Top 40 Heather McGhee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We’ve got to get on the same page before we can turn it.”

— Heather McGhee

2. “Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”

— Heather McGhee

3. “Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.”

— Heather McGhee

4. “Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a “Solidarity Dividend,” from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action. And.”

— Heather McGhee

5. “When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.”

— Heather McGhee

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

— Heather McGhee

7. “Inequality and climate change are the twin challenges of our time, and more democracy is the answer to both.”

— Heather McGhee

8. “I learned that although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them – they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen – segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all. For all the ways that segregation is aimed at limiting the choices of people of color, it’s white people who are ultimately isolated.”

— Heather McGhee

9. “America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.”

— Heather McGhee

10. “In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the ‘We’ in ‘We the people’ is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.”

— Heather McGhee

11. “We’ve got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We’ve tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history – both the pain and the resilience. It’s time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.”

— Heather McGhee

12. “Nonetheless, the idea that Black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hardworking taxpayers – the “makers” – has become a core part of the zero-sum story preached by wealthy political elites.”

— Heather McGhee

13. “They are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy.”

— Heather McGhee

14. “This is one of those truths that we Americans know without a doubt and yet like to deny: Who your neighbors, your co-workers, and your classmates are is one of the most powerful determinants of your path in life. And most white Americans spend their lives on a path set out for them by a centuries-old lie: that in the zero-sum racial competition, white spaces are the best spaces.”

— Heather McGhee

15. “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.”

— Heather McGhee

16. “Labor experts call this kind of stratification a tactic: create a sense of hierarchy and you motivate workers to compete with one another to please the bosses and get to the next category up, instead of fighting together to get rid of the categories and create a common, improved work environment for everyone.”

— Heather McGhee

17. “The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America. Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all.”

— Heather McGhee

18. “The profound love for America’s ideals should unite all who call it home, of every color – and yet America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.”

— Heather McGhee

19. “Fundamentally, we have to ask ourselves, how is it fair and how is it smart to price a degree out of reach for the working class just as that degree became the price of entry into the middle class? And how is it fair or smart to create a new source of debt for a generation when that debt makes it harder for us to achieve the hallmarks of middle-class security: a house, marriage, and retirement savings? There is neither fairness nor wisdom in this system, only self-sabotage.”

— Heather McGhee

20. “Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression.”

— Heather McGhee

21. “I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, because I know that decisions made the world as it is and that better decisions can change it.”

— Heather McGhee

22. “It’s often unconscious, but their perception of The Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them.”

— Heather McGhee

23. “Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic: counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.”

— Heather McGhee

24. “The unions are for putting people on equal ground. Some people see that as a threat to their society.” As Earl had said, “Even the white guys on the line, they felt they would lose some power if we had a union. The view is, white people are in charge, I’m in charge.”

— Heather McGhee

25. “The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.”

— Heather McGhee

26. “Morally defending your position in a racially unequal society requires the fierce protection of your self-image as a person who earns everything you receive.”

— Heather McGhee

27. “Public commitment to college for all was a crucial part of the white social contract for much of the twentieth century. In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.”

— Heather McGhee

28. “In many states and territories in the nineteenth century, white-skinned immigrants didn’t even need to become citizens to be granted the prized right of citizenship, the vote.”

— Heather McGhee

29. “In his words, “Herrenvolk republicanism had the advantage of reassuring whites in a society in which downward mobility was a constant fear – one might lose everything but not whiteness.”

— Heather McGhee

30. “The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor – on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.”

— Heather McGhee

31. “To this day, even though Black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.”

— Heather McGhee

32. “The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that Black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right.”

— Heather McGhee

33. “This massive public investment wasn’t considered charity; an individual state saw a return of three to four dollars back for every dollar it invested in public colleges. When the public meant “white,” public colleges thrived.”

— Heather McGhee

34. “There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes.”

— Heather McGhee

35. “He was just expressing the unspoken conventional wisdom in my field: that we’d be less successful if we explicitly called out the racial unfairness or reminded people that the United States had deliberately created a white middle class through racially restricted government investments in homeownership and infrastructure and retirement security, and that it had only recently decided that keeping up those investments would be unaffordable and unwise. What.”

— Heather McGhee

36. “I’ve found it’s easier to understand the sorry state of today’s elections if one starts by unlearning the grade school narrative of the framers’ commitment to equality and democracy and recognize that the framers left holes in the bedrock of our democracy from the outset, in order to leave room for slavery.”

— Heather McGhee

37. “Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692 – these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020; adults without children are usually ineligible.”

— Heather McGhee

38. “They have to make Americans afraid of one another. They’re exploiting fear in America to sell guns.”

— Heather McGhee

39. “The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.”

— Heather McGhee

40. “After all, arguing that Black and brown children suffered from not being with white children affirmed the reality of unequal conditions, but once the argument was divorced from the context of legal segregation, it also subtly reaffirmed the logic of white supremacy. Today, it’s that logic that endures – that white segregated schools are better and that everyone, even white children, should endeavor to be in them.”

— Heather McGhee

41. “Though people of African descent were nearly one-fifth of the population at the first Census, most founders did not intend for them to be American.”

— Heather McGhee

42. “White men are now one-third of the population but three-quarters of the gun suicide victims.”

— Heather McGhee

43. “Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher; for noncollege-educated men, 8 percent higher. If that bump sounds small, compare that to the fact that, since 1979, wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.”

— Heather McGhee

44. “Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.”

— Heather McGhee

45. “A 1669 Virginia colony law deemed that killing one’s slave could not amount to murder, because the law would assume no malice or intent to “destroy his own estate.”

— Heather McGhee

46. “Learning about racist episodes in history isn’t racist; it’s essential to erasing racism from our future.”

— Heather McGhee

47. “The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not only indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.”

— Heather McGhee

48. “Ultimately, an economy, the rules we abide by and set for what’s fair and who merits what, is an expression of our moral understanding.”

— Heather McGhee

49. “Texas politicians’ government-bashing is both ideological and strategic; they benefit politically by stopping government from having a beneficial presence in people’s lives – as white constituents’ needs mount, the claim that government is busy serving some racialized other instead of them becomes more convincing.”

— Heather McGhee