#sparkchamber 082222 — Trouble the Water + Drained-Pool Politics

The arts play an enormous role in both reflecting and advancing societal awareness. Our #sparkchamber today brings that to the fore as we highlight two of our powerhouse alumnae.

Ongoing at Fairmount Water Works is a museum exhibition by Victoria Prizzia of Habithèque Inc. POOL: A Social History of Segregation is a curated collection of powerful art installations and informative experiences, including rarely seen archival film footage and photographs that explore the history and contemporary implications of segregated swimming in America. POOL investigates the role of public pools in the United States with the goal of deepening understanding of the connection between water, social justice, and public health.

As part of that exhibition, this coming Saturday, August 27 from 3:00-5:00 p.m., the Philadelphia Jazz Tap Ensemble delivers a live performance. TROUBLE THE WATER — featuring singer, vocussionist, and songwriter Bethlehem and dancer, choreographer, and cultural leader in the field of tap dance Pamela Hetherington — is a jazz-based music, movement, and spoken word performance literally diving into the social, political, personal, and spiritual implications of gospel classics, Wade in the Water and Deep River. This performance excavates untold stories hidden within the lyrics of these songs and the motions of American waters.

All the details of the exhibit and the performance as well as a wonderful interview with Pamela are here.

For more context and backstory, the underpinnings of drained-pool politics is laid out powerfully and emotionally in the book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather Mcghee. Ms. McGhee was one of the people we highlighted during our five-week celebration of Black History Month 2022, and we re-post that 021422 piece again today.

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February is Black History Month, and #sparkchamber is celebrating all month long with some context and perspective. Today, we highlight public-policy expert Heather McGhee. She is the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Sum of Us with an undeniable bottom line that racism has a cost for everyone — not just for people of color.

Ms. McGhee’s specialty is the American economy — and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?

McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm — the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country — from parks and pools to functioning schools — have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benefits we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America. It leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

To-do list:

Pre-order The Sum of Us in paperback.

Watch Heather McGhee’s TED talk.

Follow the progress on Twitter.

Vote.

1.] Where do ideas come from?

[For context, from the introduction to an Ezra Klein Show podcast: “The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee. These pools were the pride of their communities, monuments to what public investment could do. But they were, in many places, whites-only. Then came the desegregation orders. The pools would need to be open to everyone. But these communities found a loophole. They could close them for everyone. Drain them. Fill them with concrete. Shutter their parks departments entirely. And so they did.

It’s a shocking tale. But it’s too easily dismissed as yet one more story of America’s racist past. McGhee shows otherwise. Drained-pool politics are still with us today and shaping issues of far more consequence than pool access. Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a childcare system, a decent social safety net. McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, offers a devastating tour of American public policy, and she shows how drained-pool politics have led to less for everyone, not just their intended targets.]

The cover art is an original painting done by this wonderful British artist, David McConachie. I wanted it to be around the pool because the pool is the central metaphor of the book, specifically it’s about the drained pool, the negative story of what happened. I wanted the cover to be an image of what should have happened — the world we didn’t create and the world we could still create. This is the world where little white kids and little Black kids are swimming together, a world where we never drained the pool and it was a place for our people to come together and learn how to trust one another, how to play with one another, how to feel akin to one another. And actually there is an image of the drained pool as well. I commissioned a friend of mine, Frances Tulk-Hart, to do chapter illustrations — there’s more art inside the book. In the chapter “Racism Drained the Pool,” there is an image of a drained pool with sort of overgrown weeds. So you do see both. But I wanted the cover to be hopeful, inviting, emotional, and to suggest a future that we did not create when we had the chance, but we could still create now.

2.] What is the itch you are scratching?

I have always been animated by core questions about our economic dysfunction in America, why it was that people so often struggled just to make ends meet. I was born on the South Side of Chicago. I saw what happened when the good factory jobs and the good public sector jobs started to leave. And it felt like we could do something about this. We could, in many ways, have nice things, right? Universal childcare and health care and reliable infrastructure and well-funded schools in every neighborhood. And the data was saying it would be in our economic interest to do it.

So I did spend about 15 years in economic policy trying to make the case for better economic decisions. But ultimately — and I started having a hunch that I was sort of using the wrong tool. And I think the election of Donald Trump really, with a majority of white voters, to me was a wake-up call. And I decided that ultimately, the facts and figures and reliance on a sense of economic self-interest was not actually going to be enough. I had to get at some deeper questions in this country. It wasn't that I had the wrong numbers. It was that I had the wrong deeper story about status and belonging, about competition, about deservingness, questions that in America have always turned on race.

It’s a really astonishing set of data. The psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson did this study. And then there’s been a whole host of other ones to basically show that there is a predominant zero-sum mindset that’s predominant among white Americans, more than among Americans of color, that basically is threatened by the idea of demographic change, that on a gut level feels like that is not in their own interest and that makes them want to pull away from some kinds of policies that are actually, you would think, in their economic interest, right?

The majority of people making under $15 an hour are white. The majority of people without health care are white. We all live under the same sky and are all going to be vulnerable to climate change. And yet making race salient, as, of course, Donald Trump did and Trumpism does, makes people — white people — more conservative. It’s this zero-sum idea that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.

3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?

I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, because I know that decisions made the world as it is and that better decisions can change it. Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.

4.] How do you know when you are done?

We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.