Discussions series in which we explore the landscape of Economic Opportunity and the implications for individuals and families and communities all across the United States. Our deep appreciation goes to the foundation walmart, cigna and Mastercard Center for their support of opportunity in america series. Focusing on advancing strategies and ideas to help Small Businesses thrive in working people and Small Businesses are taking extraordinary challenges in many a Small Businesses in the Economic Opportunity center to recognize the ethnicity and gender to play the outside role in who has access to opportunit opportunity. And we see today black and latino the health risk are black and latino Small Businesses with ability with covid19 and to get them through. Today is but talk to explore the history of the racial divine and the consequences and how we can emerge the Current Crisis what we had accepted as normal but a healthier society and a stronger economy to the nations ideals and shared destiny. So grateful that so many of you have chosen to join us for this conversation that has included people who are different in terms of race and ethnicity and gender and race district of columbia have big cities and small towns and nonprofits and the time we are struggling it gives hope that we come together for todays conversation and just a few notes before we start on and technology everybody attending today is muted we welcome your questions please use the q a box for questions or comments there is an option to enable close caption. And we encourage you to tweet about this conversation. And email us at programs and it will be emailed a post on the website the questions that are drawing on those that you have submitted and thank you for submitting questions. And the balance of the event focuses on the audience questions thank you very much for their extraordinary help to bring these events together. They will be organizing questions and please note if there is a question that you want to see addressed. So now it is my privilege to introduce president and ceo of Aspen Institute i know todays conversation is near and dear to dans heart we appreciate you joining us today i turn it over to you. Thank you to all who made this event possible especially eduardo who wrote the great book we can do it again and talk about. This program at the Aspen Institute has been leading the charge to make sure that we as members of a society ask yourself the hard questions constantly about what it is we can do collectively to promote a free, just commend equitable society. Those are big words and that experiment is to call off those ideals and fall short in so many different ways and i say that not as the indictment but as a statement of fact concept and unconscious bias are incredibly powerful to understand the reality we are in and the way we live in todays world as a part of the countrys history from the very founding. There so much to understand and to think about if you say how much racism and other forms of prejudice defined the american experiment, how we understand our history in a way that allows us to break free from repeating some of the dynamics of the past to create a more just and inclusive and equitable less discriminatory society. Eduardo porter is one of the most Clear Thinking social analyst i have ever come across. I remember a few years ago reading a piece in the New York Times like five times over it was so rich with social theory so learned and thoughtful and hardhitting and i cant remember now that was around the challenges of addressing world poverty or the bias built into the Economic System or the challenge is to claim it can lead to social mobility or the Tech Revolution that whatever it was and every time i read his work if you like any to sit down and get very quiet and still and let me something. Thats quite a guest eduardo thank you for joining us today. And thank you dan for joining us we appreciate you taking the time and your leadership to pursue a more free and just and equitable society. Thank you so much. That was sound gray background on and eduardo just for those of you quickly who dont know edward o as a member of the Editorial Board then and born in phoenix grew up in the United States and mexico and belgium began a career in journalism as a financial reporter in the Mexican News Agency for the wall street journal report with the New York Times and with this conversation the author of this book how racial hostility destroyed our promise which you can get an a hard copy as i do or read the ebook version or listen to the audio version which i can recommend. They are all good so many options available. Thank you so much for joining us today its a pleasure to have you and to see you. So the first and obvious question for you with your significant and global career and economic journalism and business reporting how did you come to write a book . Thank you for this introduction thank you for your kind words. Thank you everybody for being here and listening. This is a wonderful opportunity to get the word out about american in place and before the amazing audience. I do hope you find my thoughts compatible. I have to stories please bear with me for a minute. The awareness of that started to take shape when i was a kid i lived in mexico i moved when i was six to be closer to my moms family that moving back to the us every summer to visit my grandparents. One of the first images that i can remember having it wasnt having a working class neighborhood and to have walltowall carpeting, airconditioned all the time, a big tv and the eight track technology most of you probably never heard of a huge refrigerator and a trailer they would take up every summer to sedona and park it overlooking the creek. They were not rich my grandfather was a retired electrician and my grandmother was a librarian. But they were retired on Social Security they lived a frugal life but it was not uncomfortable. I remember being there with them and thinking back where i lived in mexico nobody had this kind of life. I was raised in a privileged situation in a country with enormous inequity and to compare that mexican reality to my grandparents house to the electricians house in phoenix i was forced to accept the American Social context was better. Like no other country that i knew for came to know long time after, seem to have created ordinary workingclass people and then in the 19 nineties i returned to live in the United States. After college and if you other places then i moved to l. A. For a few years writing for the wall street journal. What struck me then why is how little with that childhood memories and the dismal Health Situation and they threat that social confusion and what took over in my mind is how good of the country was such a crummy deal so i came to understand my grandparents lived the exception they achieved prosperity through a narrow window of opportunity within a few decades after world war ii. I now understand that window was really narrow because it was only open for whites. So the question that pops up that my ever since then and what emerged is why did it closed so many were on the outside . Thats in a took interest in the social tieins Racial Division with political scientist and sociologist of how intense Racial Divisions are in the United States there is a bunch of names you can call it fear or bigotry or racism but all this research how the spilling stand in the way to with that empathetic thinking that underpins our richer social safety net that pulls other societies together research how Public Schools in california encouraged parents to pull their kids out and put them in private Schools Research how cities with more Diverse Communities spend less on public goods and street maintenance and research on how white protestants put less in the collection basket at church. So the interim is the vulcanized city. With that dismal and social and Health Outcomes for much of the population of the United States the thought that why he doesnt the us behave like a prosperous country that it is . And my conclusion is that Racial Divisions got in the way. That is the part of the story happened just a few years ago when donald trump decided to run for president. So his very first speech blasting americans as racist and thugs the president has worked really hard to rekindle the racial and ethnic divisions laying below her political consciousness the overt racial animus came like a slap in the face it reminded me abruptly of how racial hostility could place in the future as it forms the racial and ethnic reality. Trump portrayed himself as the voice of White America that forever has held a range of power with the drawbridge to stop the rise of that mission. And with such a law on large share of White America , i felt i just had to write this book. I had to make the case that these politics have forever damage the fabric of the nation to undermine the social contract and turning us into a failed state. So that was a long answer to your question but that is my motivation. Thank you. Here title notes racial hostility the book starts with that story against mexicans that some may call ethnicity rather than racial divide so lay out how you think of the concept of race versus ethnicity and do you see thes categories shifting are changing . Did you have an understanding or a sense to that change of dollars you worked on this . Thats an interesting question people at the Census Bureau have been grappling with forever as a little aside i remember covering the results of the 2000 census in part of that coverage i discovered they had all this trouble if they would use that ethnicity question alongside the racial question was a before or after . And how we decide to frame this and put this if it is included or not would alter the distribution of responses. So one of the conclusions is that a social and political construct its more like a product of political understandings and at the end of the bureaucratic organization. And to answer how i think ray spitz alongside ethnicity as a social and political construct they are indistinguishable. And in fact as a system of Political Organization you can say they share things with religious difference and other cultural differences the way they shape our society and politics that are used for organizational purposes to preserve the privilege of power of one group over another for example so i start off with this book with a sense i dont think there is a really relevant difference to these terms when it comes to how they have been used with society and they came out writing that book even more strongly. Especially by looking at that political narrative out my window and arguing a very specific black white racial context to now be deployed against mexican immigrants which on the census form can put whatever race they want which is hispanic or not hispanic just really a bureaucratic difference with no social reality of their own of course the most consequential Racial Division in the United States between whites and blacks. Even as i say that i feel i am being we miss for not referencing the racial violence against native americans but to be fairly honest it is an experience i did not cover in the book that i am not very well educated in but even as i say this, the black white racial dividing line is not the only one. Its hardly the only one. With privilege versus jews and southern europeans against the chinese, japanese, very definitely up to recent speeches from the current president. So these categories are not even very solid. Some italians and southern europeans were the others in the early 20th century. In the immigration act of 1925 was basically designed to stop central europeans and use. Jews but then they became richer and as our research has found the great migration of africanamericans from the south to the midwest encouraged White Americans to invite the jews and central europeans and the portuguese into the fold of whiteness. And just as a final thought that debate has missed that part of the story with a lot of complexity and its critical to acknowledge because immigrants especially poor immigrants from Central America and mexico are the most vulnerable and directly threatened by the president and his supporters. I like that how you want to bundle that has changed over time. One of your contentions in the book is the social safety net from the legacy of racial animus so can you unpack that a little bit . You spent some time in kentucky so how does that work for people to be convinced it is important for them to deny people of benefits that they dont even know or live in the county . And by so doing denying themselves that same benefit. How does that work . Suggest to come clean come i dont have any training in psychology. And i did not explore the individual psychology that leads to these outcomes or attitudes that you talk about. That is a shortcoming of my boo book. I went and looked at them and saw that they were there. But i have very little understanding of how this education that permeated with racial means and racially decoded thoughts helps to create a character that has such very deeply embedded racist biases as an adult. But the contradiction does very much come to my mind because what is true is people in harlan kentucky they are the most reliant on federal aid in the entire country. Over half of the personal income on average of people comes from federal programs. Food stamps, Social Security, medicaid. And harlan kentucky, more than 50 percent comes from the fed consistently votes for politicians that oppose Big Government and any expansion of the social safety net. I was they are onesided townhall when the governor was a tea party stalwart and was there talking about beyers in the trash with locals everybody was grunting and then started to talk about how undeserving people were taking advantage of medicaid laying on their couch to get hands out one hands out and they really came to life and the applause rippled through the hall like a crazy change of energy. And those and other similar areas are overwhelmingly white. I think harlan is 97 percent nonhispanic white. That opposition to bigger government is behind the rhetoric about not deserving others, corrupting others. So far that i heard and with that argument against the broader social safety net. And not just appalachia these means and thoughts pop up in other places and have never seen a person of color or a hispanic or immigrant. There is another place i write about in fremont nebraska. There really are no immigrants in fremont nebraska. But in 2010 and 2014, the people voted in referendum for the toughest municipal ordinance against Illegal Immigrants in the United States. It barred employers from hiring Illegal Immigrants its already a federal law. And then they had an additional provision barring landlords from taking Illegal Immigrants as tenants. This is a place there are no immigrants. But still this sense of threat from not abstraction was very we all. So to connect that to your question better, maybe the thought is and now im thinking how a loss of the vote in the 2016 election for President Trump was in counties where there were not a lot of people of color or immigrants so it is a political argument how the immigrants were bad for us. And in places that did not experience immigrants in a daytoday life. Immigrants and people of color are more the abstraction. And how it is the social safety net they are detached theres a lot of latinos and africanamericans and we can see they are lazy and living off of handouts the elite is mediated to the political system and the less you know about the real lives of people , people of color and immigrants, the easier it is for you to assume these attitudes that they are leeches milking the federal government. So with that Labor Movement he spent some time writing about it and obviously to be successful as a union works together in solidarity but yet the issues of racial animus it is a complicated history but also obviously not strong in the moment but there was a resurgence of labor activism and in alternative forms to see those more Diverse Organization organizations. How do you see the role of worker organizing and that Diverse Workforce and Going Forward and do you see any models that are working well . Taking a step back, yes. I write about the Labor Movement just to underscore how racism made it tough for that institution to help improve the working conditions of american men and women as i noted in the history of organized labor divisions of race and racism made it possible to create across racial ethnic Labor Movement in my view would have been much stronger and more powerful so racism got in the way thats one particular instance of how ice racism were being our institution in the way to und