Maine is the state with the whitest and oldest population in the country, whose children are the least likely in the country to have a classmate of color. The state ranks among the top ten in opioid deaths. From 2011 to 2019, the state’s governor, Paul LePage, campaigned and governed on rhetoric about illegal immigrants on welfare and drug-dealing people of color. (“These are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys that come from Connecticut, New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is the real sad thing because then we have another issue we gotta deal with down the road.”) Meanwhile, he vetoed Medicaid expansion for the working class five times and delivered large tax cuts for the wealthy. I traveled to the state’s second-biggest city, Lewiston, because of the ways its residents are especially vulnerable to the zero-sum story, but also because of a promising phenomenon I saw signs of about ten minutes into my walk up the town’s main street.
of my walk, many of the buildings I saw—richly constructed nineteenth-century brick with Italianate moldings—stood stately and vacant, with neatly boarded-up windows on the ground floor. Here and there, a storefront lawyer’s office appeared with a couple of desks needing far less space than it had; a pawn shop complex occupied much of an entire block. But once I crossed Chestnut Street, Lisbon Street came alive. Windows were suddenly stacked high with goods, framed by posters for mobile wire transfers and prepaid cards. One store had an arresting display of caftans and hijabs in bright coordinated colors. Another, next to the shadow of a faded old grocery store sign, had a sign reading Mogadishu Business Center. The shop offered groceries, a restaurant, money transfer, a seamstress, a tax preparer, cleaning services, halal meat—and sweet, strong coffee, as I learned when I stopped in to fuel up.
The door chimes marked my departure from the street into a warm, fragrant, and music-filled shop. In the aisle near a wall of bulk spices, I saw two men and a young boy speaking in a language I recognized as Somali. As I ordered my coffee from the young hijab-wearing woman behind the counter, we chatted about how long she’d been in Maine (seven years), the weather (what good comes from complaining?), and after my first sip, the spices in my coffee (a secret blend, but yes, cardamom). I exited the Somali shop and looked around at the white and Black residents on the street with a smile. Maybe these somewhat accidental neighbors were destined to create another story, a different formula from the zero sum, one more fitting for our future as a nation of many.
I turned off Lisbon to enter the historic City Hall. Through the open doors, I saw a stately marble hallway flanked by large portraits of every mayor in Lewiston history. I understood the reason for the tribute, but I also recognized, from so many institutions I’d been in, how it feels to be a person who doesn’t look like the images on the walls, which were almost all of white men. It’s hard not to get the message that this place—no matter who occupies it at the moment—belongs to them, not you. Then, down the middle of that long hallway came bounding a man as animated as the portraits were still: Phil Nadeau, the deputy city administrator. He greeted me warmly and showed me into an office decked with maps and memorabilia.My eye immediately went to the famous photograph of Muhammad Ali in the boxing ring, lording over the knocked-down Sonny Liston. I was shocked when Nadeau told me that the heavyweight title fight had happened just around the corner in Lewiston, in a youth hockey rink in 1965.
Unlike the elected and largely symbolic mayors, Nadeau was an urban planner appointed to run the day-to-day nuts and bolts of the town. He explained Lewiston’s decline in blunt terms: “It was a one-and-a-half-industry town. Come the sixties and seventies, when it’s pretty clear [the jobs] are going, there’s little that you can do to stop it. There were a variety of things that we tried to help those businesses remain viable. But it was a losing battle against a global economy.” Soon, everything that was once manufactured in Lewiston would be made in the American South with cheaper labor, and eventually in China and Southeast Asia. By the 2000s, the loss of jobs had created a vicious circle: as young people left to find work, there was nobody to work the few service sector jobs that remained in the wake of shuttered factories. Then, with the town losing population year after year, it was impossible to attract new employers. Lisbon Street, once the second-biggest commercial district in the state, began to show as many vacant windows as store displays. When Nadeau moved to his position in Lewiston city government in the early 2000s, it became clear to him that only one thing would save the town: new people.
“Maine is the oldest state in the country. One of only two now in the country, Maine and West Virginia, where deaths now exceed births. None of this is good news.”
I asked him why getting new people actually mattered to those who stayed; how did he counter the idea that newcomers were just competing for dwindling resources? He shook his head emphatically. “You can’t convince businesses to either expand or move into your state or into your community if the bodies aren’t there. These companies know this about Maine. But here’s the city of Lewiston bucking that trend.”
The secret to Lewiston’s success was something of an accident: in the early 1990s, the U.S. government accepted thousands of refugees from the Somali Civil War and resettled many to the Atlanta suburbs of Georgia. Word of mouth got some to Portland, and then to Lewiston, where the quiet streets offered more peace and the low rents more security. Family by family, Lewiston’s refugee population grew. Soon it wasn’t just Somalis but many other African refugees, from the Congo, Chad, Djibouti, and Sudan.
“The refugee arrivals…are filling apartments that were vacant for a long time. They’re filling storefronts on Lisbon Street that were vacant for a long time. They’re contributing to the economy.” Phil Nadeau is passionate about the value of the “new Mainers,” as he calls them, to the revitalization of Lewiston. He boasts that while other Maine small towns had plummeting real estate values, fleeing young people, and shuttering schools, Lewiston is building new schools—and creating the jobs that come with that. Though Phil also credits good regional planning and maintenance of the historic assets—the infrastructure built nearly a century ago, the hundreds of thousands of square feet of factories that have not become blighted—he simply can’t say enough about the benefit of migration to small towns like his. A bipartisan think tank calculated that Maine’s African immigrant households contributed $194 million in state and local taxes in 2018.
When I met Nadeau, he was in his last weeks on a job that has taken him through multiple administrations of elected mayors who, to put it mildly, haven’t shared his enthusiasm for the changing face of Lewiston. But Phil has seen the economic fortunes of the town reverse, and for a city planner, there’s nothing controversial about that. He plans to spend his retirement crossing the country to share the good word about how immigration can be a win-win for locals. “I could talk about it all day long.” Phil sat back in his chair and allowed a broad smile to finish his point.
Before I left, I asked Phil if I could take some pictures of his office for my recollection. I took a shot of his Ali portrait. Some in the town have adopted the story of Ali’s knockdown punch as a symbol of Lewiston, where people knew how it felt to get knocked down: the old-timers who’d seen their fortunes fade when the jobs disappeared, but also of course the refugees who had lost everything before coming to America’s shores. The Ali-Liston fight was historic for another reason that would be special to the new Mainers: it was the first time that Cassius Clay was introduced by his new Muslim name.
alone in this new wave of new people; for the past twenty years, Latinx, African, and Asian immigrants have been repopulating small towns across America. Pick a state, and you’ll find this story in one corner or another. Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is now 50 percent Latinx, mostly from Mexico, and it’s a community given new life by the families of migrant workers at the local mushroom farms. In Storm Lake, Iowa, the elementary school is 90 percent children of color. Towns across the Texas Panhandle have been drying up and losing population for years, but the potato farming stronghold of Dalhart grew by 7 percent from 1990 to 2016 because of Latinx families. Low-paid farm and food processing work is what draws foreign-born people to these small towns at first, for sure. But once there, immigrants have, as European immigrants did a century ago, started businesses, gained education, and participated in civic life (though the Europeans’ transition to whiteness offered a glide path to the middle class unavailable to immigrants of color today). Even in the face of anti-immigrant policies and the absence of vehicles for mobility such as unions and housing subsidies, today’s immigrants of color are revitalizing rural America. A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.
In many of these communities, longtime residents—who are overwhelmingly white—have chosen not to feel threatened by these new people of color. The temptation is there, and the encouragement from anti-immigrant politicians is certainly there, but the growth and prosperity the new people bring give the lie to the zero-sum model. Locals know that the alternative to new people is compounding losses: factories, residents, then the hospitals and schools and the attendant jobs. So, the residents are putting aside prejudices in order to grow their hometowns, together. If they don’t, wrote Art Cullen, the local newspaper editor in Storm Lake, Iowa, “there will be nobody left to turn out the lights by 2050” in towns like his. “Asians and Africans and Latinos are our lifeline,” he declared flatly in 2018.
These small-town success stories are full of local gestures, both big and small, to integrate the newcomers, ranging from free ESL classes to community college partnerships to help new immigrants get degrees. One of these gestures changed the life of Lewiston resident Cecile Thornton, but it wasn’t she who offered the education to her new neighbors; they gave it to her. A quarter of Maine citizens, like Cecile, have Franco-American heritage—mostly descendants of French-speaking Canadian immigrants who came to work the cotton mills and shoe factories a hundred years ago—but only 3 percent of the state speaks French regularly at home, and Cecile is among the many “Francos” who have lost their French. Cecile was born in 1955 to French-speaking parents and did her best to forget the French she’d learned at the dinner table, escaping to the living room once the family got a TV set and repeating the words of Walter Cronkite to learn how “real” Americans spoke. The “Francos” were the butt of schoolyard jokes, so by high school, Cecile made sure to suppress her accent altogether and held on to very few words of her native French.
When I met her, she’d also lost the closeness of her family. “All of my family is away, including my kids,” she told me. “They’re all out of state. And my aunts and uncles, my parents, all of those people are dead.” The kind of isolation that Cecile faced when she retired to an empty home in Lewiston has become a growing epidemic among older people in rural and suburban America. The former U.S. surgeon general has linked it to the “diseases of despair” that are disproportionately haunting white Americans facing economic decline: alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide. Social isolation has been found to lower life expectancy by a degree comparable to smoking almost a pack of cigarettes a day.
But a few years ago, Cecile made a decision that turned her story around. She got in her car to drive to the Franco Center downtown. She went looking for a connection—to other people, to her community, to the language that had filled her home as a child. What she found on the first day at the center, however, was a roomful of elderly people who had long ago traded away French for belonging—to become no longer “Francos,” but simply, white. It was a cultural assimilation that happened in time to every group of white-skinned immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Italians to the Poles. What America offered for the price of assimilation was inclusion in the pool of whites-only benefits that shaped the middle class, but we don’t talk much about what they left behind.
The Franco Center had a rule: put a quarter in a jar every time you spoke English. The maximum penalty was one dollar, though, so when Cecile looked around, all the tables had jars full of dollars and conversations carrying on in English. She couldn’t hide her disappointment: even here at the Franco Center, her community’s language seemed lost. In her isolation, the idea of reclaiming her French had become a lifeline, so she wasn’t giving up—she found the most talkative person in the room and complained. He told her, “You should go to the French Club at Hillview.” Hillview is a subsidized housing project in Lewiston. When Cecile arrived at one o’clock on a weekday afternoon for the advertised French Club, she was shocked to see that she was the only white person there.
“I didn’t even know at the time that we had Africans in the city who spoke French. I had no clue, none.” The first man she spoke with, Edho, had just followed his wife and children to Lewiston from Congo. After a timid “Bonjour” from Cecile, she and Edho launched into the longest French conversation Cecile had had since her childhood, with Edho helping her recall long-gone words and phrases. By the end of the first session, she was exhausted but thrilled. “Just as an interested and curious person, when I was meeting these people, I just fell in love with them.” She laughs, knowing what that sounds like. “Not that I really fell in love with them, but I felt like I belonged with them.”
Over the next year, Cecile would make the Francophone African community of Lewiston the center of her life. When she noticed that it became hard for Hillview folks to attend French Club once they enrolled in community college downtown or got a job, she launched a new French Club, at the more convenient Franco Center downtown, but she heavily recruited her new African friends to come. With Cecile’s encouragement, soon the two populations of French speakers were mixing: elderly white Mainers with halting vocabularies learning from new Black Mainers who spoke fluently. Francophone Africans like Edho, once seen as strange folks from far away, were now teachers. Today, Cecile volunteers to help asylum seekers, doing winter coat drives and connecting new arrivals to services, but she’d be the first to say that what she gives pales in comparison with what she has received.
Bruce Noddin would say the same. A few years ago, Bruce was the father of two kids and the owner of a thriving sports equipment business—but he also had a drug and alcohol addiction that nearly killed him. He was on the verge of becoming a statistic, a white middle-aged man succumbing to the opioid epidemic stalking Maine and other white enclaves across America. But after he hit rock bottom, a chance encounter led him to becoming a community organizer. “My wife says my new addiction is being in the community,” he told me with a chuckle.
In 2015, Bruce was participating in a jail ministry as part of his recovery. In the jail parking lot, he noticed a woman unloading from her car “the best-smelling food.” She was bringing it to the handful of Muslim men in the jail who would break their fast after sundown. He’d of course noticed the rising numbers of African refugees in Lewiston over the years and generally found them a source of curiosity, but he’d never ventured a conversation. In the parking lot, he and the woman got to talking about what each of them was doing at the jail. She introduced herself as ZamZam, and then Bruce heard words coming out of his mouth that surprised even him: “God is God.” They traded phone numbers on the spot.
After that, things happened quickly. ZamZam encouraged him to join the Maine People’s Alliance, a 32,000-member-strong grassroots group advocating for policies like Medicaid expansion, a minimum wage increase, paid sick leave, and support for home care. His activism would take him into deeper engagement with the Muslim immigrant community in Lewiston. Somalis taught him how to handle a rude voter while canvassing on a mayoral campaign; as he shared his frustrations about corruption in the Catholic Church, men from Djibouti opened up about the hypocrisy of their religious leaders. Bruce has become a lead organizer of an annual cross-cultural festival, the Community Unity Barbecue, which brings out hundreds of Lewiston residents. Last summer, as he spent hours standing over a hot stove in the park learning to make Somali flatbreads, he couldn’t help thinking of his own Franco ancestors who fled persecution and found refuge in Lewiston—and what they’d gone through to finally be accepted.
“The vision for me for this city,” Bruce told me, “it’s [that we will] embrace our past, embrace our ethnicity…and then embrace the people that are here now that are just like those people that came here one-hundred-plus years ago. They’re exactly like that. But actually, they’re even worse off. They didn’t always have a job. They were escaping atrocities in their country. They were escaping possibly dying or seeing their children die. And they need[ed] to work. There should be this massive amount of empathy from that next two, three, four generations down from those people that went through the same stuff as these people are going through, and saying, ‘We’re going to embrace you. You’re going to help us make this city great again.’ ”
cross-cultural festival provide glimpses of the way Lewiston, and much of America, could be—but they’re few and far between. The zero-sum tension is still prominent, even in Lewiston, with all its successes. Phil Nadeau’s enthusiasm for the net economic gains of creating a more diverse Lewiston had me convinced that I’d found the antidote to the zero-sum narrative. But then I talked to Ben Chin, the Maine People’s Alliance deputy director, who told me wryly, “Unless you are three relationships removed from Phil or closer, you haven’t heard that and you don’t believe it.” After my conversation with Phil, I went back to Lisbon Street to the Mogadishu Business Center to talk with one of the owners, Said, a gregarious Somali man with soft brown eyes. Said told me that one of the first white Mainers to venture into the store was a woman named Brenda, who was drawn by the clothes hanging in the front. She asked so many questions that it became evident that she was a skilled seamstress who had been out of work for some time. She struck up a rapport with the store’s other owner, Said’s wife, known to all as Mama Shukri. Mama Shukri offered Brenda a job repairing the hijabs and kaftans people would bring into the shop. Said explains, “And then she started making new clothes after that.”
My eyes got wider. “So, Brenda started making African clothes?”
Said nodded matter-of-factly. “Yeah. She’s very good.”
He told me more stories about integration going well at the person-to-person level, including in the Lewiston Blue Devils soccer team, which African immigrant kids from six countries had led to three years of state championships. White Mainers and African Mainers doing business together was going well, too, he said. It’s the government he worries about. In fact, Lewiston has been governed by mayors using harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric for all of the twenty years that Somalis have been present. After the first group of families arrived in Lewiston by word of mouth, then-Mayor Laurier Raymond Jr. wrote an open letter saying that the town was full, even though much of downtown lay vacant. “This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all,” Raymond wrote. The letter became a rallying cry for white supremacists, who descended on the town for a march soon after. An early Republican in the Trump mold, Governor Paul LePage won his elections campaigning against welfare, suggesting that immigrants were stealing resources from the local taxpayers. Said shook his head. “So, [the mayor] is going to a lectern and saying, ‘Oh, because of the Somalis, we are going to cut the welfare. Because these people, they’re coming here only for welfare.’ ”
His eyes got a little distant, as they did when he was talking about home. “In central and south[ern] Africa, there’s a saying: ‘When election day comes, keep your knife close.’ That’s when the problems happen, especially inter-clan problems. But once the election is gone, people are normal. Everyone is looking for his life. They are trading with each other, friends getting married together. But the one day election comes, the knives are out. The politicians will try to separate us.”
The politicians will try to separate us. The people I met—Phil, Bruce, Cecile, Said with his co-worker Brenda—belonged to a beachhead of solidarity amid a surge in xenophobia pushed relentlessly by politicians in Lewiston and across the country. The faith that the Lewiston people I met had in the idea of different cultures not only coexisting but thriving through their differences didn’t come from theory or ideology; it came from lived experience. Each of them had had a reason to roll up their sleeves and put in the time to make some part of their community work better, and in so doing, they had bettered themselves. But the resistance of many white Mainers to new people isn’t about just dollars and cents, if we’re honest. It’s also about the fear of a loss of community, of identity, of home. It was striking to me that what old Mainers were worried about losing is something that, by definition, the new Mainers have actually lost: home. And for people like Cecile and Bruce, cross-cultural friendships have given them a deeper sense of community than they ever had before.
Yet in Lewiston, with its thirty-five thousand residents, a 2015 mayoral campaign presaged the turn that national politics would take once Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” Incumbent Republican mayor Robert Macdonald, who was enthusiastically supported by the immigrant-bashing governor, ran a fear-mongering, zero-sum campaign against Democrat Ben Chin, of the Maine People’s Alliance. A multiracial Millennial, Ben is a community organizer and Episcopalian lay minister who was explicitly trying to counter that division.
Ben looks even younger than his years, with the lean build of a triathlete. His grandfather was a Chinese immigrant who fought for the United States in World War II, built a successful business, and then was targeted in the McCarthy era. Ben grew up in Pittsburgh and Syracuse, New York, also declining manufacturing cities, but when he arrived at college in Lewiston, he found “the kind of issues that every big city has, but on a small enough scale where you can have some kind of impact and make a difference.”
When Ben and his volunteers were out knocking on doors, he heard firsthand the effect of the zero-sum narrative. Urban legends were repeated freely. “The big one was ‘Somali people get a free car as soon as they come to America,’ ” he told me. “And that just stuck. Once LePage gets elected in 2010 and Mayor Macdonald gets elected in 2011, and you just have these two guys using the bully pulpit, just driving this relentless message that is anti-immigrant for all these strategic reasons that mostly end up hurting white people, like cutting Medicaid….[W]hen I go out canvassing, sometimes you’re in neighborhoods where, every other door, you’re hearing something like that.”
Ben’s campaign for mayor focused on economic justice issues like increasing the minimum wage and access to affordable housing, and on integrating immigrants into the community. His campaign energized a cross-racial group of supporters and volunteers and relied on the community-organizing techniques of person-to-person outreach. His goal, he said publicly, was “to make sure Lewiston is a city where everyone has a shot at their dreams.”
“When I ran the first time,” he told me, “one of the slumlords that we [at the Maine People’s Alliance] were holding accountable put up a bunch of signs around town calling me ‘Ho Chi Chin,’ with a racist caricature of my face and a hammer and a sickle.” His story called to mind Senator Claude Pepper, whose support for a policy that would have benefited mostly white people led rich people to target him with a red-baiting racist campaign, as well. Ben countered these scorched-earth tactics with a base of young and passionate supporters, exceeding state fundraising records mostly with small donations and coming within 600 votes of unseating the incumbent mayor.
In 2017, Ben ran again, made it to a runoff, and then lost by just 145 votes after a leaked email thrust the issue of racism into the campaign weeks before the election. Ben had just finished a long day of door-knocking when he emailed notes to his campaign staff about his forty-seven conversations with voters that day: a woman who wanted to volunteer for him after losing her sister to an overdose; good talks with two African American families; swaying a former Macdonald supporter who was leaning his way; and “a bunch of racists, too…” he’d written. Somebody leaked the notes to the press, and Ben’s frank appraisal caused a firestorm. The right-wing media seized on it and made it seem like he had accused the entire town: “Leaked Email: Ben Chin Says Lewiston Voters ‘Bunch of Racists.’ ”
I asked Ben about it. It turns out “this particular street that I was referencing in this email was one of the wealthiest streets in town…so it hit a nerve, right? Because I actually think the racism in Lewiston—the center of gravity is not in the working-class parts. It’s in these sort of swankier, more upscale parts of town.” Through all the campaigning ups and downs, Ben held on to his conviction that white working-class voters would one day see through the racist narratives that his opponents were using to sell them an agenda that betrayed them. As someone who shared his conviction, I hoped he was right.
His opponents’ agenda had already included three major tax cuts for the wealthy that squeezed public services and led to higher property taxes on the working and middle class. Ben’s first opponent, Mayor Macdonald, proposed that all welfare recipients be publicly named on a website and that asylum seekers be banned from the state assistance program, even though the law also banned them from working for months while waiting for their legal status. And Governor LePage refused to expand Medicaid after passage of the Affordable Care Act, vetoing it five times during a period when almost 10 percent of the state’s population was uninsured. These men invoked the age-old story of competition that is deployed to make people feel less generous and welcoming, and more supportive of austerity measures. But in Maine, white people constitute about 95 percent of the population, and 11.5 percent of them were in poverty in 2016—twice as many white people in poverty as there were people of color of all incomes in the whole state. The people who needed government services were overwhelmingly white.
Finally, starting in the fall of 2017, Ben and the thirty-two thousand members of the Maine People’s Alliance were able to win a string of victories that began to refill the pool of public services in Maine—and justify Ben’s faith. Maine became the first state in the nation to vote to expand Medicaid by ballot initiative over the governor’s repeated refusal. The ballot campaign faced racist tactics but overcame them. “During the campaign there was certainly an attempt to racialize it…and the code word for that was welfare. And our canvassers would knock on doors and sometimes, unfortunately even people who would be eligible for Medicaid [said] they were against it, because they thought it could be going to immigrants and other people they thought would be undeserving. But we won it resoundingly.”
I asked Ben how they were able to overcome the race-baiting, and he explained that the multiracial coalition was the key. “And by coalition, I really do mean this broader working-class set of folks that cross lines of race and all of that. We were hoping for a lot more support from bigwigs like folks in the hospital association…but it was this broader base of working-class people that actually got it across the finish line, not the muckety-mucks.” The winning political coalition included, for the first time, immigrant-led political action committees, and the get-out-the-vote effort was anchored by a network of Somali taxi drivers who used their infrastructure of radios and vehicles to get elderly, homebound immigrant and poor Mainers to the polls safely.
Since then, Maine has experienced a Solidarity Dividend. Rejecting the scapegoating politics that enabled a right-wing government to deny healthcare and creating new political alliances between workers of all backgrounds resulted in sixty thousand Mainers winning access to healthcare. These same organizers and volunteers helped elect a wave of new politicians the following year, who passed reforms to address the opioid epidemic and guarantee a generous paid-time-off law for Maine workers. The next frontier of cross-racial coalition building, though, is for white people not just to stop voting against their own interests, but to vote for the interests of people of color, too, on issues of racial justice.
In the whitest state in the union, there are promising signs that this is happening: a slate of progressive school board candidates in Maine are running explicitly on racial equity. The slate includes a white suburban mom in Bangor; a Somali social worker; a South Sudanese graduate of Maine public schools; a twenty-five-year-old queer grocery clerk with Asperger’s syndrome; and a white transgender man with twenty-four years’ experience as a schoolteacher, who wears a T-shirt in his campaign video that reads: “I’m Not Black, But I Will Fight For You.” The candidates have championed racial justice issues such as removing police in schools, equitably funding the increasingly diverse South Portland district, and creating antiracist curricula.
And back in Lewiston, the mayor who beat Ben Chin, Shane Bouchard, ended up resigning his seat over a racist text message. It turns out that the person who had leaked Ben’s email had been having an affair with Bouchard; she eventually had a crisis of conscience and revealed the whole story, including Bouchard’s texts with racist and sexist jokes. “All my jokes are quite racist lol,” he wrote her. “What do you call 2 old black people sitting on your front lawn[?]” he had texted her. “Antique farm equipment.” When I heard that, I was honestly shocked—and I don’t shock easily. At first blush, it would seem implausible that a white Millennial from Maine—not Mississippi—would even have a frame of reference for making a casual, dehumanizing joke about slavery. But then I chided myself for buying the myth of northern innocence and forgetting how interconnected it all is. Maine once had the largest Ku Klux Klan membership outside of the South, and the textile mills that made the city of Lewiston were, of course, processing southern cotton.
My journey across the U.S. from California to Mississippi to Maine, tallying the costs of racism, has led me to five discoveries about how we can prosper together:
The first is that we have reached the productive and moral limit of the zero-sum economic model that was crafted in the cradle of the United States. We have no choice but to start aiming for a Solidarity Dividend.
The second is that the quickest way to get there is to refill the pool of public goods, for everyone. When our nation had generous public benefits, they were the springboard for a thriving middle class—but they were narrowly designed to serve white and soon-to-be-white Americans.
Third, because of that, our people are not all standing at the same depths today, so we must resist the temptation to use universal instruments to attain universal ends. When it comes to designing solutions, one size has never fit all. Everywhere that I found white people paying the spillover costs of racism, I also found that, without exception, their co-workers and neighbors of color were paying even more, in lost wealth, health, and often lives. Getting white support to address those different levels of need, and to acknowledge the racism that caused those differences, is never easy—particularly when the zero-sum mental model turns every concession into a threat of loss.
That’s why uprooting the zero sum is so essential, as is embedding in its place the value that I found radiating out of the people who had the biggest impact on me and their communities: the knowledge that we truly do need each other.
The fifth and final discovery is that 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.
now just isn’t working. When the rules of the game allow a small minority of participants to capture most of the gains, at a certain point (for example, when the entire middle class owns less than the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans), fewer people can play at all. Extreme inequality robs too many people of the means to start businesses, invest in their families, and invent new ideas and solutions—and then it isn’t a problem just for those families. Ultimately, having millions of people with potential on the sidelines because they have too much debt and not enough opportunity saps the vitality of the entire economy. There’s a growing body of literature that shows that inequality itself impedes a country’s economic growth—even more than the factors policy makers have emphasized in the past: liberalizing trade policies, controlling inflation, and reducing national debt. And America’s racial inequality is not only the most extreme manifestation of our inequality, but also the template, setting up a scaffolding of hierarchy that increasingly few people, of any race, can climb.
The plutocrats have always known that solidarity is the answer, that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us. That’s why the forces seeking to keep the economic rules exactly as they are aim to cut off any sense of empathy white people who are struggling might develop for also-struggling people of color. Their “punching down” political attacks are how we know that empathy is a strength. Bridget from the Kansas City Fight for $15 discovered the power of solidarity in a basement organizing meeting, when she saw her own life reflected in that of a Latina fast-food worker. Until then, not only had Bridget bought into a dehumanizing narrative about people like the woman who spoke that night (and Black people like Terrence), she’d also bought the idea that her own labor would never be worth $15 an hour. There’s something about the mentality of degrading others in your same position that can make you unable to see a better life for yourself, either. When you believe the dominant story that you’re on your own, responsible for all your own successes and failures, and yet you’re still being paid $7.25 an hour, what does that say about your own worth? The problem with the easy out that the right wing offers—scapegoating immigrants and people of color instead—is that the scapegoats aren’t actually the ones paying you poverty wages. As my friend George Goehl, head of People’s Action, a grassroots network that organizes in rural America, says, “We’ve found the enemy, and it’s not each other.” Bridget and Terrence found that redirecting the blame toward the people actually setting the rules was liberating; finding a sea of potential allies in the people who worked alongside them was empowering. That’s the Solidarity Dividend.
we face in society are going to require strength and scale that none of us can achieve on her own. The crises of climate change, inequality, pandemics, and mass involuntary movements of people are already here, and in the United States, each has exposed the poverty of our public capacity to prevent and react. Save for the ultra-wealthy, we’re all living at the bottom of the drained pool now. The refusal to share across race has created a society with nothing left for itself. With falling support for government over the past fifty years has come falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century.
We have to refill the pool. Some restoration of public goods will be relatively straightforward, like rebuilding the fifty-year-old dams that are failing just in time for climate change to send heavier rains, or laying new pipes to replace the ones leaching toxins into our drinking water. We know how to do that; we’ve just lost the will. I’ll acknowledge a bigger problem with the progressive vision for more robust government: we’ve let slip our capacity to deliver services with efficiency and skill. The old adage goes that poor people get poor services, and as we’ve ratcheted down the income level for government benefits over the past fifty years and squeezed public payrolls, the experience of dealing with the government has become increasingly frustrating and negative. Just ask the millions of people who applied for pandemic-related unemployment insurance from state agencies stripped by years of Republican budget cuts and who were still waiting months later; the graduates who were unable to get the public service loan forgiveness they’d organized their careers around due to technicalities; or the voters who navigated a maze of requirements to get a ballot and vote. Refilling the pool will require us to believe in government so much that we hold it to the highest standard of excellence and commit our generation’s best and brightest to careers designing public goods instead of photo-sharing apps.
When we do, the potential is boundless. The crisis of youth un- and underemployment offers the opportunity to create millions of public-service jobs across the country to do the work that desperately needs doing. Every community in America could use the kind of renewable energy project that has engaged the youth in Richmond, from weatherizing buildings to installing solar arrays. The country needs new parks and community centers; childcare and camps to support working parents; literacy programs and home visits to the elderly. We need more internet service in rural and inner-city areas, oral histories of gentrifying urban communities and depopulating rural towns, and yes, even new public pools. Public pools were part of the “melting pot” project that fostered cross-cultural cohesion among white ethnic immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, and it’s absurd to think that something as shallow as skin color is an insurmountable obstacle to doing it again. The big and small public works our country needs now should be designed explicitly to foster contact across cultural divides, sending urban youth to rural areas and vice versa, and explicitly building teams that reflect the youth generation’s astonishing diversity. An analysis Demos did in the middle of the Great Recession found that one hundred billion dollars spent directly hiring people could create 2.6 million public service jobs; spending the same amount on tax cuts trickles down to just one hundred thousand jobs.
becomes more diverse, there’s a way to design our policy making to get the best out of all our communities and create from the bottom of the social hierarchy an upward spiral of mutual benefit. There is a vanishingly small number of changes tailored for those struggling the most that wouldn’t ultimately benefit us all. Policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell calls this “the curb-cut effect,” after a fix created by people using wheelchairs that now also helps non-disabled people carrying large loads or pushing strollers. The post–World War II GI Bill is a good example of a well-intentioned policy meant to benefit all veterans that in fact did almost nothing for Black veterans for two generations, because the policy ignored the disparate conditions they faced, such as being excluded from most of the educational and home-owning opportunities the GI Bill was supposed to support. There’s a better way. It’s called “targeted universalism,” a concept developed by law professor and critical race scholar john a. powell—he doesn’t capitalize his name—who currently directs the Haas Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal and then develop strategies to achieve the goal that take into account the varied situations of the groups involved.
Let’s take homeownership, the center of financial security and wealth-building for most families—and for the American economy. The building, buying, selling, financing, and consumption of homes contributes to about 15 percent of the GDP. As we’ve seen, people of color and Black people in particular have been disproportionately and intentionally excluded from this linchpin of economic freedom, so any program designed to boost homeownership that does not specifically address the barriers facing African Americans can only succeed in increasing the racial homeownership and wealth gap. A public policy that does manage to increase Black homeownership to the same level as white homeownership would shrink the pernicious racial wealth gap by more than 30 percent. Today, however, our major federal commitment to homeownership comes through the color-blind home mortgage interest deduction, which allows people to deduct from their tax bill interest paid to lenders on all real estate properties they own. The problem is, this massive subsidy is upside down, bestowing the largest benefits on the richest people and effectively rewarding people with wealth for having it, as opposed to helping people without it find a toehold, as the whites-only housing programs did in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The ability of white families to count on inheritances from previous generations is the biggest contributor to today’s massive racial wealth gap.
We can do better. The maps have already been drawn, through racist redlining, so instead of ignoring them and the damage they wrought, we can target down payment assistance to longtime redlined residents, as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren proposed in the 2020 presidential primary. It’s not difficult to imagine the knock-on benefits of increased home ownership among Black people, which range from the financial security and mobility it would provide families to the spillover effects of higher property taxes and, therefore, education funding. If the United States adopted policy interventions to close the racial disparities in health, education, incarceration, and jobs, the economy would be eight trillion dollars larger in 2050, the year at which people of color are projected to be the majority. Generic, color-blind plans and policies can never achieve this.
A race-conscious housing effort to close the Black-white gap in homeownership could be the centerpiece of a national effort for reparations for the economic harms of slavery, systematic discrimination, wealth suppression, and theft. Given the potential benefits to all of us from racial equity, the imperative for racial reparations becomes more urgent. In their 2020 book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century, professors William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen make the case that it’s the U.S. government that perpetuated the harms, and therefore must pay. The book proposes a straightforward process for identifying descendants of African slaves based on Census records and genealogy, and models possible payments based on various methods for determining the debt, from the worth of the elusive “forty acres and a mule” to their preferred route, closing the current racial wealth gap.
Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born. That is why the Black-white wealth gap is growing despite gains in Black education and earnings, and why the typical Black household owns only $17,600 in assets. Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more Black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords. A 2020 Citigroup report calculated that “if racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.”
Every day seems to bring more examples of the inverse: what happens when we do not address racial inequality. The 2020 COVID-19 crisis provides a tragically clear example of how failing to design policy with those most impacted in mind will create racist outcomes, ultimately endangering us all. The pandemic saw a color-blind virus attack people with disproportionate ferocity and fatality based on the way that racist and exploitative structures had unequally exposed us to the harm. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a spirit of unprecedented interconnectedness in the country, when we first understood that in a contagious epidemic, we are all only as safe as our neighbors. The spirit of solidarity and self-sacrifice that blossomed instantaneously from the vast majority of Americans—sewing masks, volunteering to deliver groceries, upending their lives to stop the consumer-driven American way of life and work in order to keep their community safe—was inspiring. But that should not have allowed the people in charge of the pandemic response to neglect the fact that, even though we were facing the same storm, we weren’t all riding it out in the same boat. In the first months of the pandemic, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people were multiple times more likely than white people to get sick and to die. The factors were numerous and interlacing: more likely to have to keep leaving home for work but less likely to have health insurance if they got sick; more likely to be deemed “essential” but less likely to be treated so, as employers left low-wage workers in warehouses, care facilities, meatpacking plants, and retail stores without adequate protection; more likely to live in formerly redlined, still-segregated areas where pollution degraded their lung quality, in crowded housing, detention centers, or jails without social distancing or on reservations where clean water was hard to come by. A study modeling COVID-19 transmission routes in a representative U.S. city found that the majority of the city’s infections came from situations where racism was driving higher exposure. “Any serious effort to fight this disease has to treat inequity as a driver of infection and death for everyone, rather than an unfortunate consequence for other people,” the study co-authors at the Center for Policing Equity wrote. “Covid-19 is telling us, in the starkest possible terms, that the burdens of the most vulnerable—and racism specifically—pose a collective threat.”
The country was caught without public health capacity largely because of the drained pool—antigovernment sentiment that has hobbled the public health infrastructure, and decades of cuts to public hospitals in low-income and of-color communities that left half of low-income areas without a single ICU bed when the pandemic hit. In my hometown of Chicago, according to a ProPublica investigation, leaders cost lives by issuing one-size-fits-all guidance without being attuned to the facts on the ground for Black people—from lower-quality, under-resourced hospitals; to transportation inequity; to well-warranted suspicion of the medical system that, combined with the generic message to stay at home, meant that far too many Black people stayed at home until they were already dying. It was people of color who could see the dreadful pandemic’s effect in every single one of its manifestations—a clarity born of being maximally vulnerable.
This is why it’s essential that we listen closely to the experiences and insights of people most exposed to all our society’s ills, viral and human-made. It’s become fashionable to say “trust Black women” and to root for the leadership of women of color. And maybe it’s because I am a woman of color and wasn’t comfortable with how self-serving this advice seemed, or because it seemed to suggest a biological basis for some traits, I rejected this shorthand. But the truth isn’t that there’s some innate magic within us; it’s that the social and economic and cultural conditions that have been imposed on people at the base of the social hierarchy have given us the clearest view of the whole system. We can see how it’s broken and all those who are broken by it. That’s why it’s essential that women of color are at least as represented in government as we are in society. (As opposed to today, when over two-thirds of officials are white men, even though they’re only a third of the population.) For nearly two decades in public policy, I saw how the fear of what white people would think held back the ambitions of some of the best policy thinkers in the business. Our politics have operated in the shadow of white disapproval my whole life. We need leaders who see color, who recognize the profound impact social hierarchies have had and continue to have on our national well-being, and who create new visions for how we can recognize our American diversity as the asset that it is.
Tucker Carlson, who has in recent years chosen to promote a sort of commonsense white nationalism to gain viewers, recently asked on air, “How precisely is diversity our strength?…Do you get along better with your neighbors or your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values?”
What Carlson did there was a quick elision, from not sharing an ethnicity to not sharing values. In fact, it’s just the opposite, I discovered. When people have a chance to create a bond that’s not based on skin color or culture, what they actually connect on are the things they value in common: The joking friendship between Nissan workers Melvin and Johnny, built across a racial divide as deep and old as they come in this country, out of the raw material of their commitment to improving life at the plant. How Torm was able to make common cause with Black ministers because he knew the refugee community needed to learn from the victories that Black activists had won against Chevron in the past. The way that ZamZam and Bruce connected over their faith in redemption for people in jails and prisons.
This is not to say that it was always easy to bridge these divides. Nonetheless, the discomfort of cross-racial connections is actually the source of their power, according to the late Dr. Katherine W. Phillips of Columbia Business School, who was the first Black woman to receive tenure there and who became the vice dean. After decades of research, Dr. Phillips made the conclusion that it’s the mental friction that creates diversity’s productive energy. “Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another; that they will understand one another’s perspectives and beliefs; that they will be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.”
As one example, Phillips described an experiment she conducted to study the impact of racial diversity on small decision-making groups. She and her researchers created three-person teams, half of which were all white and half of which contained one person of color, and tasked the groups with solving a murder mystery. Each participant was given one important clue known only to them, but otherwise, the groups all had the same information. “The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity,” Phillips reported. “Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.”
The power of diversity can help real-life juries find their way to justice as well. One of the professors I visited at Harvard Business School, Samuel Sommers, borrowed real jurors from a Michigan court and asked them to reach a verdict in mock trials he conducted. Of the six-person juries Sommers organized, some were composed of four white and two Black jurors, and some had exclusively white people. The diverse juries deliberated longer and performed better, in part because the white people upped their game in mixed company. White people in the diverse teams “cited more case facts, made fewer errors, and were more amenable to discussion of racism when in diverse versus all-White groups.”
So it turns out that the diversity that is causing an often-unconscious racial panic in so many white Americans is actually our biggest strategic asset. The research has borne this out in education, jurisprudence, business, and the economy. Put simply, we need each other. Our differences have the potential to make us stronger, smarter, more creative, and fairer. Once we abandon the false idea of zero-sum competition, the benefits of diversity become evident, from the classroom to the courtroom to the boardroom. Of course, it should be stated that it’s quite possible to have a diverse society that still has a strict racial hierarchy. The assumption behind the research on diversity’s benefits is that people of different backgrounds are meeting on a plane that is equal enough that they can all contribute—and that they share the will to work together. If that can happen, the benefits multiply. What we’ll have to overcome, however, is the gulf that exists between our people’s basic factual and moral understandings of who we are as a society. It’s a gulf that has been profitable for powerful people, in the media and politics, and we can’t bridge it if we don’t acknowledge the truth of how we got here.
conversations I had on my journey convinced me that we can’t each do it on our own. We can all buy books and go through trainings in an individualized, shopping-cart version of racial truth-telling and truth-learning, but that is wholly insufficient to the scale of America’s racial story. We need a national effort, rooted in community, one that brings us together and has the full backing of the body that has kept us apart: the U.S. government.
A model for such a process began locally, in 2017, when fourteen communities across the country launched efforts known as Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT). The next year, the Association of American Colleges and Universities did the same, and by 2018, twenty-four college campuses had TRHT centers. On June 4, 2020, after a week of nationwide protests sparked by the brutal police killing of George Floyd, members of the U.S. House of Representatives led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced a resolution urging the establishment of a U.S. TRHT Commission. The TRHT framework was developed in 2016 with the input of a group of over 175 experts convened by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The experts learned from the forty truth-and-reconciliation processes across the globe that had helped societies process traumas—from South Africa to Chile to Sri Lanka—but they explicitly left the word reconciliation out of the name for the U.S. effort. “To reconcile,” notes the TRHT materials, “connotes restoration of friendly relations—‘reuniting’ or ‘bringing together again after conflict,’ [whereas] the U.S. needs transformation. The nation was conceived…on this belief in racial hierarchy.”
To launch a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort, community leaders must gather a representative group of people, both demographically and in terms of the sectors in the community. The framework involves a process of relationship-building and healing by sharing personal stories about race and racism, but it doesn’t just help people “talk about race”—TRHT groups also identify community decisions that have created hierarchy in three areas: law, separation, and the economy. Bridging between the individual stories and the desired policy change is narrative change, accomplished by identifying manifestations of the belief in human hierarchy in our stories, be they school curricula or media portrayals or monuments, and replacing them with “complete and accurate stories that honor the full complexity of our humanity as the country forges a more equitable future.” The TRHT guidebook lays out instructions for communities, making an idea that can seem lofty and abstract appear manageable but powerful.
That’s what compelled Jerry Hawkins to give it a shot. Hawkins is a forty-something Black man who made a career for himself in Dallas, Texas, as an early-childhood educator who cared deeply about the families of the children he taught, “immigrant parents primarily from Mexico and Central America,” he explained to me. But when the TRHT came into his life, he had quit his job in frustration and was about to leave the city. It was the 2016 election summer, and the parents “were facing multiple issues of harassment and fear of deportation and reprisal. And so, we started to focus on racial equity in that work. I immediately felt a lot of pushback from folks who were just months ago supporting me doing early-childhood work….They didn’t want me doing racial equity work, period. They gave me an ultimatum.” So, he left. But that summer was also the summer when a Black veteran killed five Dallas police officers and two civilians, and civic leaders were calling for racial healing. Community leaders encouraged Jerry to apply for the job of leading the TRHT in Dallas.
“I had hesitations around racial healing,” Jerry admitted, because in the aftermath of the Dallas tragedy, it could have pathologized Black people. “I was really hesitant, until I read the guidebook.” Three things in the document changed his mind.
“One was—and it was so random, because I just opened up the page. It was, ‘Do we need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States?’ ” He laughed a little. “Right? So, just saying that, period—I was like, ‘Wow. This is not what I thought it was.’
“And then I looked at two things that I knew I had to do first, if I were ever to get this job. And they stuck out to me. A lot of the things in there are really suggestions, because they’re inviting communities to do the work. But there are two things that are very clear, almost mandatory, that you need to do.
“One was a community racial history…this historical analysis of policy and place, of race, and the people from Indigenous times to present. And second was this community visioning process…this way of convening [a] multiracial, multifaceted group of people together, to come up with a shared community vision of how do we end this hierarchy of human value?”
Jerry was hired and is now the executive director of the Dallas TRHT. The multiyear process has solicited the input of hundreds of Dallas residents: civic leaders, businesspeople, police officers, and grassroots organizers, but also high school students and the general public, in community visioning sessions at public libraries across the city. The group published an illustrated report that, when I read it for the first time in 2019, made me gasp more than once. In the opening pages, bold orange words bleed to the edges of a two-page spread: Dallas Is on Stolen Land. A few pages later, again: Dallas Was Built with Stolen Labor. For all that I know and have written about these truths, I had never seen them stated so vividly in print, in a document that spoke for a city. In our conversation, Jerry called stolen land and stolen labor the first two public policies in Dallas.
A few pages later, I came upon a black-and-white photograph of a smiling group of white high school girls in poodle skirts talking to a cowboy hat–wearing Texas Ranger leaning nonchalantly against a tree. I almost turned the page before I noticed something in the background: at the top of the school building hung a life-size stuffed doll, an effigy of a Black man, as a warning against families who had tried to enroll in 1956. A few pages later, a photo of a smiling twelve-year-old Mexican American boy, Santos Rodriguez, whom a police officer “shot and killed Russian roulette style in the back of a police car with [Rodriguez’s] thirteen-year-old brother next to him” in 1973. Toward the end of the book is a present-day photo of a Black woman standing in front of what appears to be a mountain, but the caption reads, “Marsha Jackson and the Shingle Mountain”—as in, a hill created when a plant illegally dumped seventy thousand tons of toxic roof shingle material in the backyard of Jackson’s neighborhood.
The report, “A New Community Vision for Dallas,” reads like a graphic novel of the racial history of the city in fewer than fifty pages. It has been an eye-opener for most people, Jerry said, white, Black, and brown lifelong Dallas residents. “Ninety-nine percent of people who I talk to don’t know what happened.”
There have been some surprises from the Dallas TRHT process. The organization’s director of strategy and operations, Errika Y. Flood-Moultrie, wanted me to know about a breakthrough moment in one of the community meetings after a presentation by longtime Black activist turned city councilwoman, Diane Ragsdale. Errika told me how “a white suburban school superintendent raised her hand and said, ‘I want to apologize to you, Miss Ragsdale. Because all this time, I thought that you were this horrible mean person who wasn’t—’ ”
Jerry interrupted with the exact word she’d used: “Troublemaker!”
“ ‘Troublemaker,’ ” Erika continued, “ ‘that wasn’t looking out for the interest of Dallas. I only saw you on TV. And when I saw you on TV, you were agitating. You were—you know, screaming. You were protesting. The media…showed you as this bad person. I always, even as a young person, thought of you as a bad person. And I want to apologize to you. Because having this conversation, I understand why it was required for you to [protest]. And what value you bring to Dallas. And that I’m changed because of it.’ ”
Breakthroughs in the hearts and minds of decision makers in Dallas—and the cross-racial relationships that the TRHT process has engendered—are great to hear about, but I wanted to know what had changed in the city. Jerry arched his brow. “I think the mere presence of TRHT in the city of Dallas—I do want to say…this is so different from the coast. We are the only organization in the city focused on racial equity, period. So, that’s number one. Where if you go to Oakland, there’s like, you know, dozens. Right?”
But then Jerry proceeded to list off multiple points of impact. The Dallas school district now has an Office of Racial Equity. The city does, too. “That’s something that the city of Dallas has never had, right? But it has it now,” he said with some pride. A conservative city councilwoman—“one of the few council people who voted after Charlottesville to not remove Confederate monuments in Dallas. So that’s the kind of person I’m talking about”—attended a TRHT National Day of Racial Healing event and decided to issue a city proclamation to recognize it officially, “which had never happened before.” Jerry has joined the Dallas County Historical Commission, so he will have influence over the historical markers in the city. He and colleagues have trained most of the top city administrators. Jerry taught the students at Southern Methodist University Engineering School about redlining, blockbusting, and why there are such racial divides in the city’s built environment—in the hope that they’ll know how to plan for infrastructure equity over their careers.
After a white policewoman mistakenly walked into Botham Jean’s apartment and killed him, the local media began to fall into the trap of denigrating the Black victim—but this time, twenty groups organized through the TRHT process sent a letter to the local papers “saying that the narratives that are coming out of the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Morning News were racist.” Jerry attributes this swift coordinated response—which resulted in a meeting with the publisher of the paper about how the paper could atone for racist narratives and do better in the future—to the emphasis on narrative in the TRHT framework.
The demand for what TRHT is doing is outstripping its capacity, from all corners of Dallas society, Jerry said with a sigh. “There are now folks who are like…‘I’m a former accountant, and I want to do racial equity work. How do I join you all?’ ”
and Transformation was the vision of a woman named Dr. Gail Christopher. She’s an expert in public health and social policy, and she’s my mother. At the very end of my three-year journey, I found myself in her home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. We sat in a sunroom in the back of the house that she has transformed over the years into a social justice retreat center. She is a small woman with expressive hands and skin that looks like poured honey, even at seventy. Most people who meet her talk about her smile; when she bestows its light on you, you don’t soon forget it. She and I were sitting on a cream-colored couch on the day that Congress introduced the resolution calling for a national TRHT, and I asked her why she felt the country needed a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort on top of all the other policies I was advocating for to address inequality.
“It’s a powerful, liberating frame to realize that the fallacy of racial hierarchy is a belief system that we don’t have to have. We can replace it with another way of looking at each other as human beings. Then, once you get that opening, you invite people to see a new way forward. You ask questions like ‘What kind of narrative will your great grandchildren learn about this country?’ ‘What is it that will have happened?’ Truthfully, we’ve never done that as a country. We’ve been dealing with the old model, patching it over here, sticking bubble gum over there.” She laughed.
“But we are young. What makes America America is the creative power of our people. It is our responsibility to take this privilege that has come from the exploitation of so many people and the land—to use that freedom to create and actualize the aspirations of tomorrow. We need to envision an America that is no longer bound by that belief in racial hierarchy—we owe it back to the universe. That’s bending that moral arc toward justice,” she said, and though I’d heard that phrase countless times before, it meant something different to me at the end of my journey.
Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But we know that progress is not guaranteed. When the arc in America bends from slavery in the 1860s and returns to convict leasing in the 1880s; when it bends from Jim Crow in the 1960s and returns to mass incarceration in the 1970s; when it bends from Indigenous genocide to an epidemic of Indigenous suicides; when it bends, but as a tree does in the wind, only to sway back, we have to admit that we have not touched the root.
We have not touched the root because the laws we make are expressions of a root belief, and it is time to face our most deep-seated one: the great lie at the root of our nation’s founding was a belief in the hierarchy of human value. And we are still there.
This moment is challenging us finally to settle this question: Who is an American, and what are we to one another? We have to admit that this question is harder for us than in most other countries, because we are the world’s most radical experiment in democracy, a nation of ancestral strangers that has to work to find connection even as we grow more diverse every day.
But everything depends on the answer to this question. Who is an American, and what are we to one another? Politics offers two visions of why all the peoples of the world have met here: one in which we are nothing more than competitors and another in which perhaps the proximity of so much difference forces us to admit our common humanity.
The choice between these two visions has never been starker. To a nation riven with anxiety about who belongs, many in power have made it their overarching goal to sow distrust about the goodness of the Other. They are holding on, white-knuckled, to a tiny idea of We the People, denying the beauty of what we are becoming. They’re warning that demographic changes are the unmaking of America. What I’ve seen on my journey is that they’re the fulfillment of America. What they say is a threat is in fact our country’s salvation—for when a nation founded on a belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief, then and only then will we have discovered a New World.
That is our destiny. To make it manifest, we must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class; we must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.