5 Quotes by Heather McGhee

Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else.... Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.

And again we confront the problem of history: it's usually the powerful who get to write it.

We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history--both the pain and the resilience. It's time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.

Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.

There is a better way, it’s called targeted universalism. A concept developed by law professor and critical race scholar john a. powell, who currently directs the Haas Other and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley. With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal, and then develop strategies to achieve that goal that takes into account the varied situations of the groups involved.