America we should all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy. And something that weve been thinking a lot about lately is actually the root of our name. Demos is the greek word for the people which is the root word of democracy. And right now in this country it feels like figuring out who exactly belongs in our demos and the people of our nation is this nations highest calling. Brian i woke up on december the 10th, 2016, picked up the New York Times, in their opinion section saw the headline, im prejudiced, he said, then we kept talking. And i want to show you the video because it started here at cspan some time before that and then ask you to explain the whole thing. Yes. Good morning. I was hoping that your guest can help me change my mind about some things. Im a white male and i am prejudiced. And the reason it is is something i wasnt taught but its kind of something that i learned. When i open up the papers, i get very discouraged at what young black males are doing to each other and the crime rate. And i understand that they live in an environment with a lot of drugs, you have to get money for drugs and this is a deep issue that goes beyond that. But when i have these different fears and i dont want my fears to come true so i try to avoid that and i and i come off as being prejudiced but i just have fears. I dont like to be forced to like people. I like to be led to like people through example. And what can i do to change to a be better american . Heather mcghee . Heather thank you so much for being honest and for opening up this conversation because its simply one of the most important ones we have to have in this country. Brian you said more, but ill let you tell us what happened after that. Heather that was a remarkable moment. I didnt really realize until i kind of stepped off the set because there were more calls after that we just had to keep rolling how powerful it was. There was something in his voice that touched me, i mean you can hear it. Its so authentic as he searches for the words to Say Something to a National Audience that most of us wont admit in our homes, im prejudiced. And the way he ended his question, saying, what can i do to change and be a better american . Just reached right in and grabbed my heart. I had to kind of just pause and it felt like the set sort of fell away and i was trying to communicate with this person who really reached a hand out to me. I mean, yes, he said things that as the sister of a black man and a daughter of a black man were painful to hear and i knew there was many more layers of stereotype against black men underneath even just what he said. But at the same time i know that were all swimming in a sea of racist stereotypes and that the media overrepresents black crime and that its become the sort of aim of a lot of politicians actually to make people distrust one another and particularly distrust people of color. So could i really blame him for absorbing that, particularly when he was asking for a way to change . I kind of just had to thank him. Brian what happened next . Heather so i work in law and public policy. You know, i before that call id been talking about Student Loans and economic inequality and trade policy. And, yes, id been talking a little bit about Race Relations and i do but as an instrument to talking about public policy. But i could tell that gary from North Carolina as i knew him then really wanted kind of really simple answers to his questions about kind of how he could sort of integrate his life. So off the top of my head i said get to know black families and if youre a religious person, join an interracial church, right, the idea of sort of joining in with people of different races with a higher purpose, with some kind of higher common purpose. I did tell him to turn off the nightly news because we know that theres a really warped kind of vision of who commits crimes in this country that comes in many media markets. And i asked him to read about black history. I got a sense that who he was really talking about was black people. I could have, of course, talked about stereotypes against immigrants and muslims, but it felt like with his question he was really asking me as a black woman on his television to tell him sort of how to overcome his prejudice against black people. Brian and then what . Heather and then i kept going with the program. It was a great program. And i walked off the set and i had a text message from my colleague, gwen, in my Communications Office and she had watched it. She was there with another one of my colleagues. Shes a young white woman from the south. Hes a young africanamerican man from the south as well. And they had sort of looked at each other with tears in their eyes and they said something really special just happened. And a few days later they put it on facebook. And it was on the weekend, it was on saturday. They put it on facebook, just a clip of garys question and then my full answer and by monday it had about a million views and that had never happened to demos before. And a bunch of different other sites and video kind of aggregators picked it up and put different headings on it and it became a sort of racist cspan caller asks this black woman a question and heres her response. And it really went viral, i mean you had comedians and sort of public figures talking about it. You know, demos is an organization that works in public policy. The people who follow us online are wonks and nerds, theyre people who really care about the specific issues we work on like debtfree college or raising the minimum wage or democracy reform. But this was getting out there, you know. My like sisterinlaws hairdresser said, i saw this, you know. It was starting to really break out of the bubble. And i think part of the reason for that is you have to remember this was august wed had this sort of racially charged summer with Donald Trumps campaign with black lives matter and the Police Shootings and then the tragic events all in baton rouge and dallas. I mean it was really a time when people felt like all they were seeing on tv about race was bad news. And here was first a white man admitting that he was prejudiced which for people of color was we kind of just all said, finally. I mean you had donald trump saying that mexican immigrants are rapists and then saying i dont have a prejudiced bone in my body. And here was the sort of everyday guy being willing to have the courage and say, yes, i have this prejudices. Brian now, we found this video on your website and i want to run a little bit of it and tell us how this happened. Heather i went down to North Carolina and i met with gary and we furthered that conversation about race and asked each other hard questions and it was amazing. I said this is somebody i could talk to again and here we are, were talking again. When you get to know people, theyre usually their fears are unjustified. Dont let it go by. If you got eight Million People responding positively to my insecurities, they must be having the same things. Its just something that is we dont practice and taking that first step is the hardest thing. Brian how did you find gary . Heather no, gary found me. So gary so as i now know, gary, a few days later was watching tv. Hes watching cnn. I went on Cnn Headline News and had a little interview about the fact that this clip had gone viral and at this point had reached 8 million views. And so he saw, he heard my voice again, hed never have seen or heard me before the cspan show. So he heard my voice again and he sort of ran into the living room and saw me talking about the clip and then at the bottom it said my twitter handle. So then gary went to his computer and got on twitter for the first time in his life. His first tweet said, how does this thing work . And he found me he entered in my twitter handle and he said im gary from North Carolina. Immediately i wanted to know i mean the way those shows work, i gave my answer, then we went on to a next another call. And so i didnt know how it landed with him, i didnt know if he brushed it off. I didnt know anything about who he was and there was really sort of no way to know. So he found me. He said, im gary from North Carolina. And then i sent him a direct private message and i said, gary, im really glad you got in touch. Id love to talk to you about what you thought about my answer to your question. So i gave him my phone number and a few days later i got a phone call. And he was sitting at a burger joint having lunch break and he decided to call me. He was very nervous. I was very nervous. But he said what you said changed my life and to which i was shocked. I mean i thought, sure, when asked a pretty hard question off the top of my head i gave some decent answers, but i didnt think that it was going to be something that he would take so seriously. And he explained to me that hes now on a path he wanted to get right about this before he died. He said he was inspired by the fact that newspapers across the country and obviously it went viral on social media but also it was picked up in the normal press and he was inspired by that. He said there are probably a lot of other people like me out there who have these fears and prejudices and thats and are worried about what is going to happen to them if they admit it, but also know that they can t actually change unless they admit it. Brian when did you go down there and why . Heather so we had a couple of phone conversation. The first one was so good. He thanked me. I thanked him for his courage. He said some version of actually what he said in that video. He said i dont know what you want to do with this, but this seems like a big thing. And if youre willing to keep talking about this, he said, im willing to talk with you about it, you know, sort of use me to keep this conversation going because the country needs it. And so i kind of took that to heart. I didnt i didnt know exactly what would come of it. But i had a and then i got married actually and then and then my life kind of went i went away from my work for a while and i got married. I talked to gary once in a while when i was getting ready for my wedding. He told me about the books he was reading. I gave him some ideas. He told me a funny story about having gone to the bookstore to get a bunch of africanamerican studies books. He sent me a little video of himself and then the sort of heading for the africanamerican studies section of the bookstore to tell me he was in the bookstore. And then i got an invitation to go speak at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. And so my new husband and i said, well, lets call gary and see if we could drive by and meet with him and so we did that. And gary and i, i think, were both very nervous to meet each other. We had no idea what would happen. My husband is a documentary filmmaker and so i said, gary, i think we should probably record us meeting. And he said, yes, absolutely. So that footage you saw is from my husband. And it was a really beautiful conversation, the first one in person that really kind of exceeded my expectation. Brian where is that . Heather so that he lives outside of ashville, North Carolina so he wanted he wanted us to meet in ashville. So we met its actually in sort of a park outside of a hotel in downtown ashville, one of the highest points. It was a beautiful fall day, the changing leaves. It was about a week before the election. And we didnt talk about the election much. We didnt talk about politics. He told me about his life we just got to know each other, where hes from, the experiences hes had in life. Brian im going to hold you there for a second. How old is the man . Heather i think hes mid 50s. Brian where is he from . Heather he was born in connecticut actually newhaven, connecticut. Connecticut actually newhaven, connecticut. And he but he was in the in the navy and had a heart condition and went down to ashville in his early 20s for a heart surgery at the va down there. And had in his life in connecticut this is one of those sort of beautiful things that happens in american peoples stories where really the same things that he was afraid of from the sort of media stereotypes about africanamericans had been part of his experiences growing up in connecticut with gangs and drug addiction. And he when he got his heart surgery he stayed in ashville and kind of fell in love with it down there in the sort of slow pace of life and has been living there since then. He was an hvac electrician operator and now i think hes mostly retired. Host has he been married . Heather no. Host so he has no children. And how often in your life have you heard you cant quantify, but how often have you heard the kind of things that he was saying about what he as a white man thought about black people . Heather i mean it is a pretty innumerable account. It feels like in terms of someone saying that to me personally probably not so many times. I, in my career, really started out as an Economic Policy person and would go across the country in my role at demos and in other in other jobs talking to groups of people about the economy. And oftentimes just in Church Basements or grange halls, union halls talking about sort of what had happened in our economy over the past couple generations so that working people are finding it so hard to get ahead. And i could tell that story without talking about race at all, i could tell talk about globalization and technological change, about Corporate Power in washington and trade rules and tax rules and workers rights. But i felt that if i didnt mention race i was not telling the whole story. Some piece of the puzzle was really missing about how it was that my grandfathers generation, you could have just had a kind of working class job, didnt have to go to college and you had a great job with benefits, retirement security. And Public Schools were wellfunded, you go to college at free and that something changed in the late 1970s. And, yes, there are lots of reasons for why that changed, but something also shifted in our politics to where the very idea of a government that invest in its people and supports working class folks and supports investments and mobility has become hard and, in fact, racialized so that the sort of conservative argument against government was very much kind of carried on these stereotypes of undeserving people of color who would actually benefit from government. And so it felt to me like i was getting drawn into more and more conversations about race even when i was supposed to be talking to a white laid off steel worker about the economy. And i sort of learned a way to talk about race with white people that allowed them to see their selfinterest in it, their story in it. Host go back in your own life and tell us where you were born. Heather sure. I was born in chicago, born and raised on the south side of chicago. Host parents did what . Heather my mother was at the time that i was born, she was a Holistic Health practitioner on the south side of chicago and then actually ended up moving into working into more social policy so i kind of come by rightly. My father was an artist and photographer and a graphic designer. Host were they together . Heather they were together. They got divorced when i was young, but i lived between both of them, had a great, great, Great Community that i grew up in, the south side of chicago, sort of the Michelle Obama south side now that people know it that way, really thick black community. My grandparents on both sides have come up from the south and worked in the Public Sector as a cop and as social worker and it was really great way to grow up. Host how many white people were in your high school . Heather that is a great question. So i actually grew up in mostly all black schools until i went away to boarding school. And this was a decision my mom made when i was in seventh grade, which is pretty early. So i went from growing up in chicago to virtually all white girl in new england school. Host what school . Heather its called bement. Its a very small school in western massachusetts and i was one of i think two black children in the whole school. And that was a pretty, pretty phenomenal adjustment. I was young as 11. I was i was young for eighth and for seventh grade, but in some ways i think being that young kind of helped. It helped me still be a child and had a sense of adventure about this incredible cultural shift that i had just experienced. And so in my high school that i went on to it was a diverse but very elite prep school. And most of the kids of color would want to came in on scholarships. Host where was that . Heather that was Milton Academy outside of boston, massachusetts. Host and how were you treated when you were 11 years old by the white girls . Heather yes, it was hard. I mean we were kids so in some ways we were just young enough to have a little bit of that sort of childhood innocence and some of the kind of harsher kind of status concerns that come in high school, we were before that. I was 11 years old. But there were a lot of moments where they just didnt understand kind of some of the basic things about being black and young like i went from living with my family to living with all white people, with all white dorm parents and fellow students. And so Little Things about just the way ive grown up that was different in the way they grow up came about. But i developed wonderful friends, wonderful friends. I flourished in the school. It was also going from a big Public School to a tiny school where you sat around in a kind of library room with five teachers and a book. I mean it was in many i mean, sorry, five students and a book and a teacher. And it was in many ways a very i was very fortunate. Host were your parents wealthy . Heather no, but they were able to use Financial Aid and it was a big it was a big leap that my parents may had to say. I wasnt getting the challenge i needed in Public School and host one of the things that people noticed when you answered gary in the call and show is there was a nod and ounce of anger in your voice. So when did you learn how