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(Past Event) Keynote Address with Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Photo of Heather McGhee

Date: Thursday, June 9
Time: 10:00 a.m. (PT) / 1:00 p.m. (ET)

The Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd is delighted to invite you to a keynote address with Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. This event is made possible through generous funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?

Who Will Benefit

Administrators, policymakers

What You Will Learn

Session goals include:

  • Learning about the concepts of Zero-Sum Paradigm and the Solidarity Dividend, illustrated by key stories of race and racism in America
  • Delving into ways that participants, as state leaders, can work together through policy and funding to address structural racism

Speaker

Heather McGhee designs and promotes solutions to inequality in America and is author of the bestselling book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was longlisted for the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a Visiting Lecturer in Urban Studies at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. She has also held visiting positions at Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. She’s earned degrees from Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. She chairs Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. In addition, she sits on the boards of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the U.S. Programs and Demos of the Open Society Foundation.