The Pandemic's Opportunities and Challenges for Racial Justice

Subscribe and Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | YouTube

Transcript

Rob Johnson:

Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. (singing)

I’m here today with an old friend who I met through INET board member, John Powell, at a meeting organized by he and John in Bellagio, Italy. Gary Cunningham has a whole spectrum of fascinating, what I’ll call, experiences and vantage points in his life. He’s currently a Washington, DC President and CEO of Prosperity Now. He has worked in the city of Minneapolis. He’s run healthcare facilities there. I think he’s done all kinds of things with the Metropolitan Economic Development Association was where he worked when we first met. He stirs the drink. I’ve known him not well, but each time I’ve met him, I just get invigorated and inspired. And I wanted him to come on and share that energy with all of us at this critical time.

Gary, thanks for joining me. This is a difficult time in this country. This is a difficult, prolonged experience with, what you might call, the injustice to Black people. Lots of things have been, not being facetious, unmasked by the pandemic. But we are in a place now where if this country is going to continue, if it’s going to meet the promise of its founding words, we got a lot of work to do. And I look forward to your perspective on what’s the nature of that work and how do we credibly implement it and turn this country back to a thing we can be proud of for our children and away from the haunted house we’ve been living in in recent years.

Gary Cunningham:

Thank you for having me, Rob. It’s so good to see you again after a number of years. Meeting you at Lake Como and Bellagio, and really what we were working on is the same questions we’re talking about today, which is how do we create an economic system that works equally well for everyone? And that’s what we were focused on. And we were particularly focused on the question of what is economic justice for African Americans, if you recall? And Sandy [Dougherty 00:03:03] was there, and La June from the Kellogg Foundation. We had an all star cast, Andrew Glover Blackwell, Manuel Pastor, Maya [Rockeymoore 00:03:16], Dedrick Asante-Muhammad.

Rob Johnson:

Was Danny Lopez [crosstalk 00:03:23].

Gary Cunningham:

Yeah, Danny Lopez was there. He was part of that group. Susan Batten from the Association of Black Foundation Executives was a part of that group. We just had an all star cast really trying to focus on what is the narrative? What is the narrative? What is the narrative that we tell? And we’re still really working on that. So this struggle that you mentioned is an ongoing struggle in this country for how does everybody belong and how is everybody included in the American picture. And how do we start so that every young person in our country, everybody in our country, but every young person, let’s just start there, has an equal footing to begin? And then how do we get there from here so that my grandkids and your grandkids can actually do well in America? And so that’s part of what [inaudible 00:04:17].

And so I consider myself a patriot. I believe in this country. I believe that we can actually do better. And I was raised to really look at what is it that I can do to contribute, to use whatever skills, whatever privilege, whatever position I have to actually move the agenda for social and economic justice for all Americans in this country. And I say all Americans intentionally, in part because we’ve kind of got into a frame of zero sum. My group can do better if yours does worse. And we need to move away from that to really thinking about what is the abundance that we have. There’s enough in America. There’s enough wealth, there’s enough power, there’s enough of everything. So everybody actually could share in that, and everybody can use their skills and ability to help others do better. So that’s the framing that I have.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, I’m always reminded by very, very brief insight from Muhammad Ali. When he was asked to tell a poem at the Harvard commencement, he said, “Me, we.” I think we live on the pendulum between me and we, and maybe it’s rocked a little too far in the direction of me and not enough in the balance of we.

Gary Cunningham:

Well, that is so on point. Robert Putnam just did a book called Upswing and he talks about, he goes back to the Gilded Age in America. And he calls us from that time up until the civil rights movement, we were an “us” society. Meaning that it was about us doing well together, even though we had all kind of Jim Crow and all kind of other things going on. Actually African Americans, as an example, were actually doing better in 1960 economically as a whole than they are today. Black Americans actually had the highest marriage rate in the country in 1960. People get surprised by that. And the reason that they were better off is because they moved from the South, a devastating situation in the South, through the great migration. My grandparents came to Minnesota from Oklahoma as a part of that great migration. So I’m part of that story. Not a story that’s separate for me, it is my story.

And that created jobs and economic opportunity, but several things happened at once in America, at that point. You had jobs that were available in the North in factories, et cetera. My grandfather worked in Munsingwear making shirts for a living. He supported a family of six children, had a house and a car. And so he was on his way to the middle class, even though there was discrimination and segregation within the community that I grew up in, we were still making it. And there was still economic mobility in this country at that time. If you look at economic mobility, not just for people of color, but just for middle class Americans, it has stagnated in this country. In fact, Canada has greater economic mobility than the United States and many countries in Europe have greater economic mobility. When I say economic mobility, that means you could start off at one class level and you can move to another or one.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, I remember-

Gary Cunningham:

With hard work.

Rob Johnson:

Nicholas Lemann had a wonderful book called The Promised Land about the invention of the cotton gin and the migration north. I spent years making blues music. I ran a label, and going from Clarksdale, and Jackson, and all those places up through Chicago and Detroit. And I learned a lot about that, how you say it, that upward mobility for a time, but it doesn’t appear to be continuing.

Gary Cunningham:

Yeah. Well, several things happened. One was those, as Julius Wilson writes so eloquently about, those jobs disappeared. Meaning the Rust Belt, America moved from a producer nation to a consumer nation, from an industrial powerhouse to really a service industry. And so when that happened, all the people that were doing well, those jobs dried up, they disappeared.

Rob Johnson:

I grew up in Detroit, and I used to say to my dad, as a lot of his friends were becoming alcoholics, what we now call diseases of despair and so forth. And as it was getting compressed in the seventies and eighties, I used to say, “Dad, why did America divorce Detroit?” Like we weren’t part of the place anymore. We were allowed to sit there and rot.

Gary Cunningham:

Oh yeah, totally, totally. I told you, I think I told you earlier, I was a community organizer in Detroit.

Rob Johnson:

Oh, that’s right. That’s right, yeah.

Gary Cunningham:

In the eighties.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, yeah.

Gary Cunningham:

In the eighties. For Acorn, and I actually watched that city struggle with the huge economic inequalities. You go out to Ten Mile, Eight Mile, Nine Mile things would be pretty good, but you’d come into the inner city and things would just be horrible. I worked with organizing youth at that time and going door to door in some pretty bad scenes, but trying to organize people so that they could actually take some control over their own destiny. And so that’s kind of been the arc of my life is how do we work with communities? [crosstalk 00:10:18].

Rob Johnson:

Eminem was from Detroit. He created a movie called Eight Mile, which was almost like the line, the marker between prosperity and despair.

Gary Cunningham:

Oh yeah, totally, totally. And in fact, we talk about red lining, the issue for why Blacks, so we had the greatest prosperity that was ever created in America for the middle class was the New Deal. And that was created in the 1935 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, out of the Great Depression at World War II. All of that stuff was happening, World War II happened a little later, but it was all happening at the same time. And they created home ownership, which is the key to wealth in America is owning a home, right? And so they created a program and they created rules around that program so African Americans couldn’t participate. They also created rules around the program so whites could not live in Black neighborhoods.

So it’s out of that, and then they created the GI Bill. Now, I can go back in my family history and my family has fought in every war, including the Civil War. And there’s some lore in the family about the Revolutionary War in America that we were servants. We were slaves owned by others, but we were part of the history. So in every war, since Civil War, I can trace actual family members that died for this country. Yet, in World War II and the other world war, we didn’t get to participate fully. And so when the GI Bill came in, where you could get education and other benefits, even though we had fought, even though we were a part, we couldn’t be a part. And so this kind of dynamic in this history in America is deep. And then we have the original sin of slavery, but we also had years and years and years of Jim Crow and [inaudible 00:12:35] segregation that created the dynamics that we find ourselves in today.

Now, one would argue, right, well, okay, so that happened, right? What we have to think about today is not what happened, we need to think about where we’re going to go. And I had mentioned Robert Putnam and his book earlier, let me go into that just a little deeper for a moment. So what Robert Putnam really said was that we moved from a “us” society to an “I” society, and it happened approximately in the seventies, late sixties and seventies. And then there was a backlash. There was a white backlash to the civil rights movement that happened. And that white backlash actually happened successive times since then. So every time there’s progress on these issues of civil rights, you have a white backlash, according to Putnam. Where I’ve come to actually, Rob, is that if we can’t address the white backlash, we’re going to keep continue to fight this issue continuously.

And part of the issue is whites need to see themselves in the picture. Whites need to be part of the future and the picture. They to be included. And that fear and anxiety that gets created, it gets created in part because the way we’re telling the narrative is basically y’all done did all this to us, and so therefore you owe us, and we want, as Martin Luther King said in “I have a dream” speech, there’s a blank check that hasn’t been paid for, right? But we also have to think about how do we want to move forward, right? And so that’s why I actually believe in and have bought into a different way to frame this. And that is using what John Powell has called targeted universalism, right? And what is that, right? What does that mean? It’s a big term, right?

So in order for us to become a society where everybody belongs, you talked about not belonging in Detroit, as an example, or wherever you’re at, everybody has to figure out how they belong in the circle of human concern. And this isn’t a soft thing. This is a real hard thing, right? Meaning if we design universal policies and there’s a tendency to do that, and we don’t target those policies to how groups are situated to opportunity, we end up with people not being able to fully participate in the policies that we design.

And I’ll give you a clear example of that. The government recently as a response to COVID came out with the Cares Act. The Cares Act had a provision called the Paycheck Protection Program. The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to help businesses survive in the pandemic and provide them with some uplift, if you will. And what happened really was that while the program was universal, it didn’t actually reach communities of color, businesses of color by the droves. And that those banks, those entrepreneurs or those small businesses, or those big businesses that had really with the banking industry actually took advantage of that because it wasn’t targeted.

You mentioned I’m part of Prosperity Now. We worked with a coalition of folks to actually point this out to the Congress. And we had the data and the information, and they actually shifted the program. The SBA shifted the program so that it was more targeted in the second round so that everybody could participate in that program. And we know business is the lifeblood of any community. You’re not going to talk about addressing racial, economic inequalities without talking about how do you create jobs and how do you create opportunity within these communities. And so part of what we were able to do was reframe that discussion so that everybody could actually participate.

So this is what targeted universalism looks like. It looks like, yes, we want everybody to do well. We want everybody to participate in our society, but we know not everybody can participate given how they’re situated. And that’s true, whether it’s the kid in Appalachia, the white kid in Appalachia, that’s not situated to opportunity, or the African American kid in north Minneapolis, or the young man on the Pine Ridge reservation. They’re all situated differently to opportunity, and if we have these blanket programs that treats everybody the same, then we know some folks are going to benefit at the expense of others within our society. And so we actually have the opportunity, right now, we have the opportunity at this inflection point.

Rob Johnson:

I really want to underscore this insight that you have just come up with, because if I put it on the spectrum of what a psychologist would talk about, they always talk about there’s love and there’s fear. And when you fear that that person’s gain is going to be my loss, particularly in the time of austerity, in a time when globalization and automation, everything, and fears of climate change make everybody feel like, what you might call, their platform is insecure. Their future is insecure. When they have that fear, they’re not as likely to cut, despite 400 years of extreme injustice towards Black people that continues, they’re not going to cut a deal that’s a, you win more, I lose more, because they’re already full of anxiety. When you’re talking about these universal policies, that’s an up ramp for everybody.

I know Peter Temin, a very, very gifted economist at MIT. He’s written a book that INET helped support called The Vanishing Middle Class. And he talked about when you look regionally where there’s despair across the country, at a point in time where you see the diseases of despair, you also see rises in racial animosity. And secondly, he’s got another book which relates, it echoes many of the things you’ve been saying, going back to reconstruction to now called Never Together. And it’s about all of the attempts to backlash and, which you might call, resist change. But you are talking about something different. You’re talking about something for everyone moving up the ladder. And I think that’s alleviating the fear. That’s alleviating the fear because it’s creating promises for everybody. That’s a way of unlocking that I think has hope, has potential.

Gary Cunningham:

Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind.

Rob Johnson:

Oh yeah.

Gary Cunningham:

Have you ever seen that movie?

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, of course.

Gary Cunningham:

About a-

Rob Johnson:

Ron Howard and about the economist game theorist Nash. I went to Princeton for graduate school. He used to sit in on lectures when I was there. And Ron Howard-

Gary Cunningham:

Is that right?

Rob Johnson:

Ron Howard was my neighbor for years. Our children were puppy love play friends. And when he was making that film, I talked a lot with him. And Sylvia Nasar and I used to talk, the author of the book. How did Nash come to this table?

Gary Cunningham:

Well, Nash actually developed what you call the Nash Equilibrium.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gary Cunningham:

It’s a mathematical formula that talks about how groups interact in conflict, right? And his work has been used in the Salt treaties and all kind of negotiations.

Rob Johnson:

[crosstalk 00:20:57] yeah, for sure.

Gary Cunningham:

Right, right. The reason that his theorem is so important is that if you applied it to the issue of racial justice, partly what he says, and his theorem actually says, is that groups that negotiate without strong social cohesion lose in negotiation. And that the dominant group, unless it sees a benefit to itself in helping the non-dominant group, the group that is in majority or the group that is dominant will not do anything to help that other group because they think it’s at their expense. And the rhetoric that we hear in the environment, that’s why Nash’s work is so important at this moment is the fact that he actually laid it out. The one sided the equation basically says, if your group has strong social cohesion, you actually have the potential, even if you’re in the minority, to change the game. Right? But if you’re in the majority, right? If you’re in the majority, unless you see it in your own self-interest to change the game, you will continue playing the game that you have been benefiting from. It sounds like it’s kind of common sense, but it’s a powerful equation. [crosstalk 00:22:28].

Rob Johnson:

But it illuminates that the win-win quadrant in that four set of outcome boxes could be better than the win-lose, or the lose-win, and definitely better than the lose-lose. But you got to have some kind of courage and some kind of vision to go to that win-win place, even though both sides might be better, especially when it involves change that is unfamiliar.

Gary Cunningham:

So part of that also is the question about who’s in and who’s out, right? Who’s really in the dominant group and who isn’t, right? As a country, it is in everybody’s interest to ensure that everybody, every citizen has the ability to be a productive member of our community. Now that sounds like, oh, that’s really pie in the sky, Gary. But the fact is the United States is in international competition. It is not on its own. Its borders are not, they’re not closed. They’re very porous with regards to how economic activity happens in the world. And the fact that if we’re not investing in our citizens, if we’re not investing in the least of our citizens to ensure that they can actually be productive in our society and that they can actually participate, then the standard of living of all Americans goes down.

We may think in our little boxes that we are somehow immune or have been walled off. But the fact of the matter is unless America gets its act together in the next 20 to 30 years, we’re going to be in trouble from an economic position and our position in the world. And so we have a self-interest to say, okay, how do we address that? Now, I think you’re aware of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital and Ideology is his most recent book on really looking at world economic inequality. How did it occur? What happened? And how do we move forward from a global sense around these issues? But he actually takes the United States and European countries in particular as case studies in what happened, right? And one of the things that is so classic in his book that he talks about is that the United States has been getting by, and I’m paraphrasing, on the cheap with its investment in its social infrastructure, right? Meaning that even the New Deal was pittance compared to what other countries have done to support economic productivity of their people.

Now, most recently, the Congress passed a temporary measure for COVID around the child tax accounts, right? Are you aware of that? So this child tax credit actually has moved millions of people out of poverty only in the time that it has been in place, right? We’ve seen a sea change for Black communities with this tax credit for children. And the Biden administration’s now saying, we should have this more permanent, right?

We should have this more permanent, right? And so this could have a huge impact. If you remember when we were at Bellagio, Sandy [Phonetics Dehrity 00:52:04] was talking about baby bonds. And this issue of investing in our children. And Sandy’s work at the time, I hadn’t done a deep investigation in it. Prosperity now with all our resources, are pushing it full speed ahead. Because we just finished a study that looked at baby bonds and found that within a generation, we could close the wealth gap in America between people of color and white people completely by investing in a universal strategy. That then is targeted to people based on where they’re situated to opportunity in baby bonds. So if we invested a thousand dollars a year in bonds, this isn’t a savings program. This is a bond that the federal government would issue. By the time that child got to 18, they’d have $45,000 to invest in college. They’d have money to invest in a business. They’d have money to buy a home.

Right now, black wealth in America, black home ownership, let’s just take home ownership as a rate of wealth, is 41%. Black people own their home. And it’s been the same for years, going back to 1970. So, it hasn’t changed. The percentage of black home ownership hasn’t changed much in 50 years, right? And we know that’s the number one way people gain wealth. Whites is 67% home ownership. Much, much, higher rates of home ownership in this country.

So, why am I saying anything about this? Because, if we can actually invest in our people, so everybody would get a baby bond. But it would be tested by income so that those that had less income would get more of a baby bond, those kids, and et cetera. So, that there’d be some distribution to this.

Just think about a world where every child had $45, $50,000, to spend on their future. And that they had to spend it on asset building as a part of what they do. So, we know what to do, right? As a part of what we’re talking about, if we invested just in those two programs alone, we could transform America.

So it’s not something that we’re asking to take something from somebody and give it to somebody else, which is how some of these things are painted. We’re asking for everybody to do better. And we’re asking to make an investment in our children as a way to move forward in this society. There’s always this issue about who’s deserving. What poor are deserving, right? So the picture of the welfare mother that was pushed so often in the 80s and 90s comes to mind. Or the picture of the person that is derelict and is irresponsible. And so we shouldn’t invest in those people. Right?

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. They’re viewed as parasites, not as people who are subject to collective misfortune that we should repair.

Gary Cunningham:

Right. And we blame the victim, right? We blame the victim. It’s your fault, somehow you did it. You got us here. Without looking at what are the systemic things that led to that situation for that individual and for that group of people, right?

Gary Cunningham:

I’ve even had discussions. I was on Minneapolis, downtown council, right? I was on the Metropolitan Council. So I’ve been in these halls of power and I’ve heard people talk about these issues as cultural, right? They frame them in a cultural. There’s something going on with those people that is different, that is cultural, right? They like that. They like living in poverty. They like having all of these different outcomes that are poor.

When in fact, when you look at the structures that created the conditions by which people actually had the opportunity to grow. There was different structures for different people at different levels. And those structures were centered around race, as a part of what we are doing. So we’ve created a society, and the system we’ve created is as harmful for the whites, as it is to blacks. I’ll say that again.

Rob Johnson:

And what we’ve done is we’ve created negative self-fulfilling prophecies by attributing all of the result to some failure on the part of the person, as opposed to the failure of child nutrition programs. The failure of support for parents who had to work so their children could go to preschool. All of these different dimensions that build what you might call your adult productivity, meaning I’m not just talking about like working on the assembly. I’m talking about your ability to collaborate with other people in complex design. All of these things are taught when you’re little. If you do those things by the time you get older you are productive and you can say thank you to your society, because it helped build that. But when they starve people of that and say, look at what a failure they are, we’re disavowing our collective responsibility to what you might call, create the platforms that allow everyone to launch.

Gary Cunningham:

Yeah, well, so when I grew up my mother was on welfare. She was poor. There were five of us children and the policy of the welfare, remember I said 60% of black people were married in 1960 or more. And, the policy of welfare also had a lot to do with the decimation of black family. So, let’s look my welfare worker would come around our house. They’d look through our drawers to see if there was a man in the house. Right? So, this issue of having a two parent family caused men who had come up to Minnesota to work as part of the Great Migration, right? All of jobs disappeared as Julius Wilson. So, [inaudible 00:33:00] puts, and then these men were out of work. The women could get money into the house, but they had to disavow the man.

So, you set up a policy which was a compromise between liberals and conservatives at that time, that actually helped exacerbate. Then, we had a war on poverty that lasted for a minute. And, then we had a long war on crime. And this war on crime took out about a third of the male population out of the black community, put them in prison and then had a collateral sanction.

These collateral sanctions, meaning even after you got out of jail, you did your time for most of the time something that was minor. I’m not saying it wasn’t real crime in the community, but we’re seeing now all of these people getting out of prison for things they didn’t do. And, you’re reading about it every day in the paper.

So you had this dynamic they’d get out of jail and then they’d have collateral sanctions. So, they couldn’t get a job because of their record. They couldn’t rent a place, et cetera. So, then further remove them from the circle of human concern, these African American men.

And, then you look back on it, and say, well, why didn’t you do okay? What happened? Why didn’t these young men do okay? Well, I did a study in 2000, 2000 of black men in Hennepin County, 44% of the male population was arrested every year, un-duplicated.

This is the most liberal county, one of the most liberal counties in America, Black men being arrested at 44%. And the numbers haven’t changed much since then.

So when you have that kind of dynamic going on and then when they try to get back in. So, I was raised to believe that if you did the right thing, that if you worked hard that you would do well in America. That’s what I was raised with. That’s the social contract that we had, but that contract didn’t work for black people. It wasn’t a contract for us, right. It wasn’t until long after that, I found out that contract wasn’t for me.

And now we need a new social contract because many of the folks that are disenfranchised, they’re disinvested in our way of life. I asked Secretary Madeline Albright when she came to Minnesota, she was at the Humphrey Institute and I was a fellow there. I asked her do you think that this issue of the wealth gap in America is harming us internationally in terms of us telling people to join our democracy?

When they see people just based on their skin color, that can’t fully participate. And she said, yes, it’s harming us. It’s harming us telling the story about join our democracy. When people look at America and are seeing this injustice go on, they see George Floyd.

They’re seeing the dynamics within our community. And, if we’re going to have a country that actually is the beacon of light for the rest of the world with regards to democracy, and we continue to have these issues of racial and economic inequalities we have this illusion of merit. But it actually is not a system of merit. We have a system that used to have affirmative action as a way to try to address these issues. But the Supreme Court in [Phonetics Crossen 00:37:02] basically said that, that you can’t use these, I shouldn’t say you can’t that, that you have to have strict scrutiny when using racial categorizations.

And that’s strict scrutiny actually pretty much wiped out some of the progress that we made in the early 70s around trying to create what we call a world that works in glute well for everyone. So, if you look at the dynamics of what we see now we’re at this point so let me bring you red here. Red, at this point. We just had election in this country last year, President Biden won that election, but it was a very divisive election.

Gary Cunningham:

70 million people voted for President Trump, for President Trump. And more people voted for Biden. He was elected and some people dispute that, but let’s take that as a fact. And, we have folks that want to say that Civil War heroes or what they call the Rebel Heroes that we should be glorifying that. And, trying to tell you that oh, that’s okay. That somebody was fighting to keep people enslaved is something that we should be glorifying. So we got a deep divide. He ran here in Virginia right down the road from me.

They just had an election. And one of the things that they were talking about is this issue of critical race theory and the governor won on a platform of doing away with critical race theory. Well, what is critical race theory? What is that?

It really is something that talks about the true history of the country, meaning the dynamics of slavery.

It’s not something that says white people are bad and horrible and et cetera. It does say that we had a country that actually divided people based on race. Now I’m not a proponent or an expert in critical race theory. And that’s not my background, but I can tell you that if we can’t actually walk into the classroom and have an authentic conversation about the history of the country, that is based on fact, that it’s going to be a sad state of affairs 30 years from now. As we think about how we train our next generation for preparing them to make America great again, if you will. And, so I would say that we actually need to have some kind of reckoning about that. We need to have some truth telling about that.

Rob Johnson:

Well, Let me just use an analogy for a second. We’re in a medical profession and a doctor misdiagnosis the disease, then he prescribes the wrong remedy. So, if you don’t come clean with the disease of our society, we’re not going to be looking in the right direction.

Gary Cunningham:

Exactly. I just finished this book called Afropessimism. It’s pretty good, interesting framework. On the flip side of that you don’t want to go into a state where somebody’s bad based on the best color of their skin, right?

There’s these streams is what I’m trying to paint, and on both ends of those extremes is what John Paul calls breaking. they’re not bridging, it’s breaking. Meaning you can go to the other end of the extreme on the same subject and folks are one; very pessimistic about the future. Don’t feel like anything will change. Feel like we can’t get there from here. And, feel as if we actually need to do something to white people as a result of what has happened. And I would argue that’s the wrong position to be in as well.

Meaning on that side of the spectrum you’re going to have some problems. And that’s kind of the struggle I have with how we frame the racial equity movement in this country.

Ian Haney Lopez, who’s a professor at University of California, Berkeley’s. A law professor there wrote a book called Merge Left powerful piece. In part because him and Melinda Lake of Lake Associates, I believe they’re called did polling. And, they did focus groups and they framed messages. They framed the social justice message or the equity message. And they print it in front of whites. And they asked whites a question and the majority of whites actually don’t buy into that message.

But also the surprising thing is they put in front of social justice advocates and they didn’t actually buy that message. Pretty powerful. Yeah. Pretty powerful. What his framing is that we really need to reframe this so everybody can see themselves in the picture. So his work and John’s work are complimentary to each other.

And, what they really talk about is how we frame a message so that everybody can hear. Now when I was growing up I would’ve never believed we’d have gay marriage in this country. I’ve never believed it, simply because the world I grew up in the 60s and 70s and 80s was very homophobic and how the view of the world was. But, now we have the right to marry across the country and the Supreme court has said that is the right.

What was the change that happened there? And I’m using this an example that big change can happen. But they reframed the message. So, originally Stonewall all those great movements, the GLBTQ community happened and legitimately so, but they weren’t seeing much change in people’s hearts and minds about how they addressed these issues.

And it wasn’t until they started thinking and talking about it differently and talking about love and talking about somebody in your family and somebody you know, and all of that, that they really started to pick up some traction. To the point that I sat in a cab with an African American cab driver when I was in DC when all this was going on, and we’re in stuck in the Gay Pride Parade. And I’m expecting this guy to say something homophobic or something. He looks back at me says you know, I used to be really homophobic. He says it wasn’t until my son come, came home and told me he was gay that my perception changed, because I’m not going hate my son.

And then he said that he went to church and the church, the preacher was up there at the pulpit saying homophobic stuff to the prisoners. And, he told me he looked back and he said, I got up. And I stood in church and said, you talking about my son. And it had a huge impact on that congregation. But this happened all across the country, in little rooms and little parlors.

And I look at that as a way that we can actually reframe the question for how we get to this place, because what we’re seeing is the fastest growing group in this country is biracial.

The fastest growing group in this country is biracial. So you going to say a biracial person hates your mama, hates your daddy? How we going to play that out?

And as we all look at our history, whether it was rape and slavery or other things, we are actually becoming a multiracial society that is actually different. And so I actually think we have the opportunity to reframe the message to address white backlash. I mean, if you look at when Obama ran in 2008 and then in 2012, many of the same people that voted for Trump as an example, voted for Obama.

Why was that? Because he had a narrative and he had a message of hope and opportunity. He had a message that was different. why wouldn’t we shift the frame? Now George Floyd just died almost a year and a half ago. On the very streets I grew up on in Minneapolis. And we had a reckoning in the streets of America.

We had people of all colors, all races, out on the streets saying, we need to change this situation. And people demanding change, but now a year and a half later we can’t get a bill pass. Voting rights has went down the drain. We can’t get the Floyd Bill pass for how police operate in relationship to African Americans and other people in this country. So, this backlash is occurring right now as we speak. It was that quick. Hugh did a survey of Americans, and actually Prosperity Now, and Othering & Belonging Center did a survey in 2019 of American attitudes. American attitudes that actually shifted for a time there around the issue of race in America. But now they’re shifted back. So, what we’re seeing is because we’re not framing this situation correctly and our analysis can’t be one group’s got to do worse at the expense of another. That just can’t be our analysis. That’s not going to work.

So, how do we frame this in a way that everybody actually can see themselves? And that’s where I’m going to stop right now, because, part of this is the narrative that we’ve gotten here. And, I don’t think anybody and deny mass incarcerations.

Oh, I don’t think. The data is just too clear that there was a whole mass incarcerations and it was bought into both by the liberals and the conservatives. So, it wasn’t just a conservative thing. Liberals actually created some of that mass incarceration not some of it they actually were involved with it up to their elbows. We can’t deny that we have created a huge issue in this country around immigration. Used to be that you immigrated to America, you came here for hope opportunity, et cetera.

Now you can barely get in the gate. And, we’re paying a price for our immigration policy through the labor market right now.

I mean the labor market, particularly on the lower skilled work is paying a huge price because of the policy that we’ve enacted around immigration. And we need to be able to fix these things. We need to be able to address immigration policy that makes sense. And immigration’s complicated. It’s complex. So I’m not trying to make it like it’s this easy fix, but unless we don’t address some of these big issues, we’re going to continue down this road. And the road doesn’t lead us to a successful America. It leads us to an America that is more and more regressive, less and less democratic, and a world that we see our standard of living declining.

Rob Johnson:

Yes. Yes. And you know I, as I’ve mentioned to you and to our audience many times growing up in Detroit, I look at what’s happened with the combination of prison reform and privatization of prisons. The intensity of the jailing of fathers in the city of Detroit and the deterioration of the performance in children in public schools. And there’s a woman at University of Michigan has done a fabulously penetrating study on the loss of quality teachers because teachers in public schools are put under the pressure of how the kids perform on tests. But, when dysfunction in the family, we’ll just start right there. Dysfunction in the family affects the student’s performance and the teachers are not getting promoted or getting fired. They move to a different community if that other community doesn’t have that dysfunction. The dysfunction comes from the incarceration of all the dads.

And Heather makes it even more clear that somebody who’s convicted of a felony is no longer allowed to vote. But when they adjust the census every 10 years, when they’re in prison in Northern Michigan, they count in the redistricting, which strengthens the state legislature and weakens on behalf of the rural, conservative, and prison communities to the detriment of the city. So. You don’t get to be not counted either place. You don’t get to vote in the place where you’re a resident. You get counted in the place where you’re incarcerated, but not allowed to vote. She just took this apart. And what’s happening is then when all the teachers pick up and leave the Detroit metropolitan area, the spiral goes down for.

… The Detroit metropolitan area, the spiral goes down further. It gets worse and it gets worse. One of the things I wanted to ask you before we draw things to a conclusion today, is that in running the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and people often talking about the role of money in politics, there is a sensibility that a lot of times what the very wealthy do is they get a tax cut from themselves or make it legal to keep their money offshore, then the infrastructure in all of these rust belt areas goes down the drain.

And then racial animosity picks up and the plutocracy says, “Well, why don’t you and him go fight about these identity politics issues and leave me alone with my money offshore.” In essence, we’re not dealing with the stress that our political economy is putting on everyone, which is making it harder and harder to resolve this racial injustice. And like I’ve said earlier in this conversation, the way you bring it back to a win-win, it’s almost like all black and white people have to create a more just distribution of income and wealth in our society so that we can create that rising tide for all boats.

Gary Cunningham:

Absolutely. I want to come back to your education for a minute. I spent part of my life as the associate superintendent of schools for the Minneapolis public schools. And so, I was the overall operations and human resources and labor relations for the district, and so I learned a lot about how school systems operate. Minneapolis is one in point, but it’s one of the big city schools, if you will, and so there’s some patterns that you see there. One of the patterns that I saw and I did a regression analysis around this was that the teachers with the most experience were in the places that had the least issues with their student from a academic standpoint, right, and that it’s the system that was creating that dynamic, was one thing.

And then when you looked at resource flows of how resources flowed in communities, 60%, 70% of the kids in Minneapolis schools are kids of color, and that’s true in many of the districts that are urban areas around the country. But then you have enclaves, very small percentage of students of color in schools that are in very wealthy areas in the city of Minneapolis. So, how in the world does that happen where you have places and the resource flows, meaning into those schools were five and 10 times what they were in the black area of town, or the native American area of town, or the Latino area of town. And so these patterns, right, and then when you raise the question and I’ve seen many district improvement plans go down the drain, and many of them, they were like a whole [sense 00:55:31] in trying to fix the problem.

And these weren’t bad people. They weren’t like, “We hate black people.” Or carrying the conservative flag, but when it came to their kids, in sharing those resources with black communities, you didn’t see it happen or sharing it with other communities of color. It’s still an issue in the twin cities and you still have these unequal outcomes that are significant, and you do see white flight happening more and more and that white flight means that you’re going to segregate kids. I had a professor, when I was at Harvard, Gary Orfield. He was teaching, his course was poverty in public schools. What I learned is a lot of the poverty is driven in public schools. If we have neighborhood schools where my kid can go, I can go to this school, but your kids can’t because you live in another part of town, we continue the cycle of the dynamic that we have.

So, we actually need to create mixed income communities that are mixed economically and mixed racially. And this is the only way as America goes forward, that we’re actually going to get to a place where everybody has equal opportunity, equal access to the same goods and services because what we find in those districts that do have an integrated situation, we find that those white parents are advocating on those [inaudible 00:57:06] schools, that they have power, they have privilege and they come in and advocate and they’re not just advocating for their white children, they’re advocating for all children in that school. And you’re building relationships, meaning the most powerful thing I’ve seen in my time is when people build relationships with one another. I know that sounds simple, but if I don’t know any people of color or I don’t know any white people, my belief about white people or people of color is skewed by that not having a relationship, right?

And so, I’ve actually seen the power of relationships. I was the county administrator in Scott county. I’ve had a lot of jobs, Rob. I was county administrator, right, and I’m in a county that’s a third ring suburban county. The black population in that county was 0.004% black. It’s the wealthiest county in Minnesota. The average house at that time in the ’90s was 400,000 or more, right. So that’s the average house, right. In fact, the housing market was so skewed in that community that the kids of the other families that lived there couldn’t live in that community. Workers couldn’t work at the Burger King or the McDonald’s or you name it, because there just wasn’t any place for them to live in that community, and they liked it that way, right.

So, the market was skewed on the top end and it skewed at the bottom end for housing. But my point here is that one of the things that I did while I was there is I had the Humphrey School bring in graduate students of color and I matched them up with each of my direct reports that never had any action, really, with people of color, at all. This went on for five years. They’d get a different student, et cetera. By the end of that period, I didn’t have to talk about affirmative action. I had these white people that had no relationship up into that point with a black person, were now saying, “I need to hire some people of color.” Change their perception right there in front of my eyes, right.

I didn’t have to talk about anything. All I had to do was create those relationships. I didn’t realize it was experiment for me at the time. Now they call it reverse mentoring, we didn’t have a term for it back then. But you having a relationship with another person that’s different from you, that you see them as human, right. Black people, in many cases, don’t think of… White people don’t think of blacks as human and there are some issues for black people in that equation as well. So, it’s not just a one-sided thing where white people are the problem. Black people actually, because of their own segregation and the skewed nature of how we’ve created our society, also believe that whites have done a lot of wrong, et cetera, et cetera.

You can look at any PU-poll. There’s a recent poll came out, it was in the New York times last week and it really showed you the different views that African-Americans have of their reality and how white people think about their reality. It didn’t matter whether you were a Democrat or a Republican. There was definitely some differences in the Democrat and Republican, but the main point I’m making is that we’ve got to be able to talk to each other. We’ve got to be able to actually be in a room with somebody that disagrees with our opinion, right. If I just surrounded myself with people that agreed with me and everybody that I talk to agrees with me, I won’t learn anything. I won’t grow, right. Now, I might disagree with your opinion, right, Rob, on a matter, right, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t have a relationship, right?And so, I know that sounds all soft and stuff, but I’m telling you, it really does work. When we build bridges across this divide that we have, it actually creates change minds. It changes hearts. We need to start thinking about how do we change hearts and minds because you’re going to tell somebody that grew up in Alabama, whose parents were racist or whatever, you’re going to tell them, “Well you better start hating your parents now because they weren’t right and they did …” That isn’t going to work. That’s just not going to work, right.

I don’t care how much you talk to me about my mama, right? You’re talking about somebody that raised me, right? Somebody tried to tell me they hate white people, right, and the woman that taught me how to read and write was a white woman, my auntie, Sharon, right. I couldn’t hate Sharon for the life of me. Sharon was white, right, but I wouldn’t have been able to learn how to read and write without her, right. So, this question that I’m trying to raise here is not just a policy question. The policy question is fundamental and is important, but it is also around what are you doing? Your audience, the people that are sitting here listening to me, what are you doing to have relationships with other people outside of your circle? What are you doing-

Rob Johnson:

I got to pay a little bit of tribute to my late father. He was, obviously, a white physician in Detroit and he had largely black practice and black people as the nurses and people working in the office. He had a saying, and it made me grin as I was listening to you. He said, “You got to go out in the world and explore, because if people want to call you a dragon, you’re a dragon. But if you go meet them, they find out you’re a human, you’re not a dragon anymore. And it may not always be comfortable, but at the end of the day, you’re going to find out they’re a human and they’re going to find out you’re a human and there ain’t going to be any dragons.”

He used to tell me that over and over again in my childhood. And when I started doing subversive changing the economics profession, as this foundation Institute for New Economic Thinking, I remembered my father and I’d say, “When I go to universities, we may differ about your working paper or mine, or how monetary policy works, but I’m still respectful enough to be with you and listen to you and want you to hear what I think, and maybe learn from you.” Because what you might call [Acus 01:04:20] and to everybody being dragons is not the best we can do.

Gary Cunningham:

I would totally agree. One, that’s powerful story. Two, I also think that people have to see it in their self-interests, right, to change the conditions, right. If somebody doesn’t see it, they like, “Okay, Gary, I’m in total agreement with you on this equity thing. I think it should happen, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me, right. I didn’t do any of that. I had nothing to do with that.” Or, “That’s all good, but what…” And so we need to frame this so that that blue collar union worker or that person that’s in Huntsville, Tennessee can actually say, “Oh, I know why we’re doing this is we’re doing this to help me, right. We’re doing this racial equity movement to help me. I might be a white person in any place in America, but I see that we’re doing this not because we’re trying to give some special benefit to these folks based on X, Y, and Z, because the history is real and it’s happened, but we’re doing it because we’re trying to help each other get to the next level of this work, right.”

And so, Martin Luther King talked about the beloved community, right? So if you go back and read that, it’s targeted universalism. It’s really talking about how do we create a world that everybody fits into and belongs? How do we create a world where your kids and my grandkids can actually do well. And how do we move out of this kind of divisive situation we got ourselves in? And how do we start listening to each other? John Powell did something powerful in his last conference, Othering and Belonging Conference. I know he took a lot of heat for it, so courage is a requirement of this work. Courage is a requirement of this work.

But I want to say, he brought in to his last session, somebody that was a Republican had ran in California, et cetera. And he started having a conversation with this person and he treated that other person, even though he didn’t necessarily agree with him, as a human being. And he was trying to demonstrate the need for us to reach across to each other, right. Even if we have a difference of opinion with each other, that we can actually get to know each other as people and humans. Now, when he did it, I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, et cetera.” But after it got done and I thought about it, that was a powerful testament because he was using all his personal credibility, all the things he had done over all those years to put it on the line and say, “I really believe in a world where everybody belongs and that’s putting it on the line, if you will.

Rob Johnson:

I’m thinking of Barry White song, Practice What You Preach. John knows that. John knows that. And…

Gary Cunningham:

That is so funny. There’s no question we come from the same generation.

Rob Johnson:

Yeah. We’ve explored a lot today and I’d like to have you back for another chapter, but part of our audience are my young scholars and I want to underscore something, in this last hour, I’ve listened to a man that talks about John Nash, who talks about different aspects of psychology, who has worked in healthcare education, municipal government, philanthropy.

The breadth of your curiosity and the breadth of your striving and all of this, I’m holding you up as a model to these young people of the kind of pathway that has the depth and the imagination, the awareness and the coherence to bring about the kind of change that you’re campaigning for. But the one thing I also want to underscore in our conversations in preparing, you mentioned George Floyd being you used to live on that block where he was murdered, is that you witnessed, your heart felt the inhumanity of that racism, that otherness, the contradictions between being treated like a human and what you saw people being treated like. I would suspect that that gave you an awful lot of propulsion inside in defining your mission and your sense of purpose with how you deploy your energy and deploy your curiosities to make a difference in life.

Gary Cunningham:

So, Rob, it’s not like it’s academic for me in some ways or removed. I actually got beat by the same Minneapolis police officers when I was in college. I wrote a article about it for the Star Tribune, which is the paper in Minneapolis, when George Floyd was murdered. I experienced their brutality firsthand for no reason at all, just walking down the street. I got pulled off the street, they said I looked like somebody and they beat me half to death. I missed my finals and had to retake all my finals and then went to court and got in a courtroom and they just dismissed it. And I said, “Judge, I’ve been beat up.” And the judge says, “Well, that’s too bad. Next case.”

So, it’s not like it’s secondhand to me. I didn’t get killed, but it very well could have happened because it’s happened to so many African-American men, Philando Castile, somebody I knew, right? These are not figures that were somewhere else or somewhere else. We’ve seen it in our community day in, day out, particularly in the ’70s and ’80s. Even today it hasn’t let up in terms of the issue of police violence. The police are actually carrying out a mandate. The police have been given a mandate by the white society: protect their interest, to protect their property and to protect their interests. So, the over policing in the communities of color, particularly black communities, is a mandate that whites actually have bought into.

They know why the police are there. They know why those neighborhoods are over policed. They know what’s happening with all of that, but as long as it’s over there, as long as it’s not their children, right, it’s not a big problem. I was in Minneapolis when Justine Damon was killed, who’s a white woman, by a Somali African-American police officer and the reaction was totally different. I had white people come up to me saying, this is in a middle class neighborhood I lived in, they would say to me, “Oh, I now know it can happen to me.” Think about that. You’re saying to me, “I always knew it can’t happen to me.” But it was a wake up call that oh, all of a sudden it can happen to you, right, and so I had some energy around that, Rob, right?

You’re coming up to me saying, “It can happen to me. I’ve been privileged.” This is the unspoken words. “It never could happen to me. In fact, when I looked at police officers, I never thought anything about it.” But every time I turned around, I was just here… When I first moved here to DC, this just happened, I moved here to DC and I turned on a yellow, right, in Maryland. I had four police officers surround my car with their guns drawn. I’m in my ’60s. I had a traffic violation, right. I didn’t deny, maybe done something, right. I wasn’t violent or anything. Now why in the world would you need four cops with their guns drawn for a 60 year old black man?

Now, this is just down the road, in this town here, right, so, it’s not like it’s removed, right. If you get a gun drawn on you, that’s a scary experience, right. This happened just a year and a half ago. I’m not making it up. I’m telling you the truth, right. I’m sitting here right here telling you that’s what happened to me and I’m educated. I’m part of the middle class. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do right, in this society. I’ve never really been to jail at all, except for protesting, right. And yet I turn on a yellow light and I got cops with the guns drawn.

Rob Johnson:

Let me, let me say something-

Gary Cunningham:

I’m just telling you, it’s not removed, right.

Rob Johnson:

I want to say one thing to you. I’m not trying to justify it, but it may be a part of the hope of talking to each other that can be on the horizon. I have a friend who’s a major producer of film, including the show called Law and Order. He’s been looking at what to do in his forthcoming seasons. He and I take walks together quite several times a year, and he’s been involved in Chicago and in Minneapolis with trying to understand what’s going on. And he says that the equivalent of PTSD, psychological problems, that mid and later career law enforcement people are having now are exploding. And he’s saying, when you talk to these people, what they’re saying is they can sense that they are being asked to enforce what they now know is an unjust system.

And you were saying, “There’s an unjust system, and they do that, they do that for white people.” And you’re right. But he’s saying that some of them now are saying, “I thought I was being a great contributor to my country by being a law enforcement officer, and now it’s blown up in my face and I can see the contradictions. They may yearn for that healing. Right now maybe they’re too prideful to admit it and so they have these psychological disorders. He is sensing that they want to evolve where they’re defending an order that is viewed from all different vantage points as a just type of society.

Gary Cunningham:

I’m saying this authentically, right, that was powerful. And it was powerful because you don’t think about it from that perspective, right. And the fact that we are having 30 and 40% of the police officers going out on medical leave, et cetera, is part of they’re standing on the front lines of trying to protect the current regime, if you will, could have a huge psychological impact on the individual, wherein they… My son’s a firefighter, he’s a captain of the fire department. He always wanted to be a firefighter, right, so even when he was five I tried to talk him out of it. He was not going for it, right, and now he loves being a firefighter.

He joined the fire department because he wanted to help people. Police officers, I would think for the most part… I know African-American police officers, they stood in my house when there was a protest in Minneapolis, my wife was the mayor in Minneapolis at the time, they came to our house and protested. They came into my house and I invited them, the protestors and the police. And I knew a couple of cops because they grew up in the neighborhood, right, and they were African-Americans. And I asked the protestors, I said, “Are these your enemies?” I said, “I know him. I know his kids, right. This individual standing here is not the enemy.” And then I talked about this issue of preparing and doing protests, and I talked about the six steps of non-violent protest to them. Many of them didn’t even understand that there was actually a practice.

… didn’t even understand that there was actually a practice involved with protesting that you actually have to give up something in yourself. You actually have to sacrifice something yourself. And part of the principles that Gandhi came up with about protests and King took on about peaceful protest and nonviolent protests, was that you go and talk to the people that you’re protesting against. You get to know them as human beings and you give them opportunity to change. These are the principles, right? Of nonviolence that one has to go through, and it’s just not somebody’s evil on the other side of the fence. Most of those are just working class individuals trying to make their way in the world, right?

They have become part of a system that says, here’s what you’re supposed to do. And a system that’s out of control that says it’s okay to beat other people, et cetera, et cetera. It’s okay to shoot people, et cetera, et cetera. So the system is, I’d say out of balance is putting it mildly. But I actually hadn’t thought about what you just put on the table. That’s a powerful analysis of what those individuals are going through on the other side of the line.

Rob Johnson:

What I’m basically saying is quoting my dad. We might think they’re dragons, but we might do a little better if we realize they might be humans too. Might be capable of change, might be relieved by a change that you initiate.

Gary Cunningham:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Go ahead, I’m sorry.

Rob Johnson:

I’m always reminded of how courageous I felt Martin Luther King was. And when I’ve worked as an adjunct professor at Union Theological Seminary, I’ve often taught… This was particularly during the time of Occupy Wall Street. When a lot of people knew what they didn’t like, but they didn’t know what to aspire to do. And so I came and joined some of the faculty there as an economist. And I used to teach something that A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King put together called the Freedom Budget for All Americans. And when you look into it, there’s books about it and there’s all kinds of conversation and discourse and notes. Dr. King and A. Philip Randolph had a strategy. They said, we’re not going to come in and look for a budget for black people. We’re going to come in and look for a budget, which has the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare and all of these things that all Americans, a freedom budget for all Americans, which they felt required a very substantial restructuring.

But my understanding was while it wasn’t passed as a bill, it did strongly influence the Great Society budgets of the Lyndon Johnson administration. And by imagining just like you… I’m actually just feeding back to you what you’ve been saying to me in this last hour. Dr. King and A. Philip Randolph went and said, this is something designed for all of us to be better, not for a small segment of us to be better to the detriment amount of others. And I thought the spirit of what they were doing was exactly what these theological students would find inspiring. And it appeared to me from our conversations, they were all graduate students there, that they did. They could see that, which you’ve referred to kind of as the win-win logic of starting from the premise that everybody’s a human and what do we all need to make it better?

Gary Cunningham:

So it’s interesting you say that because Prosperity Now, the place I’m CEO of, actually believes that we can no longer mitigate the effects of a broken system. And that we believe that the tax structure in America is upside down. Because if you look at economic inequalities for the middle class, for working class people in America, the tax system has driven economic inequalities. In America, where you can be a wealthy person, a very wealthy person and pay no taxes. And then you can be a middle class person, and you’re playing most of the taxes in this country. And so we need to turn our tax system upside down, or we need to right size it. So that it actually is serving the people in this country, as opposed to just serving those folks at the top. Now I don’t hate people at the top, or I don’t have any issues, but if we have a structure that actually… We have people in this country that have more wealth than they could spend in a hundred-thousand lifetimes.

Gary Cunningham:

Why wouldn’t we ensure that every child in this country can read and write? Why wouldn’t we ensure that every person has a right to housing in America? Why couldn’t we ensure that everyone has a right to a job and a means of employment? Why can’t we just do those things? But we’re not doing those things. We’re basically concentrating wealth at the top of the pyramid. People don’t even have economic mobility in a country that prides itself on Horatio Alger stories? We pride ourselves on the rag, the riches, somebody made it big, but actually that’s not true. It’s not a true story for most Americans. For the majority of Americans, not just the most, the majority of Americans. People aren’t moving up the ladder.

So if you’re in a low wage job, something happens. You have no emergency savings to rely on. You have nothing to rely on. COVID has taught us one thing. It’s taught us that these economic inequalities are deep and they are exacerbated by the COVID crisis. But it’s also taught us that it’s bare. Meaning you can see it. It’s not hidden. The dynamics of those that actually can make it out. So you’re a low wage person. And you have no hope of using your talents, your abilities and strength to move to the next level rung because you don’t see anybody else in your community that’s done it. We need to create America that’s built on abundance, not scarcity. We need to create an America that everybody can participate. We need an America that lives up to its dream, that if you work hard, you do the right thing, you can excel in this society.

If we had that promise made and kept, this country would be so much better off. Just that promise made and kept. There’s no way that you can expect children that grow up in homeless situations or in unstable housing situations to actually do well in school. I’ve seen kids that were moving seven and eight times in a school year to different schools in the low-income areas of Minneapolis, and there’s no way those kids could do better. Why can’t we stabilize that for those children? Why can’t we stabilize the basics, housing, food, education, and medical care. If we could do that as a country, we would change the trajectory. We would be on a path for growth and prosperity in this country. And that’s the work we do at Prosperity Now.

Rob Johnson:

What I recall in my formative years was reading a British scholar named Isaiah Berlin. He had a famous essay or book called Two Types of Liberty. And I’ll cut to the chase. It’s the freedom to do has got to be in balance with the freedom from what others do to you. So if there’s no gun control, I’m free to carry around a gun, but you’re not free to feel safe from being shot.

Gary Cunningham:

Isn’t that the truth.

Rob Johnson:

The current pandemic, if you don’t have to wear a mask, I’m more at risk at getting COVID-19. So you have the freedom to not be vaccinated or whatever, but I don’t have the freedom from the danger that your behavior creates. Well, taking it deeper, taking it to the places you’ve been taking this today, the freedom to do whatever you want with how many billions of dollars is a little bit in tension with the freedom from the kind of fear and despair that people who don’t eat or have healthcare, or have proper schooling for their children. They need freedom from that fear. And we can’t just sit and celebrate the people at the top. Though some of the people at the top have been very innovative and they’ve created things that benefit us all. It’s not a zero sum game that way either. But thinking about the common good and the individual good. Going back to your quote with Robert Putnam, is it a me society or is it a we society?

Gary Cunningham:

Right, yes. And I actually think we have the potential to move back to we from a me and an I. And so we have that opportunity today and that’s what Putnam is pointing to. But I think there’s a whole lot of other people that are starting to wake up and come to their conclusion that we actually need to create… I worked in Paul Wellstone’s first campaign, Senator Wellstone. And knew him well. And one of the things that he is known for is that we all do better when we all do better.

Rob Johnson:

Yes, that’s right.

Gary Cunningham:

And so that’s one of his famous quotes.

Rob Johnson:

I visited Carleton College with my son and there was-

Gary Cunningham:

Oh is that right?

Rob Johnson:

… that was printed up on a banner in one of the rooms we walked into.

Gary Cunningham:

Oh yeah. We all do better when we all do better. That’s targeted universalism. That is all the thing… He put it so succinctly that there’s no way that we’re going to do better if somebody else is doing worse. But we’ve gotten to this… And that doesn’t mean that we have to put up with people that carry Tiki torches or shooting people in churches. And there are some lines that we shall not cross, and there are some places that are, there is no moral other side. There is no moral other side to some of these questions, right? Meaning bringing back Jim Crow or justifying slavery or justifying the Holocaust or justifying some of the human atrocities in our society. There’s just no moral other side to talk about those issues in a way that makes sense.

Gary Cunningham:

But if we can talk about, how do I help your kids do better and how do my kids do better? We can talk about our common human experiences together. We don’t have to talk about what you believe and I believe. But there’s no moral other side to, I want to put your people back in slavery. It’s just not how we talk about that. What is that conversation like for folks? But I do get the anxiety, the deep anxiety that many of my white brothers and sisters are feeling. I understand it. When you feel attacked, when you feel you’re on a spot and people talk about accountability.

Gary Cunningham:

I had a situation where I came into a place and people were calling each other out, you’re racist and you’re this, that and the other. And my question to the folks that were saying that is, is that going to change the situation that… you might feel better. It might make you feel better. I called somebody racist. I said, but are you solving the situation? What happens to that person when you do that? And then what happens to you? And so how do we have a civil dialogue when you call somebody a racist? Well, they might have some tendencies that… we are in a racist society. It just is. Meaning the society has fundamentally treated black people differently or Latinos differently, et cetera. But we’re not going to get there by me calling Rob a racist, because Rob could be an ally. He could be somebody that could help us. Or he can be somebody that withdraws and holds back and becomes part of the silent backlash.

Rob Johnson:

I’m going to talk from that side as the Caucasian side of the ledger. I have had that experience in recent months. And what I would recommend to my fellow Caucasians is to sit and listen carefully and use the challenge and the discomfort to reflect upon, how I can be a better person. And don’t be highly reactive to the other person. Many times when people are injured, you’re not the cause even if they accuse you. But there are times when I’ve hurt other people because I’ve been unmindful. Not necessarily needs to be race, but just I’m talking about in the course of life. So the idea is to listen, be patient, be compassionate, and don’t lash out, don’t lash back and maybe inside feel sad for how much they hurt. Then both sides are human. Again, they’re not dragons, they’re humans.

Gary Cunningham:

You could feel that-

Rob Johnson:

Even when someone attacks you, they may be a human, not a dragon.

Gary Cunningham:

Right. And we all respond in the moment to these things, too. So we all kind of have a reaction to them because I’ve been in situations where it hasn’t been comfortable. And what I find is that people strive to be comfortable. We strive to be comfortable and when something happens, it makes us uncomfortable. It creates some dynamics for us internally. And so what you just said is hold that, don’t react to it.

Rob Johnson:

Don’t be a pleaser and don’t be self protective.

Gary Cunningham:

Flatulation, right. Or self protection. I just had a situation where I’m on a board of an organization that I won’t name, but they’re doing DEI work, Diversity Equity Inclusion work. And they started down this journey and some of the staff started telling their stories. And the leadership, which is pretty white, not pretty white, mostly white. I was getting this relayed to me by a white person on the staff and a person of color just the other night. And the person of color says, you guys shut us down when we were telling our stories. You shut us down. We couldn’t tell our stories. And the white person said, well, I wasn’t there, but what I heard was it was a bitch session. So in their mind it was a bitch session. And in the people of color mind, they were actually raising their issues and concerns talking about their conditions. So the reaction was, you’re making us uncomfortable. So therefore we’re going to label this and put a label on it instead of letting it happen. And let people tell their stories.

Rob Johnson:

Don’t block it.

Gary Cunningham:

Right. And the backlash to that for the people of color has been tremendous because they felt insulted. They felt like they didn’t matter. And the white people in the situation, I can tell you, I know them well. They have good intentions. They have good intention. I know it. There is no question, I’ve known these people for 20, 30 years. But they’re afraid to be uncomfortable. And they push that uncomfortableness away, and then pushing that uncomfortableness away they actually can’t feel their own humanity in the situation or empathize. So if you’re describing it as a bitch session, what does that say-

Rob Johnson:

That’s blocking-

Gary Cunningham:

… about, right, it’s blocking. And it’s actually putting you in a worse situation. You might as well not have done that diversity inclusion stuff if you didn’t want to hear what people have to say. And people’s cultures are different. This quilt behind me is from Pine Ridge Reservation. So I worked in Native nations across eight states. And one of the things I learned is, there’s different cultures. And you come in there not understanding the culture of the situation that you find yourself in, you can actually do a lot of damage without even knowing you’ve done damage. They’re bitching. That’s damaging.

Or if you’re in the black community, I used to go in these meetings. And when I was working on African American men and we’d have these big public kind of meetings where people get up and people would have to go through a catharsis. They’d have to go up and say everything and go through something before you could actually get to it. And I had a good friend of mine and my mentor, Dr. Joseph White, is one of the first African American psychologists in psychiatrists in country. He’d say to me, Gary, you got to be patient. And you got to listen to this. I want to get to it. I want to get to it. I want to solve the problem. But no, he said you can’t get to it unless people go through something. They have to go…

And so African American people, we’ve got just a different cadence. We’ve more vocal, et cetera, et cetera. And for me, I was like, I want to just get to the work. But he taught me that I couldn’t let my emotions about where I was at, because I didn’t want to hear all of that. I had to be patient. I had to sit back and I had to take that all in. And then he was right. Once people got it all off their chest, they were in a place that they could actually have a… Because they felt listened to and heard.

Rob Johnson:

I was going to say, the irony might be by not blocking or by not pushing hard to get it off your chest, you may create the unity that allows things to move forward.

Gary Cunningham:

Exactly.

Rob Johnson:

That the polarized environment could not achieve.

Gary Cunningham:

Exactly. In part, it was a big lesson for me because after I sat there and listened. But that is recognizing somebody else’s humanity. Going back to what we talked about earlier. You being able to sit there and not respond to being called a name. And only reason you respond is because you’re upset about being called that name. And there are some hurtful words. There’s some hurtful words that can be said, but just think if you took a different approach to it. And you just sat back and said, okay, I’m going to hear that. I’m going to take that in. I’m not going to respond to it. And then that person gets all their wind out. They said everything they need to say.

And you’re still sitting there in that uncomfortable space. Sure enough. Then you could start having that dialogue because you heard them. They start treating you like a human being. They might even start joking with you and having a different conversation with you because now you’ve been through the catharsis with them, they’re able to see you as a human being. You’re able to see them as a human being. You don’t have to say yeah, my parents didn’t do anything. What are you talking about? I hadn’t had no slaves and I didn’t do any of this. I think for whites to be great allies, they have to be great listeners and they have to have great compassion. And that’s hard.

Rob Johnson:

Yes it is. And what I am reminded of is in my childhood, Marvin Gaye, third verse. Marvin Gaye third verse. We got to bring some understanding here today. What’s going on? Starts with talking to mom and dad. We got to bring some loving here today. But the third verse is we got to bring some understanding here today.

Gary Cunningham:

I’m totally loving you, man. That was good. You brought it home. So anyways, good talking to you, man.

Rob Johnson:

You too. This has been delightful and I think I really want to help the world see what a constructive example you are and what you’ve cultivated within yourself. I think you are a guiding light for this challenge.

Gary Cunningham:

Oh thank you.

Rob Johnson:

It’s a great pleasure to be with you. And I hope we can do another chapter in the not too distant future. Excellent.

Gary Cunningham:

All right.

Rob Johnson:

Excellent. Thank you.

Gary Cunningham:

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, man.

Rob Johnson:

You too.

Gary Cunningham:

Take care of yourself.

Rob Johnson:

You too.

Gary Cunningham:

And your wife and kids and all of that, take care, man. Bless you.

Rob Johnson:

Bye-bye. Bless you too.

Gary Cunningham:

Bye-bye.

Rob Johnson:

And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, at ineteconomics.org.