I want to note our deep appreciation to the ford foundation, prudential financial, walmart, the Cigna Foundation and the Mastercard Center for growth for the support of opportunity in america series. At the Economic Opportunities program we focus on advancing strategies, policies and ideas to help working people and Small Businesses thrive. Working people and Small Businesses are facing extraordinary challenges today with over 26 million recently applied for Unemployment Benefits and millions of Small Businesses at risk of closing for good. At the Economic Program we recognize for too long, race, ethnicity, gender and race have played out side role in who has access to opportunity and to a shutout. We see today black and latino workers being most affected by unemployment, and by the health risks that come with being classified as an essential worker. We see black and latino owned Small Businesses facing much greater vulnerability to the economic devastation of covid19 and more challenges accessing funding to get them through. In todays book talk will explore some of history and dimensions of americas racial divide, how were seeing the consequences of our exclusionary choices play out now, and how we can perhaps emerge from the Current Crisis not to return to what for far too long we accepted as normal, but to a healthier society and a stronger economy and to a fuller expression of our nations ideals of equal opportunity and shared destiny. I am so grateful that some of you have chosen to join us for this conversation. From over 45 states and the district of columbia, from big cities and small towns, from nonprofit business, research institution, government agencies, educational institutions, philanthropy and more. At a time of her struggle with so many divides in our society, it gives me hope all of you chose to come together for todays conversation. And just a few notes before we start todays conversation on our technology. Everybody attending today is muted but we welcome your questions. Please use the q a box on the bottom of the zoom window for questions or comments. Theres an option to enable closed caption so if youd like to avail yourself of that please do so. We encourage you to tweet at this conversation. Our hashtag is hot opportunity. If you have any technical issues during this webinar you can chat with my colleagues or email us. This webinar is being recorded and will be shared via email and posted on our website. So for todays sessions will begin with opening remarks Aspen Institute president ceo Daniel Porterfield and i will post them questions to eduardo about his book. Some my questions are drawing on the questions many of you submitted. Thanks very much for samiti questions during the registration. The balance of event will focus on the audience questions, in my colleagues behind the scenes, i want to thank them very much for their extraordinary help in bringing these events together. Its a lot of work and we have a great team here. They will be organizing questions and submitting them along to me please note you can also upload questions, so if theres a question you take to want see addressed you can give it an up vote. Now is my wonderful privilege to introduce Daniel Porterfield, president and ceo of the Aspen Institute, at another todays conversation conversation is near and dear to his heart, so dan, we really appreciate you joining us today, and i turn it over to you. Thank you, marine. Thank you to all that make this event possible, especially Eduardo Porter about the great book, that we can dig in and talk about him. The Economic Opportunities program at the Aspen Institute has been leading the charge to make sure that we as members of the society ask ourselves hard questions, constantly about what is it that we can do collectively to promote a free, just, and equitable society. Those are big words, and the history of the american experiment has been to call off those ideals and then honestly to fall short of them in so many different ways. I say that not as an indictment i think but as a statement of fact. Concepts like structural racism, unconscious bias, White Privilege are incredibly powerful for understanding the reality that we are in and the way we live in todays world. Its been a part of this countrys history from its very founding. Theres so much to understand about this and theres so much to think about, then when you say given how much racism and other forms of prejudice have define the american experiment, how we understand our history in a way that could allow us to break free from repeating some of the dynamics of the past, in order to create a more just, a more inclusive, and more equitable, and less discriminatory society. And i think Eduardo Porter is one of the most Clear Thinking social analysts ive ever come across. I remember a few his ago reading one of his pieces in the New York Times and reading it like five times over, it was so rich with Economic Analysis and social theory to learn it as a thoughtful and so hardhitting. I cant remember now if it was around the challenges of addressing world poverty for the biases built into the Economic System or the challenges in claiming education can genuinely to social mobility the way it is practiced in this country, or something about the tech revolution. But whatever it was, because now ive Read Everything since it and every, read his work i feel like i need to sit down and get very quiet and very still and let myself think. Thats quite a gift, and water. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, thank you, dan, for joining us today and we really appreciate you taking the time and your leadership in challenging all of the Aspen Institute to pursue a more free and just an acquittal society so thank you so much. And now that was a great bit of background on eduardo. Mine was a bit more straightforward. Just for those of you quickly dont know eduardo, and economic report of the New York Times brings a member of the Editorial Board from 20072012, and economic columnist from 200820122018. He was born in phoenix, grew up in the United States, texaco and belgium. He began his career in journalism as a financial reporter for a Mexican News Agency in mexico city and also worked for america, and latin America Business magazine and for the wall street journal before joining the New York Times. Most important for the purpose of this conversation, Eduardo Porter is the author of this book, if you can see it, american poison how racial hostility destroyed our promise which you can get as hard copy as i did obviously or you can read the ebook version or you can listen to the audio version which also did and can recommend. I can recommend them all. They are all good. So many options available for you. Eduardo, thank you so much for joining us today. Its really a pleasure to have you and to see you. So the First Encounter obvious question for you is, for you what sort of your significant and global career and economic journalism and business reporting, how did you come to write a book about the role of racial hostility in america . Thank you for this introduction. Thank you very much, dan, for your kind words. Thank you, everybody for being here and listening. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to get the word out about American American poison before this amazing audience. I do hope that you find thoughts compelling. So i have two stories to answer your question. One is old and what is relatively new. So please bear with me for a minute. My awareness of the American Social contract started taking shape, hazy and articulate when i was a kid. I lived in mexico. I moved to mexico when i was six, to be close to my moms family. Taking back to the u. S. Pretty much every summer to phoenix to visit my grandparents who lived there. One of my first images of the United States at least one of the first images i can remember having was their house. It was not really fancy. It was in a workingclass neighborhood, hurting far from the money, but it had this walltowall carpeting. It was airconditioned all the time, had this the tv and a cassette tape and eight track, technology that most of you probably have never heard of, had a huge refrigerator and had a pickup truck at a pontiac at a trailer which they would take up every summer to sedona and park it, this trailer park overlooking the oak creek. They were not rich. My grandfather was a retired electrician who would move from chicago to phoenix to work and my grandmother was librarian, so that stories to tell about soup kitchens during the great depression. But they were retired on Social Security and the lives of frugal life but it was really not an uncomfortable one. And i remember being there with them and thinking that i lived in mexico, electricians didnt get anywhere like this kind of life. I was raised in a privileged situation but in a country with enormous inequity. And comparing that max and reality to my grandparents house, the electricians house in phoenix, i kind of was forced to accept that the American Social context was better. Like no other country i knew an action no other country i came to know for a long time after that, it seemed to have created, succeeded in offering ordinary workingclass people a true shot at prosperity. And then in the 1990s at the end of the 1990s i returned to returned to live in the United States. After college and having lived in a few other places. When i got here i would first in new york and then i moved to l. A. For a few years, writing for the wall street journal about latinos in the United States. And what struck me then was how Little America resembled these childhood memories i had. As a reporter poring through the poverty stats and the numbers on showing americas really dismal health situation, statistics about kind of like really threadbare social cohesion. The idea that took over in my mind was how could a country this rich provide such a crummy deal to so many of its people, you know . Psyching to kind of understand my grandparents really live an exception. It was not the norm. They achieved their prosperity through a really narrow window of opportunity within a few decades after world war ii. I also now understand that that window was really narrow because it was really only open for whites. And the question that popped up from my mind at the time and that ive been chewing on since ever since then from which this book ultimately emerged is why did this window close when so Many Americans were still on the outside . It was around then i took interest in lot a lot of the sl tieins about Racial Divisions, theres been a lot of research by economist, a sociologist, clinical scientist, psychologists about ten of like how intense Racial Divisions are in the United States. You can call them, theres a bunch of names for the period you can call it fear or bigotry, racism, but there was all this research about how these feelings stand in the way of developing the kind of empathetic thinking that underpins this sort of richer social safety net that helped pull of the societies together. There was research about how immigrant gets entering Public Schools in california encouraged American Parents to pull the kids out and put them in private schools instead. Theres research about how cities with more Diverse Communities spend less on public goods like trash collection and street maintenance. Theres research on how white product put protestants but less in the collection basket at church. My aha moment, my kind of epiphany was in l. A. Which was an enormously vulcanized city. Racial divisions got in the way of empathy. Thats the old, long admittedly part of the story. The new side of the story and i promise its shorter happened just a few years ago when Donald Trumpdecided to run for president. From his very first speech where he blasted mexicans as racists and thugs screaming illegally over the border the president has worked really hard to rekindle racial and ethnic divisions that label the surface of ourpolitical consciousness. Is over racial appeal or racial animus came to me like a slap in the face. It reminded me abruptly of how racial hostility could further poison our future as a graphic change transforms are racial in reality. In those speeches from portrayed himself as thevoice of White America. That america which hasforever held the reins of power , building walls and pulling up the drawbridge to stop a multiethnic nation and witnessing such a large share of White America circling their wagons to protect their historicalprivilege , i had to read this book. I just had to make the case that these politics have forever damaged the fabric of the nation. They are undermining our social contract and they are turning us into afailed state. So i guess that was a bit of a long answer to your question but those are my motivations. Thank you. So i just want to do a little on terms. Your toilet title notes, the book starts with that story of backlashagainst immigrants, against mexicans. With some call the city divide rather than racial divide so can you lay out a little bit about how you think about the concept of grace versus the concept of atomicity and ucd categories shifting or changing in some way and im also curious , how did you work on the book, did your understanding our sense of what race needs, hasnt changed at all as you are working on this . Thats an interesting question maureen and is a question that people at the Census Bureau have been grappling with forever. As a little aside i remember covering the results of the 2000 census thats part of that coverage i discovered that they had had all this trouble about whether they were going to use an ethnicity question alongside the racial question, were they going to go before the racial question or after the racial question and how they decided to frame this, where they decided to put it when they decided to include it or not was going to alter the distribution of responses and so what am one of the conclusions i draw from this is that race is really kind of like a social and political construct. Its not like a biological truth. Its more like a product of our political understandings, social relations and the end of our bureaucratic organizations. And just answer how i think race fits alongside ethnicity , in a way i think as a social and political construct and as a tribal dividing line, there kind of indistinguishable. They are and in fact, as a system of political organization, you can say that they also share things with religious difference and other cultural differences or differences in language. I think that the way they shape our society and the way they shape our politics are by bundles of evidence. And that are used for organizational purposes to preserve the power and privilege ofone group versus another for example. And so i started off even started off with this sense that i dont think that there is a really relevant difference between these two terms when it comes to how they then use to organize American Society and i came out of writing that book even believing that even more strongly. And especially by life looking at the political reality out my window and argument that have been used in a specific racial blackandwhite racial concept, we are now being deployed against mexican immigrants which on the census form can put whatever race they want and they have their own little ethnic box which is hispanic or nonhispanic, these things were bureaucratic differences and did not really have any specific social or political reality of theirown. In the course, the most consequential Racial Division in the history of the United States is that between whites andblacks. Even as im saying that i feel that im being remiss for not referencing the history of racial violence against native americans but to be fairly honest, very honest, it is anexperience i did not cover in the book. It is an experience i have not very well educated in but just to throw that out there. And even as i say this i also think the blackandwhite racial dividing line is not the only one area its hardly the only one. Racial otherness has been applied by whites to assert their privilege versus choosing as central and southern europeans in the 20th century, against the chinese and japanese and very definitely up to very recent speeches from our current president against mexican and Central American immigrants. And the beauty of it all is these categories are not very solid in time or place. The shift so its italians and southern europeans were the racial others in the american northeast of the early 20th century and in fact if you think of the immigration act of 1925