Heather McGee

Black and brown folks are disproportionately uninsured, but the largest group are white people.

And yet the majority of white voters had been opposed to the Affordable Care Act when it was passed and for a decade since.

As I journeyed across the country and found this common thread of racism in our politics and our policymaking underlying so many of our most vexing public problems, our lack of affordable health care, education that was too expensive, housing that was too expensive, our lack of clean air and water, inability to address social

global climate change, the holes in the bedrock of our democracy, all of this had this common thread of racism in our politics and our policymaking.

And yet, I didn't get...

And so the core insight is that when it comes down to it, we need each other.

We need each other.

There are so many things that really matter.

The most important things in life, I simply can't do on my own.

Government is what helps us do things together that we simply can't do on our own.

And in a diverse society, that means it's going to take multiracial collective action.

And so I began to see that in communities where they had rejected zero-sum thinking and embraced cross-racial solidarity to use collective action to get something, and I'm talking about real things, higher wages, cleaner air, better funded schools, there would be a dividend, a real measurable gain there.

whether that was a campaign that was led by a black and white team, Democrat and Republican, both bound together in their ability to say, I made a mistake and I was incarcerated.

Those two men together led a campaign in Florida to restore voting rights to millions of people in Florida who had felony convictions, white, black, and brown, right?

In the book The Sum of Us, I tell the story, very prescient today, of a town in the whitest state in the nation, in Maine, that had seen its best days go by.

That was experiencing population loss and job loss, vacancies in the main streets, factories closing.

We all know this story.

But of course, towns like that, what they really need is new people.

And in the town of Lewiston, Maine, the new people who happen to come are

were mostly African refugees and immigrants who were, many of them Somali people, who came and helped breathe new life into that town.