Heather McGhee

Heather Charisse McGhee grew up on Chicago's South Side and is the daughter of Gail C. Christopher and Earl J. McGhee.^[5] In seventh grade, McGhee enrolled in the Bement School as a boarding student.^[7] She graduated from Milton Academy in 1997.^[8] McGhee received a B.A. in American studies from Yale University in 2001.^[5] She was initially drawn to theater and creative writing but eventually became interested in economic policy.^[5]

McGhee attended the UC Berkeley School of Law, citing how law school could help give her the credentials to change public policy. She graduated with a J.D. in 2009.^[3][5][9]

Positions

After graduating from Yale in 2001, she taught English in Barcelona for a short time, but soon after the September 11 attacks she moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in television writing.^[10]

After about a year, she moved to New York City and began working with the non-profit think tank, Demos.^[5] In 2003, McGhee first connected with Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, on the topic of credit card debt.^[5]

She left Demos to attend law school and serve as a Deputy Policy Director for the John Edwards 2008 presidential campaign.

McGhee returned to Demos in 2009 and co-chaired a task force with Americans for Financial Reform which helped develop the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2009.^[11] McGhee became the president of Demos in 2014.^[5][9][12] In early 2018, she stepped down as president but remained a distinguished senior fellow at Demos.^[13]

In December 2019 McGhee became chair of the board of directors of Color of Change.^[14]

Appearances and talks

In 2016, McGhee's televised phone conversation with a man named Gary on C-SPAN who admitted racial prejudice ("I'm a White male, and I am prejudiced. The reason it is something I wasn't taught but it's kind of something that I learned.") was widely covered by news media organizations and viewed over a million times.^{[15][16][17][18]} A year later, Gary stated he had taken her advice to heart and his views had changed.^[19][15]

In 2019, McGhee presented a TED talk entitled "Racism has a cost for everyone."^[20]

In 2021, McGhee was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, titled "Why racism hurts everyone, regardless of race."^[21]

McGhee has appeared on episodes of Pod Save America and was a guest host for a live recording of the podcast in Boston.^[22][23]

In September 2022, McGhee gave a brief interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro to discuss the student debt crisis.^[24]

In March 2021, her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together debuted at #3 on the New York Times best seller list (for non-fiction). In it she discusses what she calls "drained-pool politics", symbolized by the wilful shutting down of public swimming pools in the South in response to desegregation mandates.^[25][26] She argues that white Americans "have been steeped in the notion of 'zero sum' — that any gains by another group must come at white people's expense."^[27] She believes "the task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I've come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air and better-funded schools."^[28]

In July 2022, McGhee debuted "The Sum of Us Podcast", which expands on her book by the same title.^[29]