Paradigm Shift (with Isabel Wilkerson, Reshma Saujani & Malcolm Kenyatta)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Hillary Clinton, and this is You and Me Both.
You know, I think it's safe to say that this
last year has certainly turned our lives upside down, and
along the way, a lot of people have found themselves
thinking about our society, our economy, our democracy, our world

(00:24):
in new ways. In other words, we've been experiencing a
paradigm shift. And today I'm talking to three people who
are actually in the business of helping to bring about
new ways of thinking. We'll hear from Reschmasa Johnny, who
created an incredible organization called Girls Who Code, and she's

(00:47):
working hard now to change the way our country thinks
about and values women's work. I'll also be talking to
Pennsylvania State Representative and US Senate candidate Malcolm Kenyada, who
is part of a generation of young people changing the
face of our politics. But first, I'm talking to Politzer

(01:10):
Prize winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. I first came across Isabel
Wilkerson when she published her bestseller, which won the Pulitzer Prize,
called The Warmth of other Sons, which chronicled the great
migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South.

(01:33):
Last summer, Isabel published another groundbreaking historic book, this one
called Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents. In Cast, she
argues that America is divided up into a rigid hierarchy.
There's a dominant cast, a subordinate cast, and systems that

(01:55):
keep them separate and unequal. Race, writes, is the visible
agent of the unseen force of Cast. It's a profound
insight and like so many other readers, I could not
put her book down. So I was delighted to welcome

(02:17):
Isabel to the podcast. This book Cast is such an
important effort to help us all better understand how we
ended up where we are. And you know, the word
cast is not one that historically has been used in
reference to America. Yes, you're absolutely right. And one of

(02:40):
the things I would say is that when you are
seeking to inspire a paradigm shift and how we think
about ourselves, and sometimes it requires new language to be
able to see beneath what we thought we knew about ourselves,
and the word cast sort of forces us to think differently,
just because that's something that we think of for other
kind treats. That's something we applied to India. Maybe feudal Europe.

(03:03):
How would that apply to us? You know, I first
came to the term when I was doing research for
the Warmth of other Sons, in which I was writing
about the experiences of people who had fled the gym
Pro South and trying to describe what that world was like.
What was it that would propel people, six million people,
the largest internal migration in our country's history, to flee

(03:25):
all that they known and to seek refuge in the
rest of the country. And it ended up being that
there were people who anthropologists who went to the gym
Pro South during the depth of that era, and they
did field work and they were they emerged from their
work using the term cast. And so that's how I
came to use the word cast. But cast essentially is,
you know, an artificial, arbitrary graded ranking of human value

(03:47):
in a society. And I want you to explain to
our listeners why you choose not to talk about racism
and instead focus our attention and your argument and un
cast because you write, race in the United States is
the visible agent of the unseen force of cast. Cast

(04:13):
is the bones, race is the skin, right, And well,
the reason is because when we look at it from
a perspective of cast, and we look at it. You know,
I identified eight pillars of cast, eight characteristics that would
be present in any cast hierarchy, and it turns out

(04:33):
that every single one of those is evidenced in our society,
every single one. You know, starting with the laws of
nature or divine will, the presumptions that a group of
people is, by divine order to be assigned at the
very top, and then there are those who are consigned
to the very bottom. Often scriptures used to support that.

(04:54):
History shows that going all the way back to Noah
and his sons, with the assumptions about it happened to
Ham compared to his brothers, was deeply and very common
presumed justification for slavery in early in our country's history,
and then going towards pollution versus purity, the idea that

(05:15):
there was one group that was to be protected at
all costs from the potential pollution that could accrue from
exposure to interaction with those who were deemed beneath them.
You know, only until the nineteen sixties the Civil rights legislation,
African Americans could not swim in the same waters as
white people. There were strict laws on who could marry whom,

(05:37):
which is a term known as endogamy. And we as
a country had laws that prohibited people from marrying across
you know, these divided lines has created lines for most
of our country. System didn't end until seven, of course,
with the loving case. So I described these things as
a reminder to ourselves to see beneath what we have

(05:58):
grown accustomed to work customed to the language of race,
which is merely one of the many metrics that could
be used to divide any group of people. And we
know that in other societies that have deep hierarchies, such
as ours, they might use a different metrics. They might
use religion, they might use ethnicity, they might use language,
they might use any number of things. This is a reminder.

(06:21):
This allows us to see what is underlying the divisions
that we are accustomed to identifying among ourselves, and to
see that there are points of intersection that we can
learn from. So for a lot of people, this is
a new way of talking about American society. And I'd
be interested in what kind of responses you've gotten. Well,

(06:44):
you know it is it is unaccustomed language. So this
is of course not to diminish the impact unroll that
race has become in our society. You know, race, of
course is a social construct, but racism is real underneath.
That is the underlying purpose for why this metric was

(07:04):
used at all. And the metric was used because there
needed to be a way, they felt, the colonists felt
there needed to be way to maintain both the power
of those at the top and then to make sure
that things get done in the society that people might
not otherwise want to do. So. Yes, there are people
who have been awakened by this, you know, have I

(07:25):
hear from people all the time who say, once you
become aware of it, you can't stop thinking about it.
Once you see it, then you start seeing it everywhere
you turn. You know, I have lots of metaphors in
the book, and one of them has to do with
the house. I mean, we are the inheritors of an
old house. And when you have an old house, you
never say, well, I've I've got a new furnace, so

(07:46):
I'm all done. I don't have to do anything else
to the house. The houses done, I don't have to
think about it again. With an old house, you know,
the work is never done. There's always something that needs
to be addressed. You don't expect it to be done,
and you you often you don't want to go in
the basement after a reign. But you know that if
you don't go into the basement to check out what
has happened, the inaction is at your own peril. You know,

(08:08):
ignorance is no protection against the consequences of inaction. So
I've found that people you know, they you know, are
marking up the book, they should put pictures of the
of the book up there. They I mean, I'm amazed
that in the era of COVID, it's been its own
kind of solace and inspiration or insight to people who
at a time when people are looking for ways to

(08:31):
understand how in the world did we get here? And
I should also say that, you know, this is an
era that we're in in which so many people have said,
you know, I don't recognize my country. This is not
this is not the country that I know, or um,
this is not what America stands for. And whenever I
hear that, I, you know, say to myself, and they're

(08:52):
far too many people don't really know our country's true history.
And you know how people struggle with this if they're
at all conscious, you know, if they have any amount
of self awareness. Because one of the common refrains, and
you take this on in the book, and I'm very
happy you do, is people say, well, look, I wasn't
here four hundred years ago three d two hundred, a

(09:12):
hundred years ago. My people came from filling the blank
wherever people came from. I didn't have anything to do
with this. You can't hold me responsible. Well, that's one
of the reasons why I used the house metaphor, because
you know, when you take possession of an old house,
you did not build that house, and no one says
that you built the house. However, you are now the

(09:34):
current occupants of that house. Anything good or bad that's
going on with it is your responsibility. It doesn't matter
so much how we got there when it comes to
the condition that we find ourselves in. It's not this
is really not about a portioning blame, because obviously these
are we're going back many many centuries. We're not talking about,

(09:54):
you know, the the guilt that someone should feel because
of something that happened long ago. We're talking about taking
responsibility for and being accountable for that which you are
doing now. Being responsible for taking seriously um what one
can do now now that you are in possession of
this old house. I would also say that one reason

(10:16):
that the cast can, I think be so helpful for
us is because it focuses us on the structure of
a thing as opposed to the personal. It focuses us
on the infrastructure of the hierarchy that we have inherited.
You're born to it. You did not ask to be
born to the group that is dominant in this country.

(10:37):
You did not ask to be going to born to
the groups that maybe in the middle, you didn't ask for.
This is what we've all inherit. Then the question that
comes what does that mean? And that has created unearned
benefits to people without having done anything. For example, when
we look at housing, any person who was born to
what has been historical dominant casts in our country, if

(11:00):
they had parents, grandparents, and great grandparents who owned property
before nineteen, then they were the beneficiaries, through no action
on their own, of a system that legally excluded people
who were born to what I call the subordinated group.

(11:20):
It wasn't about hating or not liking a certain people.
It was the structure that we inherited, and this is
to awaken people to the structure that we've inherited so
that we can recognize how we got to where we are.
That it's not personal. It has to do with the
infrastructure that we were born to. We're taking a quick break.

(11:42):
Stay with us. As you point out, uprooting the cast
system in hearts and habits can be even and more
complicated than removing it from our laws. So how do

(12:04):
we go about challenging these deep seated beliefs, Well, that
is a really big question. And you know, as I
approached this book, I approached as a building inspector. Would
you know, this is the old This is the old
house that we are now currently in possession of all
of us, And this is the report on the health

(12:26):
and condition of this old house that we're in. The
building inspector is not the one that makes the repairs.
They are the ones that issue the report. This is
not a ten point plan, it's not a how to.
Book is shining a light on what we otherwise could
not see in hopes that those who know these systems
best can begin to do the work of what is

(12:48):
necessary to overhaul those parts of our society and overhaul
is what is needed in so many parts of our society,
and criminal justice and mass incarceration, education of course, so
many elements. I mean, we this our era has reminded
us of the need to do this tremendous inspection so

(13:09):
that we can get to have a chance at truly
getting beneath what we have inherited. But I also like
to think of this as a way of recognizing maybe
the most important thing of all, you know, to begin with,
is to at least know the history. I mean, you
cannot fix what you don't know. So I would say
my first wish would be for people to learn the history.

(13:31):
You know. One of the countries, one of the societies
that I looked at with this book was Germany. What
had that country done um in the intervening years after
the war? And it turns out that they have spent
a tremendous amount of energy to educate the population. You know,
school children begin learning about the history from as early

(13:52):
as they can begin to comprehend it. There's a massive,
massive structure in the middle of Berlin, a major world city.
It takes up several of all fields of space. It
is the memorial to those who Paris in the Holocaust,
and you know it's there, but it has no signage
because the people get they know the history, they learned

(14:12):
the history. And I think that that's why I would
suggest that that would be the first place to start,
like actually read the instruction manual for whatever it is,
you just have taken possession of That's what history is.
As the owner of an old house, I truly relate
to that metaphor. But when you write about Nazi Germany,

(14:33):
I think it's shocking to most American readers that you
go into the history, which very tragically points out how
those around Hitler looked to Jim Crow America for the
kinds of laws that were used to enforce cast distinctions

(14:55):
in every aspect of life. It is just it's shocking
that German eugenicists were in dialogue, constant dialogue with American
eugenicis and the years leading up to the Third Roich
and it's just absolutely stunned to learn that. And then
it turned out that American eugenesis were writing these books
that were huge bestsellers in Nazi Germany, and we're so

(15:17):
popular with the Nazis that they incorporated the books written
by American eugenicists into their own curriculum for their children.
And then, of course the Nazis did not need anyone
to teach them how to hate at all. They did
not need that. But they did send researchers to the
United States to study how America have the United States
had managed to subjugate African Americans. They looked at those

(15:40):
anti missaggenation laws and I mentioned earlier, Uh, they look
at the ways that the United States had managed to
define who was white, and who was black, and who
was Chinese. They were fascinated with the fractions that were
assigned to an individual to determine what their quote unquote
race was, and they studied that as they were formulating

(16:03):
what would ultimately become the Nuremberg Loss. I imagine you
had some dark moments when you were writing this book,
because it's so powerful to come to grips with what
led to this system that we are living in. But
at the end of your book, to me anyway, you

(16:24):
sound a very hopeful note and I just wanted to
read a little bit of truly the very end of
your book is about because I found myself tearing up.
You know, you read this book and it's hard going.
I mean there were times when I had to put
it down, you know, take a deep breath or two,

(16:44):
and then pick it back up. But I want our
listeners to hear what you say as you end this book.
In a world without cast, being male or female, light
or dark, immigrant or native born would have no bearing
on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. A

(17:07):
world without cast would set everyone free. Oh to read
that at the end, even now, I'm getting all emotional
about it. Um, So I want to give you the
you know, the last however, many words to talk about
whether you're hopeful and what makes you hopeful if you

(17:29):
are well. I wouldn't have written the book if I
wasn't hopeful, you know. I wanted to be able to
point the way to what was holding us back so
that we could actually have a reason for that hope.
And you know, to your point of the last lines
of the book, I'm kind of haunted by all that
our species has lost as a result of these false

(17:52):
divisions of cast. And I think about how on all
those sugar plantations and cotton fields and tobacco fields were
opera singers and jazz musicians and playwrights and novelists and
lawyers and accountants, and all kinds of people who never
ever had the chance to be what they could have
been or should have been in their hearts. You think

(18:13):
about how slavery went on for so long, two and
forty six years. He had twelve generations of people held
back in a fixed place, unable to be who they
actually were inside, followed by another nearly one hundred years
of Jim crofmal segregation. And so I think about all
that was lost for them, of course, the prime targets

(18:33):
of the Cassistan, but also for the rest of our society.
Where would we be if, instead of the of holding
back an entire group of people down for so long,
if people have been permitted to live out their lives
and to pursue the strengths that they had innately, as
opposed to the false assignments roles that are forced upon

(18:54):
a person based upon in our society, the lineage that's
associated with what we call race, where would we be
as a society? And I wrote this so that we
would would finally recognize the depth of what we're facing,
so that we can begin the hard work of moving
forward and making the creed that our country stands for,

(19:14):
make it real, Make it real for every one of us.
Isabel Wilkerson. I just hope that your strong sense of
what's possible can be embraced by our larger society. Thank
you for joining me today. I wish you the very best,
stay safe and healthy as we go through the end

(19:35):
of this pandemic. Do you as well? Thank you for
having me. Isabel Wilkerson's most recent book is called Cast,
the Origins of Our Discontents, and I have to say
you will be changed if you read Cast. I first

(20:00):
met Reshma so Johnny years ago. I had met her
around New York as a bright young woman, first generation American,
who was interested in politics and public service. And I
have watched her career as she has created this extraordinary organization,
Girls Who Code, an educational nonprofit that introduces young girls

(20:25):
to coding and computer science. Almost ten years later, Girls
who Code has reached more than three hundred thousand girls
throughout the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In two six,
Reshma gave a Ted talk titled Brave Not Perfect about

(20:46):
changing the way we raise and treat girls, and boy,
that talk really struck a chord with me. These days,
Reshma is focused on how the pandemic has cast a
bright light on gender inequities that put women, especially mothers,
at a disadvantage. Rushma lives in New York City with

(21:08):
her husband, The Hall, and their two sons, six year
old Sean and Si, who was born during the pandemic.
It is so great to see you, Rushmat, and I
have to ask, first of all, how are you and
your family doing as we enter, you know, the second
year of the pandemic. We're doing great, as great as

(21:29):
you could be. I mean, I definitely feel like I'm
reaching the point where I'm about to lose my mind,
but you know, we're hanging in there and we're just
grateful for our health. Amen to that. I'm so happy
to hear it. You know, you had a powerful Ted
talk a few years ago with a phrase that has
become something of a mantra for a lot of people.
Brave not perfect. What does that mean to you? Starts

(21:53):
when we're really young. If you like, take five minutes
and you sit in any playground in America, you'll see
exactly what I'm talking about. You know, we tell our
boys to climb to the top of the monkey bars
and just jump head first. But with our girls, it's like,
be careful, honey, don't swing too high. Did you take
that toy away from her? Give it back? And it

(22:14):
begins with this need to protect them from physical harm,
and then it extends to emotional harm. And it's different
with our boys. You know, my son Sean a couple
of years ago, was afraid of the dark. So I
go to BUYE Bye Baby, I get the nightlight, plug
in the night light to go to bed. Two minutes
later the hall. My husband would come up the stairs
and you take out the nightlight and Seawan would scream.

(22:34):
So we would do this for a week and finally
I said, to know, what's your problem. You know, he's
afraid of the dark. And my husband, my feminist husband,
looks at me and says, we got to toughen him up. Ah,
And I said, no, home, if Sean was a girl,
would you let her have the nightlight? And to its credit,
he admitted it. He's like, you're right, I would. So

(22:56):
it's like not conscious, but it has severe implication. This
you know, this perfection is because what happens is we
get addicted to perfection. That's a great phrase. We draw
within the lines, right, We stick in the jobs that
were good at because we don't want to feel failure
and rejection. And so that sense of perfection affects every
aspect of our life. You know. You see it in college,

(23:17):
where when young women get to be in an economics major,
they drop out, whereas better like I got a d
I'm running for president, right, completely different ramifications. You see
it in mental health, you know, women suffer from anxiety
and depression at twice the rate of men. And then
you see it in leadership, where women won't apply for
a job unless they meet a hundred percent of the qualifications,

(23:39):
whereas for men. It's so you know, my point is
is like, if we're waiting to be perfect to lead,
we'll never close the leadership gap. That's exactly right. I
think the antidote to perfectionism is bravery. I think bravery
cures it all. And I don't even mean bravery in
the big moments of you know me too, or even

(23:59):
running for Congress. I mean bravery in the small moments
when you raise your hand and you don't know exactly
what you want to say, but you want to take
up space, or when someone bumps into you in the street.
You don't immediately say I'm sorry. I think when you
build up bravery and all of those small moments, when
that big moment comes, you're ready. Well, I think that's

(24:20):
a perfect segue into the amazing work that you've done
for the last ten years, because you really were animated
by your understanding of the differences that girls and boys
faced in technology. When did you first realize that was

(24:41):
a problem. So I was I'm a weird person to
have started a movement to teach girls to code, because
I wasn't a coder. I would have been that that
woman and that young woman who said to you, oh,
I'm not good at math and science. But in I
was running for Congress, and as you know, as part
of that, you go into schools and visit communities, and
I remember seeing like lines and lines and lines of

(25:03):
boys who are learning how to code or learning how
you know, to do robotics. And I thought to myself, like,
that's strange, Like where are the girls. And I knew
that like we had Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, these
companies were blowing up. I knew the consumer base was female,
but all the founders were men. I also knew as
the daughter of refugees that like education and job, opportunity

(25:26):
is everything, and that when I heard you can make
a hundred and twenty dollars as a software programmer and
there were no women and no women of color, I
was like, this is sometimes not right. And so when
I lost my race for Congress, I knew that I wasn't,
you know, going to go back to the private center.
That I wanted to make a difference. And I said,
you know, of all the things that I saw on
the campaign trail, what's the one thing that I kept

(25:49):
thinking about because it didn't make sense, and it was
girls and coding. So I spent about a year and
a half just talking to everybody knew and just understanding, like,
why aren't there women at tech? What happened? When did
it start? You know? And I learned that the world's
first programmer was a woman in a lovelace that's right
back in the early nineteenth century, right, and that you

(26:11):
had all of these women, you know, that had built
the foundation. But then around the nineteen eighties, you know,
when computer science started becoming lucrative, when coding started being cool,
it was no longer seen as secretarial right, because in
hidden figures you saw all those women. You saw the
room full of white women, the room full of black

(26:33):
women who were in effect coding, and it was considered,
you know, a kind of lesser job. Absolutely, and that
all of a sudden, we've seen this happen in in
the law and other professions, was that it became lucrative,
it became prestigious, it became respected, and then you started
seeing these images of the Barbie doll that says I

(26:54):
hate mathelitical shopping instead, or weird science or revenge of
the Nerds were suddenly built this product type that what
a computer scientist was was a dude sitting in a
basement somewhere drinking a red bull. And little girls looked
at that image and they said, well, that's not me, because,
as you know, you cannot be what you cannot see.
And so in the eighties and the nineties you just

(27:16):
started seeing this massive decline. And you'll talk to women
who were majoring in computer science in nineteen eighties and
they were like, it was all of a sudden, we
went from the women in my engineering class to less
than So then you decided to do something about it,
which is one of the reasons why I love talking
with you because you see a problem, you want to
try to figure out how to fix it. And you

(27:38):
began Girls who Code. Talk a little bit about the
origin story of Girls who Code. Yeah, so you know,
I take about a year trying to understand. And it
felt like because we had pushed all these women out,
the solution at that moment was to put more young
women in it. So to build a pipeline. You know,
less one out of ten high schools offered computer science.
It wasn't really being offered in middle school. So if

(28:00):
felt like the right intervention was to build a program
over the summer because as you know, it's hard to
get new curriculum into the school day, and to teach
young women of code, you know, in the hopes that
they would go on to major minor and computer science
and then go into the field. And you know, again
being the daughter of refugees, I also saw in this
pipeline problem there were no black and Latina women, and

(28:21):
so to build the pipeline, I wanted to make sure
that half of those women were under the poverty line,
that half of those women were black and Latina. And
so in two thousand and twelve, I'm going to just
start a pilot program. I asked my friend Brian O'Kelly
if I could borrow his conference room in his office
because he had plenty of space. The first year, I
gave all the girls like fifty dollars and pizza every

(28:42):
day because I was like, there's no way that they're
gonna last. But like I literally, like an organizer, hand
picked my first twenty girls, found some brilliant teachers to
help me design a curriculum, and it was magical. And
I remember one week I had invited my friends from
the New York Immigration Coalition. The task that I asked
her to come talk to my students was if you

(29:03):
could build anything with technology to help undocumented students, what
would you build. I remember sitting there looking around that
room and watching these young women come up with these
incredible ideas. I remember saying to myself, you know what,
these girls are going to be the change makers. That's
when it clicked for me that this wasn't just about coding.

(29:23):
This was about building a generation of young women to
solve the problems of today and tomorrow and to be brave,
and to be brave absolutely and in fact many of
the girls who code alumni have gone on to do
some really incredible things themselves, and tell us a little
bit about you know, just a couple of stories about
the alumni. There's so so many. I mean, one of

(29:46):
our first students, you know, built an algorithm to help
detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant corus. She
went on to major in computer science at Michigan, and
another student, Anastasia, got the youngest patent at the University
of Pennsylvania. She early her whole life experienced school shootings,
and so that was the thing as a young woman
that she kept thinking about the problem that she wanted

(30:07):
to figure out how to solve. And so she built
this microchip when she was a freshman in college, so
that you could put it into a gun, so when
a gun was in an area like a school, it
would immediately alert the police. One of my students most
recently started printing three D equipment for PPE for doctors
here in New York during COVID. I mean, it's just

(30:27):
I could go on and on, but has it changed
tech Because you created a pipeline, you have filled it
with these amazing young women who have gotten patents, who
have created inventions who have changed lives themselves. Are the
technology companies, in your opinion, more welcoming to women, especially
women of color or not. Well, here's the first thing

(30:50):
I'm really proud of. Remember we started talking about basically
pretty much ten years ago. If you looked into the
computer and engineering departments at any university, it would have
been like lean eighteen. The number now is at like
Stanford car Oh yeah, it's at the M I. T
s and the Stanfords, and it's almost at like, you know,

(31:10):
thirty percent at at Harvard. So it's moved up significantly.
So now I I thought to myself, well, great, like
we built the pipeline, so Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all the
places that you hire from, so there shouldn't be a
problem now, guess not. So that was a big I like, Oh,

(31:32):
it's not a pipeline problem. It is a gender problem.
It is a raised problem. It's not about talent. You
have a broken hiring system. The problem is as the
engineers hold so much power, and we just can't assume
that people want to give up power easily, or that
they want to change and they want to have you know,
real sexual harassment training or real you know what I mean,

(31:55):
changing the way they interact with women so they don't
feel they have microggressions are straight out racism and sexism.
So that is the next step, and we were starting
to do that work, and then COVID nineteen happened. I
wanted to get to that. COVID nineteen happened, and one
of the things that it did was reveal what a
huge digital divide still existed in our country and how

(32:19):
disadvantage so many people were, particularly kids trying to be
educated remotely, and as you know so well being the
mom of a young son in the New York public schools,
I mean, trying to help your son keep learning is
a full time job, but you and your husband are
well equipped to try to do it. But the divide

(32:41):
with so many families is just creating a huge amount
of inequity, isn't it. Absolutely It's an impossible balancing act.
And a lot of the women in frontline jobs, essential
worker jobs, lower paid jobs, they were let go and
they had no savings to fall back on. They had
no real rescue safety net for them. So you've been

(33:05):
thinking a lot about that, and how would you describe
what women in this time of COVID in our country
are confronting. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Look, I you know,
I found myself at the beginning is epidemic with a newborn,
a five year old, running a women in girls organization.
As you know, when global pandemics hit, the first budgets

(33:25):
to be cut our ours. And I remember I'd gotten COVID.
I barely registered because I was working sixteen hours a
day and I'm one of the lucky ones. I had help.
I was able to work from home. But when I
looked on my zoom screen, every woman I knew was
just exhausted. And I think in the beginning of the
pandemic we were grinning and burying it because we're like, okay,
this will end. And then I think when September happened

(33:48):
and the schools didn't open, we weren't even asked, like
you know, when they figured out the cost of the
HVAC equipment and you know, teacher safety, no one said, well, okay,
if we're going to do this remote, who's going to
log them on at nine o'clock, ten o'clock, eleven o'clock
and twelve o'clock. And it was this nine fifties sensibility
that someone was going to do it, and that someone

(34:09):
was mobs, and especially for single moms, that is just untenable,
and nobody gave it a thought. And so I started really,
you know, advocating on this and thinking about this because
I was also seeing this happen in the tech companies
that I was talking to, because I just saw women
leaving and leaving and leaving and leaving and leaving. And

(34:30):
what scared me was that when I looked at the numbers, right,
our labor market participation is where it was night nine,
So we had lost thirty years of progress in nine months.
That's frightening. And the recent jobs reports showed that, you know,
seven thousand women actually gained jobs that didn't have children,

(34:51):
So this was really affecting women who had children. One
because of the schools, right, and as you've talked about before,
or the kind of instability are they open, are they closed?
How do I manage daycare? How do I manage childcare?
And the fact that we have a broken childcare system
like exacerbated that sense of uncertainty. And I think the
second thing is many women were in jobs that weren't

(35:14):
pandemic proof retail, education, healthcare, Many of these jobs weren't
coming back. And so for so many low income women
who are in these jobs that are the breadwinners, right
the vast them are the breadwinners of their family. When
they lose their job, the entire family suffers. You looked
at all of this and you thought about the consequences

(35:34):
of what has happened to women during the pandemic, and
you've come up with some very creative ideas. And I
want to applaud you for you know, thinking broadly and
systemically about what the pandemic has revealed and what should
be done going forward, and you came up with an
idea for what you call a martial plan for moms.

(35:57):
What is that? So mar plan for moms is a
three sixty plan you know that builds motherhood back better.
And some of the tenants of those plans is one,
you know, monthly short term payments for mothers, because what
we've seen in this pandemic is like we're not all
going through the same thing. Some might need childcare, you know,
some might actually need money for food, and especially when

(36:18):
you don't have time, because mothers don't have time, it's like,
just give me resources so I can figure this out.
The second thing is, you know, paid leave and you
know affordable daycare. As you know, and we have so
many of our friends who have been working on this
for for so long. You know, our childcare system is
just broken, totally broken. We have to make childcare affordable,
you know, available for every single family, because we are

(36:42):
one of the only nations that don't provide these services
for parents. Well, you know, one of the things that
your campaign for the Martial Plan for Moms really reminded
me of, because I've been, as you know, advocating for
paid family leave and for quality, affordable childcare and other
support systems for parents. But we know, particularly from others,

(37:05):
is that this has always been an economic issue, and
it was always treated either as quote, a family issue
or a woman's issue. But just the other day, the
current chairman of the Federal Reserve, Chairman Powell, said, we
need to do something about takecare and childcare. I nearly
fell off my chair because I held the first White

(37:25):
House conference on childcare and I called up then Treasury
Secretary Bob Rubin and asked him to open the conference.
He says, well, I don't know anything about childcare, I said,
but you do know about the economy, and if you
don't have childcare, you're not going to grow the economy.
So finally the linkage is beginning to be understood. But
we still face a lot of blowback. And you've you've

(37:48):
seen that as you've been out advocating, you've been writing articles,
you've been running full page ads, you've been doing interviews.
You know, what are some of the pushback that you're
getting over this idea. I think the first blowback is
motherhood is a choice. You chose this, Why are you
asking the government for help? We're supposed to be martyrs.
And I think this argument about motherhood is a choice

(38:11):
needs to be debunked, you know, once and for all.
I think on the left too, it's complicated. I've gotten
some pushback and you know, framing it around motherhood and
why not parents and why not caregivers? And look, when
I started Girls with Code, people said, well, shouldn't all
kids learn how to code? And I said, yes, but
the gender disparity is for girls. And if you don't

(38:32):
name it, if you don't focus on it, you'll never
fix it. And I don't think ten years later I
would be able to say that you were almost at
fifty in computer science classes. If I had called it
kids for code, I agree with that. Similarly, here I'm
putting the focus on mother's focus, not exclusion, because what
we do for mothers will benefit everybody, because I'm not
waiting twenty years, thirty years to get back to where

(38:54):
we were twelve months ago. And it really is about
the way treat mothers, I e. Parents, you know in
the society that really needs to be examined and looked at.
And I also think we have an opportunity we need
to tap into that populous mom rage. Every mom I
knowe is just about done. And as someone who's been

(39:16):
fighting for you know, daycare, childcare and paid leaf your
whole life, you didn't see moms marching from childcare, marching
for paid leaf. You know what I think now we can.
I agree with you. Let's do it. The time and
the circumstances and the issues and the needs all seem
to converge now. And what you're trying to do, and

(39:38):
I really applaud you for this, Reshima, is you're trying
to create a movement. You're trying to build on the
work that so many others have done. And more power
to all of us who have been on the front
lines advocating and arguing for these changes. But this pandemic,
which has been so painful and hard on so many,
does give us an opportunity, and shame on us if

(40:00):
we don't use that opportunity to try to create a
political movement. I agree, and I think it's a global movement.
And you know, I was teased like, you can't even
call our unpaid labor unseen because our partner saw exactly
what we're doing and it still didn't make a difference.
And that just shows you that it's deeper. And it's

(40:22):
just it's in my family room, it's in Bombay, it's
in Karachi. Every single family is having, every single mother,
every single woman is having this conversation right now. Well,
you are an excellent person to try to lead and
focus that conversation so that we can move towards action.
Reshma and I have loved our conversation and I can't

(40:44):
wait to see what you do next. Thank you. Reshma
is the author of Brave Not Perfect, and you can
keep up with her on social media at Reshma Sa
Johnny that's r E S H M A s A

(41:06):
U j A N I at thirty years old, My
next guest is already making his mark on Pennsylvania politics.
He got his start as an eleven year old serving
as a junior block captain in his neighborhood in North Philly.

(41:29):
I met Malcolm Kenyatta during my sixteen campaign when he
was a wonderful supporter of mine in Philadelphia. He would
introduce me at events, talk to anybody who uh he
could button hole, and I saw a charisma and capacity
for communicating in him that I found incredibly impressive. Back

(41:53):
in Malcolm Kenyatta was elected state representative for Pennsylvania's one
undered an eighty first district, becoming the first lgbt Q
person of color ever to serve in the state Assembly.
Ever since then, he's been working hard on raising the
minimum wage, protecting workers rights, increasing access to mental healthcare,

(42:19):
reducing gun violence, and strengthening our digital infrastructure. And Malcolm
has big plans for two First of all, he'll be
marrying his fiancee, Dr. Matt Miller, and second he's running
for the United States Senate. Well, I am delighted to

(42:39):
welcome you to this podcast. Malcolm. It's been a long
time since I've gotten to see you in person. And
a lot has happened, uh since then, But I want
to start with congratulations on your engagement. And your proposal
went viral on social media. You know, tell to what happened.

(43:01):
So you know what it Everything worked out. There's this
beautiful Japanese garden in here in Philly. And the whole
idea of it was that Matt was supposed to come
take pictures of me because my birthday is at the
end of July, and so I said, you come take
some pictures of me. And so he's snapping away and
he's taking these pictures of me, and I get down

(43:23):
on one knee and he's like, He's like, that's not opposed.
You have to get out. What are you doing? Well?
You made a lot of people happy and and that's
been kind of a pattern for you, my friend. What
gave you the confidence and the inspiration to run for

(43:43):
office in the community where you had grown up? Yeah, so,
you know, I grew up in a very working, poor family.
My parents divorce and I was very young. My dad
was a social worker, my mom was a home health
care aid and you know, I out of taste very
early of how upside down this economy is for working people.

(44:05):
My mom, you know, at the being at her company
years and years and years. I think the highest sage
she ever got twelve fifty. I mean, how unfair for
this woman who I saw working overtime, triple time all
the time, and still at the end of the year
we were barely, you know, scraping by. I moved four
or five different times as a kid. I got my

(44:26):
first gig at the age of twelve, washing dishes at
a vegan soul food restaurant. If you believe it's like
a contradiction, that's right. So you can tell President Clinton
we have some vegan soulfa. He's coming. He's on the
train right now. And you know the story, really you

(44:47):
can draw a direct line from this story that I'll
tell briefly to me running now for the United States Senate.
I was eleven years old and we're living on this
block in my district called Woodstock Street. And so I
came home day and I'm just like, you know, I'm
in all rage, complaining about the stuff on the block,
and I'm like mom and this and that blah blah blah,
and my mom, you know, without skipping a beat, she said, well,

(45:10):
you know, boy, if you care so much, why don't
you go do something about And I said, oh, okay,
And so I ran for Junior Black Captain. And it
was the first thing I ever did to get typically
engaged at the age of eleven. I want everybody listening
to tell some young person that story, because you know,
it does take that initiative. And your mom gave you

(45:31):
the push. But you went out the door and got
to work. And I know it hasn't always been easy.
You responded so gracefully to the homophobia displayed by your
opponent's supporters when you ran. Describe what happened and how
you figured out how to deal with what we're very
personal attacks. Yeah, you know, uh, I laugh a lot um,

(45:55):
you know something about having a good laugh. It really
keeps me ground it because it gave me a sense
that if they're spending time, you know, putting out these
homophobic little flyers and riding around. One of my opponents
brothers literally got a car with a megaphone and was
standing outside the poles reminding people that I was. I

(46:17):
was like I told everybody from the beginning, but okay,
I was like, that is true, that is that good.
That's true. You know. It gave me a sense that
one they didn't have ideas for a district like mine,
where I represent the third poorest district in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania. People desperately need government to do something, and

(46:39):
I don't think folks have to look like me or
love like me to know that I will fight for them.
And that is what people want from their elected officials,
folks who go in, who work with folks where they
can um. I'm also not a safe harbor for nonsense,
and so I call out my Republican colleagues when they're
talking nonsense. But I'm also committed to getting things done

(47:00):
because when you grow up like I did, where you're
doing that cha cha dance of poverty and maybe you'll
pay the lights this month, you'll pay the electric next month.
When I was running for State rep. My heat was
turned off. I have these little space heaters that were
eating my home. Praying that no wire went off caused
the big caused the big fuss. But I think ultimately

(47:23):
we need people who understand what it feels like when
government doesn't work to be there when big decisions are
being made well, and I love the fact that you
got through it, you won, and you won by a
resounding majority. This wasn't a squeaker, this was a landslide.
So how does it feel to be changing really the

(47:45):
paradigm of what an elected official looks like? And have
you ever had the experience now that you're in the
legislature of realizing at some moment, boy, it's really good
that I'm in this room right now because I'm the
only one who can speak to what's actually going on here.

(48:05):
So you know, I'm thinking about when the Republicans who
have really they don't they don't like elections anymore. I
seem to be anti anti election. And so I'm sitting
on the Secretary of the State Government Committee. One of
the most important responsibilities is it oversees elections laws in Pennsylvania.
And the former chairman who has retired, introduced this uh

(48:30):
Election Integrity Committee, this resolution which would have empowered um
and really bastardize our subpoena power to subpoena ballots, to
impound voting machines, and to physically compel elections officials to
come before these sham gearings as the election was happening,
mind you, And so I certainly called that out. It

(48:53):
went viral. I talked about it. I talked about how
how wrong that was, how disgraceful it was, and I
looked around that room. I'm the only person of color
in that room, including staff, including reporters and doing members,
the only person in that room. And I stand on
the shoulders of my grandfather Mohammed Kanyado, is a civil
rights leader, and so many others who fought and bled

(49:16):
and died for the right to vote. And so this
idea that in this moment, I was just going to
be a no vote and just quietly let it happen.
And they had all the votes to pass it, and
they passed it. But we were able to block it
because I brought those same tools that I learned as
a junior Black captain as a community organizer, of be
clear with the facts and engage everybody you can. And

(49:37):
folks in the middle of a pandemic and the cold
were standing out in front of the leader's offices demanding
that they that they stopped this, and we were able
to get them to pull back and to not do it.
And it's a great relief because we know, seeing their
behavior after the election, that they would have utilized those
tools had they been available, And so there are often

(49:58):
moments like that where I wreck ignized the power of
being in the room and not just being there to
be ornamental, but of actually speaking up. But when young people,
particularly see somebody who's had the life that I had
now being a serious candidate for the United States Senate,
I hope that they look and don't say, oh my god,

(50:19):
look what Malcolm has done. But my hope is that
they look and say, oh my god, look what I
can do. Difficult to be what you can't see. That
is music to my ears, because you really are part
of a rising generation of young people who are changing
the face of politics in our country. And I'm so

(50:41):
proud that Onward Together, the organization I started after the
election has worked so closely with Run for Something, an
organization started by two members of my campaign family to
help more young people like yourself run for office. And
making the leap from being oh, a concerned citizen to

(51:03):
somebody who runs for office is particularly daunting. I probably
get asked that question more than any other, like, well,
how do you do it? How do you prepare yourself?
How do you deal with the criticism and One of
the reasons I support groups like Run for Something is
because they are trying to help individuals answer those questions
for themselves so that they can run for something. How

(51:26):
do you talk to young people and how do you
encourage them to maybe take the steps to prepare to run.
So I give you know, simple sort of in some ways,
I don't know if it's kind of intuitive, but really
simple advice that says, first of all, you just have
to run, knowing that there will be these challenges, knowing
that it will be difficult. You have to accept all

(51:48):
of that and just do it because you'll be shocked
by the folks who will step up to support you.
And so that's the first thing I say. The second
thing I say is I think a big part of
the reason that a lot of folks don't want to run,
it's because they asked this question, Oh my gosh, am
I qualified enough to do with? There are these other
people who have been in office longer or whatever, And

(52:10):
I tell them, listen, I work in this building, like
not these are not always the brightest, These are not
always the brightests. Like I promise you you you can,
you can do it. And then the final thing I
think that has to happen is we have to when
we talk about what qualifications look like, start looking to

(52:32):
a broader set of skills, because so often right now,
what we say when we say somebody qualified, the question
is how many membership cards do they have to a
lot of the elite institutions that don't want anything to change,
But there is a lived experience that is deeply valuable,
not just from an aesthetic symbolic perspective, but the stories

(52:55):
that I told these things are important to policy. Yeah,
we eat allies. It's great when people say, hey, listen,
I'm not I don't have I didn't have that experience,
but I care and I'm gonna step up. But we
then also have to actually listen to the people who've
been there, who've been there, who've dealt with it, And
that is something you know. When I was making the

(53:18):
pretty big decision to run for the United States Senate,
that was something that was key for me because there
are very few people who know what I know about
what it means when we don't address the systemic and
persistent issues that keep folks up at night. And we've
seen the commercials so many times where folks are fumbling

(53:39):
through the bills and talking about how hard it is,
and then some person walks in front and says, Oh,
I'm gonna fix all your problems. How about we actually
listen to the person who's at that table. We'll be
right back. Well, my impression from knowing you and then

(54:07):
watching your campaigns is that you are so rooted in
your neighborhood. As I said, you grew up in the
neighborhood in North Philly that you now represent in the
State Assembly, and you've been serving that community since you
were eleven years old. So what makes this neighborhood so

(54:28):
special to you now that you are literally representing all
of it? You know, every day I walk into the
House Chamber and you know, no offense to the forty
nine other state houses a state sentence, But I think
Pennsylvania is by far the most beautiful chamber. It's our
Nate and it's beautiful. A lot of bad decisions made

(54:49):
there sometimes, but about a beautiful place nevertheless, And I
walk in and I'm so still struck that I have
the great privile legion honor of not just representing some folks,
but representing people who really raised me and made me
and who poured into me, and it reminds me of

(55:11):
how resilient my neighbors and my family are. You know,
when you think about the level of poverty that folks
are living in the Fair Hill section of my district
average anuine income nine thousand, seven sixty something bucks. You know,
when you think about that, if if folks made the decision,

(55:31):
you know what, I'm just going to keep my head
under the blanket and not peek out. You know, I
couldn't blame them, Like it's like, thanks are incredibly challenges.
I couldn't blame them. But that's not what they do. Instead,
they get up, they go out. There's so many small
little organizations who have zero dollars but are flush full
of hope and optimism for what the community can and

(55:55):
should be. And that's what I said in my first campaign,
that this was about what our neighborhoods, Cannon should be.
And I see that every single day people who refuse
in the face of would often feel like insurmountable challenges
to accept that as the finals say, and that has

(56:15):
really molded me that sometimes when I introduced a good
piece of legislation and we don't have the votes, you know,
I say, a no is a yes that just hasn't
gotten there yet. So they really armed me with a
level of persistence that is, as you know, really necessary

(56:36):
Um in politics. I love that, uh, I know is
a yes that just hasn't gotten there yet. And so
you have made this really momentous political decision to run
for the United States Senate. I'd love to hear what
your process was like leading you to say, Hey, I'm
going for it. I want to represent the entire stay

(57:00):
the way that I represent my district. Yeah, for me,
it wasn't a single decision. I think it was a
series of decisions. I had spent the entire cycle last
cycle as like the most requested sarag it all around
the Commonwealth, helping my state House and Senate colleagues, some
who are running for re elections, some who are running
for election for the first time, and go into all

(57:21):
these communities that maybe you know I passed through or
stop by, but now but you know, it's different when
you're going to campaign and talk to people about what
they want to see in their neighborhoods and what's really
at stake for them in this selection. And so I
think going around and having those conversations with people, first
of all, really made me get a sense of Wow,

(57:43):
there's something out here and something that I have to say,
and things that are really connecting and resonating. From my
experience with folks in Scranton, or in Cranberry Township, or
in Beaver or up in Murder Sir and Erie, all
these places, I got to talk to people who were

(58:04):
all just asking a simple question, when does government gonna
work for working people? You know what I mean, not
as a talking point, but actually gonna center the needs
and concerns of of working people. And when it became
clear that, you know, to me wasn't gonna run. I
knew it would be a big field. But I also
felt like if folks like me who have seen the

(58:29):
promise of America so often not include me, and not
include folks who are in my economic rung of the ladder,
and not include folks who are from neighborhoods like mine,
if we continue to wait on somebody else to come
fix this for us, we're gonna be waiting a long time.

(58:49):
I don't think anybody's coming to save us. But I
think the good news is we don't need anybody to
save us. When we build big coalitions, coalitions that are
big enough and bolden of to meet the moment. I
think we can do what generations before us have done
to take that promise of America, these ideas of freedom
and justice and fairness, which the founders, as prescian as

(59:13):
they were, they weren't talking about you and I. Okay,
they didn't mean us at that moment. But every generation
has said, oh wait, wait, wait, this promise is big
enough for me, and we have to expand it, and
we have to make sure that these things aren't just
words on a page, that they're real. And I fundamentally

(59:33):
believe if we're gonna get from where we are to
where we need to go, it's gonna be people who
have experienced the brokenness of our system that are going
to be able to best rebuild it. And we are
at an inflection point. And I felt like the experience
I had as a legislator, as a community organizer, and
as somebody who does not take no for an answer,

(59:55):
I felt like those would all be good skill sets
in the United States. All we we need leaders who
are going to do exactly that. Malcolm Kenyada, it is
always a joy to be with you even virtually in
this setting, and I just really wish you the very best.
Thank you, my friend. Take care of yourself. You can

(01:00:22):
follow Malcolm on social media at Malcolm Kenyata. That's k
E n y A T t A. Speaking of paradigm shifts,
We're going to be doing something special on our next show.
We've been collecting questions from you, our listeners for me,

(01:00:43):
and next week I will be answering them, and as
master of ceremonies, we're going to have a very special guest,
my friend James Cordon, the host of The Late Late Show.
And I can tell you right now that although we
won't be doing any karaoke since I literally can't carry
a tune, I know we're going to have lots of fun.

(01:01:05):
So don't miss it. You and Me Both is brought
to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced by Julie Subran,
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(01:01:29):
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(01:01:50):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Paradigm Shift (with Isabel Wilkerson, Reshma Saujani & Malcolm Kenyatta)