Heather McGee

They worked, right?

And yet they were a lot like those segregated public swimming pools, Tanya.

They were public goods that were in many ways for whites only, whether it was because Social Security excluded the two job categories that most black workers were in.

in a compromise with the Southern delegation to the New Deal Congress, whether it was that massive investment in housing that workers could afford and the federal policies to create and encourage mortgages to make the dream of homeownership a reality,

that was all predicated on the never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much of a credit risk.

And so the progressive New Deal government required racial covenants, agreements that said that the housing stock built with federal support could only be to sold or leased to people, quote, wholly of the Caucasian race.

And it wasn't until

the civil rights era and the beautiful cross-racial protest, litigation, agitation that attacked segregation in all of its forms, public swimming pools were actually one of the first areas

where black families who lost children because they could not access the safe public swimming pools led the fight.

And we saw courts issue desegregation orders for public swimming pools all over the country and in response.

towns and cities decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than integrate them.

I visited some of these sites of these lost public swimming pools, just wide, flat expanses of grass and public parks.

It was just such a powerful metaphor for the way in which a robust consensus held by white voters

that government had a role and a responsibility to ensure the decent standard of living for people.

Affordable college, home ownership, good jobs, well-regulated businesses, the sort of economic consensus of most of the 20th century, it fell apart in the face of the inclusion of black and brown people, people whom white voters had been taught to disdain and distrust.

You know, The Some of Us came out in 2021 at a time when the country had been in many ways transformed in terms of our collective consciousness, where white people all over the country were waking up to the fact that we've all been lied to about our history, were themselves really looking to find the kinds of answers that would make sense of the racial inequalities that we still have.

And we're feeling...

of their ability to kind of wake up, to understand this country in its fullness.

And I do believe that if you don't understand how bad it's been

you really can't appreciate the glory of this nation and the overcoming and the triumph and the resilience of our people.