What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America
About this episode
Heather McGhee, author of 'The Sum of Us,' argues that racism functions as economic and civic sabotage: when white Americans refused to share public goods with Black Americans, they often destroyed those goods for everyone. Her central metaphor is the public swimming pool, with communities across America literally filling their pools with concrete rather than integrating them. She traces how this drained-pool politics shaped health care, higher education, labor protections, and housing policy, producing a stingier welfare state and worse outcomes for white Americans too. McGhee draws on reporting from across the country, including a Maine town confronting demographic change and a Mississippi community fighting a hospital closure, to argue that racial resentment sustains zero-sum thinking, and that multiracial solidarity is the only path to broadly shared prosperity.