states' rights.

States rights.

Their rights to be states.

Even though it's

South Carolina, I think, specifically in their declaration of war was like, slavery's got to be here.

Or we're leaving.

Exactly.

Wow.

Right.

But so, so that's just an example to show how the like mass consciousness raising that happened after 2020

was like, you know, going from zero to 100 very quickly for a lot of people who were lied to, right?

I do not blame people.

for going to schools where the textbooks are full of lies.

That is not their fault, right?

So I think there is that that we have to just understand

but also yes i do think and i have experienced uh efforts that are more about creating the desired state than educating people

about all the things on the way okay talk about that then and the right the desired state yeah yeah yeah is where you have a sense of belonging everyone.

The desired state is where you connect on the level of your common humanity.

So, for example, I happen to be very lucky that my amazing mother

is someone who's been doing this work for a long time, not as like a DEI practitioner,

but she was in philanthropy and she pioneered this program that she calls RX Racial Healing.

And it's for racial healing in communities and in institutions.

And one of the things you do is you get a diverse group of people, you put them in a circle, and you don't ask them to share their greatest trauma and a history of, you know, oppression and exclusion.

Those people need to know that stuff, right?

But it's sort of like,

this is, you know, sort of hopefully for people who, you know, are at a 2.0 or they go through this program and then they go and read about that on their own.

But in terms of, you know, the real work in the circle, it's tell me about a time in your life when you felt awe.

Tell me about a time in your life where somebody really believed in you and it changed what you did.

And so you get people sharing their stories.

And it is a white cop and a black kindergarten teacher.

It is, you know, an Indigenous person who is, you know, fighting for land rights with somebody who's, you know, just not designed to shame either party, designed to facilitate.

Designed to connect first at the level of our common humanity.

Because, of course, what is racism?

It is the lie that we are not all human beings that are driven fundamentally by the same needs and emotions.

And so if you experience

the

actual act of hearing someone's story about when they felt certain emotions,

when their humanity was touched, you connect on that level.

And it in of itself gives lie to the racist belief in a hierarchy of human value.

And then you can do the work.

So that's just one design element of what I've seen be much more productive at diminishing defensiveness among people from groups that have historically been privileged, but also that get you to a place of trust.

Because when someone's like told you about

beautiful stories from their childhood,

you know, that's, that's, that's a trust.

Let's talk about that because the word privilege, you know, when we talk about in the language of snow, snowflakes and things like that, you know, the triggering, you know, people's lives are hard.

White people's lives are hard.

And so when they can hear you're privileged, it can trigger a kind of wait, you know, and that,

how do you separate that idea that this isn't about saying your life is great and mine sucks because I'm in a minority group, but that, you know,

life is hard and how, you know, in many ways, these racial and gender and all these divisions are there to prevent people from coming together and effectively pushing against the real issues of corporate dominance or other things along those lines.

Exactly.

How do you take the power out of that word so that people don't feel attacked immediately with just the use of it?

Yeah.

Um

so

I know I'm like I want to say on the one hand we have so many great people about to go you just tell them to get fucking over it.

That's what you tell them.

Get over it.

Not me.

That's not

you at all.

It's not.

You're the nicest person I know.

All right.

But, But, you know, don't be so fucking fragile.

Exactly.

I'm just kidding.

No, no, no, really.

No, listen,

when I wrote The Sum of Us, it was trying to make the case that we have all been poorly served in an economy that is, you know, where inequality is rampant.

And the excuse that the people driving that economy of inequality have used

is racial divisions, racial grievance politics, right?

And so I absolutely believe that people in power,

especially right now, are selling a zero-sum story that says that

progress for people of color and women is coming at your expense, that more immigrants are taking your jobs, that if there is, God forbid, less than 1% of the population that needs to become the gender that they know themselves to be, then that means that your daughter is never going to get a softball scholarship, right?

Like,

it is a zero-sum story that says, fear your neighbor instead of joining forces with them to take on the people who are actually immiserating us, who are the, you know, the greediest man in the world, for example, who's literally,

you know, the one trying to take away clean air and water and cancer research for all of us, right?

So that is that, I believe that so deeply that these racial divisions are holding us back from a society where we would all prosper more.

How do we litigate that, Heather?

Because that's then the final piece of this is you've got the evidence, you've got

the story to tell.

How do we litigate that case?

Because I don't think it's been litigated well.

So I think

we are living in the

sort of fulfillment of three decades of a right-wing takeover of the information ecosystem.

Right?

We, we, we don't, not only like, is there not the message discipline that would have, you know, everyone who wants to see unity and prosperity in our country singing from the same hymn book,

but they're just not the channels anymore.

Um, and so I think that's a real problem, right?

We've lost, you know, almost half of the newspapers in this country.

We, you know, Sinclair is broadcasting to 70% of American American households, and that's a company that's ideologically right-wing.

Real information and facts are behind a paywall, right?

So you have this education gap where the stuff that's free is just

flooded the zone, frankly, crap on social media.

That's free.

And then you have to pay 80 bucks a year for the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Right.

And algorithmically driven, yes.

Exactly.

So we've just got an information ecosystem that is really distorted and that's dangerous.

But fundamentally,

the American people know that the economy is rigged

for the very wealthy.

That is something that

the majority of Republicans believe.

And

it is something that when we have a

Democratic Party, right, and I'm talking about politics now because of the laws that matter, that change the economy, but also because

people listen to politicians explain the world to them, right?

That's part of how we get a story in our head.

The Democratic Party is seen as well-meaning, but weak.

And defending the status quo.

And defending the status quo at a time when the status quo is just not working.

People know their kids will be worse off than them.

That is a fundamental violation of the American dream.

And so, yes, 49% of the country was like, I would rather choose something different than the status quo.

And by the way, huge inroads into the very communities, minority communities, he did much better than

he had previously done.

But you used a great word, emiserated.

And you talked about the rigging of the economy to the very rich.

And yet I think the prevailing emotional drive.

of that electoral change is the economy is rigged in favor of black people, women, and undocumented immigrants.

Like the very people that suffer the most in most economic outcome studies are the ones apparently who have been elevated.

So

that is because the people holding the bullhorn who are telling, selling that zero-sum story for their own profit

are saying, blame your neighbor, blame the person right next to you that you can see and not the billionaire you're working hard but you're not getting anything out of it they are those those

welfare people yeah the the undeserving other and i i just you know you you said this so i should address why is it that more um latinos and more um young people especially young white people more asian americans more muslims uh a few more black men but not that many we're still you know black people are still the the

most

skeptical.

They're all in the lives.

They're still

really, come on.

You know, why that shift?

I think we have to get a little bit more sophisticated about race and understand that it's not the story that

the right-wing, that Donald Trump was selling, was not that all immigrants are bad, all black people are bad, all, you know, it was that the underlying negative stereotype about the racialized other, that people are lazy, that they're criminal, that they're dangerous, that they're a threat, right?

That was so like hyperbolically used, right?

It was like criminal migrants who were, you know, torturing your daughter and, right,

that even people who themselves are immigrants or themselves have immigrants in their family were like, well, let me check the box to say not me.

Right.

Right.

All right.

I'm going to check the box to say that's not me.

And yes, you should deport those bad people because they're giving us a bad name.

Right.

And lo and behold, we've got people.

Lo and behold, they're like, is that a Chicago Bulls hat?

You're out.

El Salvador for you.

Boom.

It's, it's, it's, it's wild, Heather.

Final

question:

As you watch this

sort of

build momentum in the wrong direction, are you seeing the nascent buds of an effective block, an effective, unified

group that can build some guardrails where so many others have failed.

And is there any advice that you give about sort of becoming a useful part of that?

Such a great question.

Thank you.

So the moment is for defiance, right?

It is for defiance of a hostile regime that is attacking our country as if they're going to war against it, right?

That's what you do to a country that you're going to war against.

You fire the scientists and the civil servants.

You attack civil society, right?

You try to dismantle the institutions of it that serve the people and that create independent power.

And that's what this regime is doing.

And so we owe it to ourselves and to the country that we love to defy that regime.

And the good news is that even though there have been a bunch of really early losses, right, absolutely self-owns that were totally unnecessary by places like Columbia University and law firms like Paul Weiss and others.

There have been both elites like Harvard, which really

succumbed to a pressure campaign from the inside and the out, right?

Like the city of Cambridge, you know, did a unanimous

resolution saying stand up to Trump, right?

This is before the executive order.

The faculty, 800 of them signed a letter, right?

Like

it was a campaign because people knew it was coming to sort of buck up Harvard.

And they did the right thing.

They said, you know what, our research matters, our institution matters, and that's great.

Some of the lessons there are:

A, you know, know your worth, anticipate that they're going to come for you, right?

Like a lot of my friends work in nonprofit organizations.

We just saw the first, you know, attack, the desire to get Doge employees in any institution that accepts federal money.

So you'll have like Elon Musk's henchmen sitting in your nonprofit office if you accept federal dollars.

Wow.

That just happened.

So know that they're coming for you in the sector.

Know that they're coming for media.

Know that they're coming for you and get together.

The lesson there is be in solidarity, right?

One of the things that happened with the law firms is that instead of calling up Paul Weiss when they got that executive order, all the other law firms called and tried to pick off their clients and tried to pick off their best lawyers, right?

They were like, great, blood in the water, let's do this.

And so then all of a sudden, you know, the people calling the shots at that firm were like, we're not going to survive the next 72 hours.

We've got a cave, right?

So

the understanding that there's strength in numbers against tyranny is very important.

Get ready, right?

Stay ready so you don't have to get ready, right?

Know what time it is.

Also, we had one of the largest demonstration days in American history all over the country, all 50 states, on April 5th, the hands-off rallies.

We had massive economic...

pressure being put from you know things that are being organized by black pastors against target you know saying choose Costco not Target

so we've got all of these different places You know, one of the big wedges has obviously been about, you know, anti-war protesters being picked off the street and deported.

For writing an op-ed in a Tufts University paper.

Exactly.

And so we had, you know, Jewish parents and Tufts alumni having, you know, a protest and a day of action to get that young woman back and safe, right?

So we've seen a lot of solidarity movements happening.

And I think that right now it is scary.

People do feel like we tried so many things the first time around, and here we are.

People feel like he won the popular vote, and so maybe this is just America, and I need to keep my head down.

That's why I keep saying 49% of the popular vote, right?

This is

the majority of America.

But you do have to be cognizant that, you know, we keep saying this isn't us.

And you do think, like, well, it is kind of us.

And

you have to be clear-eyed about who you have to persuade and how much it needs to happen.

And also maybe, and I love the analogy of be ready, sort of, it's Heather McGee saying, balls of the feet, people,

get in ready position and get ready to go.

But also, we live in an era of immediate satisfaction.

This is going to be a slog.

as they always are.

And, you know, they always, it's the thing I like to say when they say, you know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

And you think, well, not by itself.

And there's certainly a lot of people trying to bend it back.

That's right.

Not by itself.

And it's not linear, right?

I mean, so maybe I'll just end with this, John.

So when I was in law school,

I read about

the civil rights cases of 1881 to 1883.

And it like really changed my perspective on how progress happens in America.

So I,

like everybody, sort of had this sort of linear narrative of progress of our country, right?

There was slavery and there's Civil War and then there was Jim Crow.

That was better than slavery, but it was really bad.

And then there was Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and then

Obama, right?

You know, like it's just like this, right?

Right, right, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But when I learned that after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed civil rights laws.

Right.

And there was integration in the South.

There were, you know, black leaders.

Black people started getting elected mayor.

Exactly, right?

There were black people in Congress, right?

We had

something that

just was

the fruits of the incredible sacrifice of the Civil War.

And then the Supreme Court knocked down those federal civil rights laws in 1881 and 1883.

And then we had 75 years of Jim Crow.

Oh, see, I did not realize it was a Supreme Commons.

I thought it was a political compromise, but it wasn't.

It was.

It was both, right?

The political compromise, right?

It's always a little bit of both.

But like literally the laws that had been passed were not knocked down by the Supreme Court.

Yes.

And so, you know, what that tells me is that progress is not linear.

Right.

And that we may find ourselves living in a time when there is great retrenchment.

And it may come from a narrow faction.

Right.

And it may create the kind of suffering that I think we're going to see all over the country as this destruction happens coming from Washington, as so many of

the jobs that help our country thrive are being snatched away, as so much of the funding that helps our country be at the leading edge is being flushed down the toilet over nothing.

There is going to be misery.

You know, the fact that we are in this place where autocracy is on the march is going to be difficult.

But

we also know that if the generation that experienced

the previous retrenchment had despaired, we wouldn't be here.

I wouldn't be here, right?

You wouldn't be here.

Heather, you just turned it around for me.

You had me going.

I was heading down into the hole, Heather.

You just turned it around for me.

Keep it going, Heather.

They didn't despair.

What did they do, Heather?

If they had despaired, we wouldn't be here, right?

Yes.

They said that there is a wall in front of us, and I'm going to keep hammering at it.

And I may not be the one to see it fall down, this wall of injustice, right?

But it will fall down because of the blows that I made.

That's our job.

That's our job right now in this moment, to keep hammering at the wall of injustice, to adapt, to be smarter, to be more persuasive,

to find new ways to bring people in and call people in.

Yes, but also to keep our eye on the prize as my people would say because we have got to keep going and so for everyone who feels like oh my gosh i'm i can't watch the news anymore i'm anxious i'm depressed i don't know what to do i marched i called i donated now i don't feel like doing any of that like i hear you i feel you trust me i do and yet We have to, for ourselves and for future generations, keep doing something.

We have to keep taking these blows because what an an autocrat wants is for the good civil society majority to fall back and we can't do it.

A better country is in our future.

I have no doubt about that.

And it'll get better because of what we've had to face about ourselves in this dark period.

Oh man,

you just blew my mind in the sense of not only that we'd be a better country, but because of the trial,

you will come out with

a greater greater resilience and a greater understanding and a stronger foundation.

I believe that.

Than when you went in.

It's an inoculation

against those ills.

Heather McGee, that's just, that's just, that's just beautiful.

God,

how tiring is it for black women to always have to pull even well-meaning white dudes out of a hole?

Oh, it's all right.

You know, I mean, it's like part of the job.

You know,

it's like being a teacher, right?

I love it.

I love, I love seeing the lights go on for people.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us, I can't thank you enough for spending the time.

And

it's always such a pleasure to talk to you.

And I can't wait to see what's coming next from you.

Thank you, Jeff.

Folks, that was a roller coaster ride for me.

I got to tell you, there were moments of despair, but the beautiful thing about Heather McGee McGee is she will lay it out there steely-eyed and clearly.

And just as you are about to maybe

you feel that little hint of resignation crawling up your back, she will bring you back to that sense of duty and power and really invigorate you that this is a worthy moment.

a worthy moment and you won't always be ready to do what's necessary, but that you have to keep yourself absolutely ready.

And

she just fabulous and sobering, but also, I think, inspiring.

So, thank you guys very much.

You can always reach us on social media.

As always, I want to thank lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, video editor and engineer Rob Batolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer Jillian Spear, and our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray.

Thank you for joining us.

And

see you next time.

Bye-bye.

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast.

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