October 27, 2020 • 46 mins
America is often described as a land of opportunity where anyone can succeed -- but is that actually the case? In this episode, Hillary is joined by “Queer Eye” star, author, and newly minted U.S. citizen Tan France; community advocate Lorella Praeli; and economist Raj Chetty to talk about what the American Dream means to them personally and whether it’s still attainable. Of course, Tan also provides expert feedback on Hillary’s presidential campaign wardrobe.
Tan France is a fashion designer and television personality who grew up in the United Kingdom, the son of South Asian immigrants. He is best known for his role as one of the Fab Five on Netflix’s “Queer Eye.” His memoir, Naturally Tan, was published in 2019.
Lorella Praeli was born in Peru and grew up undocumented in Connecticut. She’s now the co-president of Community Change, an advocacy group that works on behalf of low-income Americans.
Raj Chetty is a MacArthur “Genius” grant-winning economist who has received wide acclaim for his research on equality and opportunity in America. He is the director of Harvard’s Opportunity Insights lab.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
Do I hope that in your spare time you hung
around in sweats? Yes? I do? Well, Yeah I am,
I am okay, But yeah, I thought it was so
appropriate and you made more of an effort than I've
ever seen any money necessarily make in those situations, and
(00:21):
I really appreciated it. I'm Hillary Clinton, and this is
You and Me Both, where I get into some of
today's biggest questions with people I admire. On today's episode,
we're talking about the American Dream. What exactly do we
mean when we say that? And is it still possible
to achieve? You know, I think the American dream is
(00:44):
still achievable, but I think we have our eyes wide
open about how hard it is for so many people.
There are all kinds of obstacles that have to be
overcommon individual lives. And I'm interested not only in that,
but also what do we need to do to change
our economy and our society and our culture and our
mindset to make sure more people have a chance to
(01:08):
fulfill whatever they think is their American Dream. So I'm
talking to three people today. Lorella pray Lee is a
former dreamer. She's an advocate for immigrants and low income
Americans and has an amazing story. Raj Chetty is an
economist who studies opportunity. In other words, how do we
(01:30):
help more people fulfill their dreams? What needs to be
done to make that happen? But first, Tan France Now
you Know. Tan is the fashion expert on Netflix's Queer Eye,
which was rebooted in Team You Know. It's a really
(01:51):
fun and heartwarming show. In each episode, Tan and the
rest of the Fab five team hit the road to
spend time with someone who is pursuing their dream or
just trying to get by, and to give them a
little boost. This show has made Tan a household name.
He's one of the first openly gay South Asian and
(02:14):
Muslim men on TV in the United States, and as
you'll hear, he is completely charming. He lives in Salt
Lake City, Utah, with his husband Rob and their two kids.
He's author of the memoir Naturally Tan, I love that title.
There were so many reasons why I wanted to talk
(02:34):
to him about the American dream. He recently became a
US citizen, and because he spends so much time helping
people live their own dreams, he has some pretty good
insight into what it takes to, you know, have the
American dream in the twenty one century. You know, let
me start by congratulating you, because I know you became
(02:56):
a US citizen this past June. I should what did
that feel like? You know, I don't think I've still
quite possessed it. I've been working on this for so long.
I wanted to be an American citizen pretty much my
whole life. Since I was a little boy and I
was sat there watching American TV. I dreamt of this,
and so the moment that it happened, I was so
(03:18):
overcome with emotion that all I could do was eat
donuts because that was the most American thing I could
think of. I went to the donut shop down the
street and eight donuts, and that was my version of
being a true American. Well, I think that's a very
American response, you know, to the emotion of the you know,
of the minute. Um, Where were you actually sworn in
(03:40):
in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is where I live
right now. Well, now, explain how you went from New
York to Salt Lake What was that connection? Well? I
never heard of Utah, and quite honestly, when I tell
my friends and family in England, they have no idea
where it might be on the map. And so I
was living in New York. I had a housemate who
was from Salt Lake City, Utah, and he suggested that
(04:01):
I go and visit. And I had no idea what
it might be like, what it might look like. It
sounded very country, and I was surprised to see that
they have a proper city, and I fell in love
with the city pretty much immediately. Within an hour, I
decided I was going to make this my home. Was
there something about Salt Lake that you felt connected to
(04:22):
because of your you know, growing up in different cultures
and different countries. You grew up in Britain, your parents
or immigrants from Pakistan, you were raised Muslim. How did
it come to be that going to Salt Lake, well
known as a beautiful cosmopolitan city but also the home
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
(04:46):
became the magnet for you. I don't know how honest
you would like me to be. If it spent to
be light hospital, I'm going to give you my deep,
deep Okay, So my honest, honest answer is this, so
you sin that I was a child of immigrants. I am.
My parents came from Pakistan and Kashmir, India, respectively, and
(05:07):
I was raised in the UK. And I don't know
what experience you have with the South Asian community in
the UK, but we are kind of seen as second
lass citizens in that you wouldn't really take us home
to meet your parents. If you were to date us,
it wouldn't We would be the undesirable dating community. And
that was definitely the case when I was a kid,
(05:29):
and especially after nine eleven and I was seven team
and nine eleven happened. And so when I came to Utah,
the reason why I seven in the first hour is
because we went to a restaurant. I didn't know what
it was at the time, but it turned out to
be Chili's. And within an hour or so, I had
had so many people just smile and ask where I
(05:49):
was from, and somebody here on me during that time,
and I had never experienced anything like it where my
call at the color of my skin and my ethnicity
seemed to be the thing that made people want to
get to know me as opposed to make people not
want to talk to me. And that thought so special. Oh,
that's so interesting, and that was like almost immediate immediate.
(06:12):
I really wanted to ask you. You know, this is
not our nation's brightest moment. We are struggling with, you know,
so much turmoil and so many challenges. What do I
feel like officially to become an American at this pretty
messy and divisive time? You know? I my husband asked me.
(06:33):
My husband's name is Rob, and he asked me the
same question. He said, does it feel weird after wanting
this your whole life to get to the point where
you are are now an American citizen? And we actually
do have a lot to be ashamed of? And I
say that as a true patriot. I and I do
class myself as a patriot. Even though I'm an immigrant.
I fought my whole life to be able to live here.
(06:55):
I love this country, truly, I do, and it's sad
that I became and during this time. However, I've always
been an incredibly optimistic person my whole life. The thing
that actually drives many people crazy is that I always
see hope, even though sometimes I probably isn't very much. However,
even now I see true hope, and so for me.
(07:17):
I was excited to be able to vote this year.
I thought, what better year than to get my citizenship
when I can finally vote and encourage people to vote.
And I've been encouraging people to vote for quite some time,
but it didn't really mean enough when I wasn't able
to vote myself and to say, I mean it with you.
And so the way I see is, yes, it was
a very strange year to become a citizen. However, I
(07:38):
will forever remember it as the first time I voted
was a time when I desperately wanted my vote to
be here. Absolutely. Well. You know, since um, you've had
the opportunity to criss cross our country. You have been
all over America. You've met Americans. Oh wow, So you
you really are talking with people literally on the ground,
(08:02):
and you're having very personal conversations. I mean when you,
you know, hold up somebody's pajamas and say, you know,
you're not gonna have sex in these pajamas, and the
stuff that you tell them, Um, you know, you're really
in their lives in a way that most of us
never get a chance to be. So how has that
affected your feelings about you know, both the country and
(08:25):
you know your place in it. It's been interesting going
to places I've never been before. Within this country. I
had lived here for ten years or nine years at
the time when I got the job, and open to
that point, i'd probably visited three or four states. I
felt like I knew that you talking men too well enough.
The New York I been too well enough. But going
across the country has really opened my eyes, not just
(08:48):
with where I go to universities across the country and
do speaking engagements and speak with college students who are
at that impressionable age and talk about what they're going through.
And it's been interest in learning what has happened with
their lives since two thousand eighteen. And it feels like
so many people have fed up, they feel stuck in
(09:08):
what they don't feel hid and that has been the
most common interaction we've had with people, is that they
don't feel seeing, they don't feel loved enough. That really
resonates with me because I think when you sort of
strip it all down, um, loving and being loved is
at the core of the you know, human experience, and
(09:30):
you see that with the people that you're working with
and that you're visiting with. Do you get the sense
that this divisiveness that we see in the country can
be reconciled and healed with different attitudes, not just from leaders,
but from all of us. I would like to believe.
So I think that what Netflix did super well. And
(09:50):
if this isn't just a sales pitch for Netflix, that
believe me. I just truly believe they did this very well.
They decided that they were going to bring back where
I time when we knew that things were going to
become more divided than they have been in a very
long time, and so Netflix saw our community as the bridge.
We get to speak with people in a way that
(10:12):
most people aren't afforded. For example, I can speak with
women without them feeling bettened at all by me. I
can speak with men without them worrying that we might
be trying to get their women or trying to compete
for their job. We are a community that they're not
majorly threatened by, and they're willing to open up to us,
and we use our skills, which are very personal, as
a vehicle to be able to have conversations. And so
(10:35):
we are in a very fudge position where people will
open up to us. More so than they would most
other people. When I'm in somebody's closet and I'm seeing
them in their underwear, they are in their most vulnerable state.
I can ask them pretty much anything at that point
and they'll likely answer. I think that that timing was crucial.
Netflix saw us as the bridge between the Democrats and Republicans,
(10:57):
quite honestly, and we went in with the mission we
wanted to meet as many people who didn't sing from
our hymn sheet that the people who had no interest
ordinarily in hearing outside of the story. But when you're
in your underwear, and you're probably more likely to tell
me what you think because I've got you trapped, And
that feels very special, and we put a face to
(11:18):
what people may see as a threat. They don't understand
our community, and the five of us represent many communities,
and so they get a personal interaction with a person
that they've probably never spoken to before. And so I'm
able to say to somebody, when you vote for somebody
like Trump, you are voting against me, You're voting against
(11:41):
my people, you voting against everything that we represent. So
it's not just a blind vote for a Republican. And
I think that's My biggest concern with a lot of
Americans who vote, they will vote for whoever it is,
as long as it's their party. And I will never
understand that. I don't think most Brits vote that way.
If we don't like somebody, we're not going to vote
with them, regardless of whether there are patty or not.
(12:03):
And I wish that we had more of that mentality here,
and so I feel the opportunity that we have with
Queer I is to have those conversations and say, I
am the person you're actually voting against. Here we're taking
a quick break. Stay with us. When you think about,
you know, Queer I and being part of it now,
it's so much more than a makeover. It really is
(12:27):
about meeting people where they are, giving them a boost,
trying to give them some sense of meaning and purpose
and even a financial boost. And I really love what
the Fab five does for these folks that you meet,
but it also kind of makes me sad that there
are so many millions of people who will never meet you.
(12:50):
Maybe they'll get you vicariously by watching the program. So
have you thought about, you know, if you could waive
the proverbial magic wand what are a couple of things
that you think could be changed that would help more
people than you'll ever possibly be able to get to.
The one thing for me personally that I try to
communicate as much as possible wherever ever I am, whether
(13:11):
it be in person, on the show or if I'm
doing TV, and I will always try and put this
one agenda. All the things that we're offering are just
as I've mentioned, for a vehicle to have a conversation
and to really encourage a certain kind of self esteem
in a person and to encourage them to see themselves
as better than they believe they are. And the main
(13:32):
thing I want people to take away is that we
are incredibly mean to ourselves when we look in the mirror.
The things that we think about ourselves are seldom things
that people are thinking of us. And so to look
in the mirror and remind ourselves and the things that
are actually wonderful about us, the reason why we have
friends and family who love us. I want people to
realize that those things are so much more important than
(13:55):
the new wardrobe I might give them, all the new
sofa that Bobby might give them. They're just the things
that make a good TV show our show is reminding
them that they are so much more than they think
they are, and so we're just kind of holding up
a merrit to them and saying, look at you. I
want you to tell me, basically, in a nutshell, what
(14:15):
you think that everybody else sees in you that you
clearly don't. Why do people love you? There's a reason why.
But you went through that whole process yourself. I mean
your memoir, naturally, Tan, you know, talks about your struggles
and your conflicts and your doubts, and you know, very
personal aspects of how you became who you are today.
(14:35):
I mean, we see you, We see the confidence, the optimism,
the joy in your life. But it wasn't always like that,
was it. No. I think if anybody ever suggests that
they have always been happy and that there's never a
time when they've suffered hardship, I just wouldn't believe it.
I think to get to the point where you can
be as optimistic as I am, you have to have
(14:57):
seen some bad things and experienced a lot. Then you
you've overcome it, and you've overcome it through great strength.
It does require great strength. There were times when I
struggled with my businesses. When I first moved to America,
I started my business as it was the American dream
that I was desperate to fulfill, and I did. But
it didn't get to that point without a few years
(15:17):
of hallacious hard work and as a child going through
the racism that we went through so regularly, and just
then that there was light of the tunnel. Even though
somebody may not have liked us for our skin color
or religion, my sexuality, there was still so much more
that I liked about myself, even if those strangers couldn't
see it. And so that is the message I desperately
(15:38):
want to push forward on the likes of CERA or
any platform I have, is that yes, people may throw stones,
but the one thing I say to everyone, I refused
to be the reason I'm unhappy. No matter what has
gone on in my life, I refused to be the
reason I'm unhappy. They can say what they want. I
have more control of my feelings than they do, and
so I will find a way to make myself happy. Man,
(16:00):
and I just have to thank you for being naturally
you and talking with me today. I hope we get
to meet in person at some point whenever the pandemic.
We can I encrupt you. Go right ahead, Dan, I
know that people, many people had their opinions on what
(16:21):
you are during your campaign. I am not just saying
this because I've adored you for my whole life. You
looked wonderful. Here's the thing. I will mention this also,
it didn't matter. It shouldn't matter. Trump turned up looking
like a joke every time, and nobody seem to care
that much. But you clearly made an effort. I love
(16:42):
that you did so many times the full modoco look
where you would go for a full blue or a
full whatever. But I thought you looked regal almost. Do
I hope that in your spare time you hung around
in sweats? Yes, I do, but going okay, but yeah,
I thought it was so appropriate and you made more
(17:05):
of an effort that I've ever seen any money necessarily
make in those situations. And I really appreciated it. Thank you,
Thank you, I love you even more. Tan France is
the author of Naturally Tan, a memoir. Season six of
Queer Eye, which will be filmed in Austin, Texas, one
(17:27):
of my favorite American cities is on hold due to
the pandemic. But you can watch the most recent season,
as well as his other show Next in Fashion on Netflix. Now,
I'll be talking to Lorella pray Lee. Lorella is a
dreamer who became a US citizen and she's an incredible organizer.
(17:50):
I can speak from experience. I was lucky enough to
have her working on my twenty sixteen presidential campaign and
she was everywhere. No matter where I went, there she was.
She just has a natural ability to draw people to
her to the causes that she is advocating. She was
(18:12):
born in Peru. Her parents brought her to the United
States as a very young child for medical treatments, and
you're going to hear about that now. At just thirty
two years old, she's president of Community Change, an organization
that empowers low income Americans to fight for a more
(18:32):
just future for themselves, their children, and generations to come.
As you're about to hear, Lurella is a kind of
person who makes you want to get up and go
out and change the world. Hello, Corella, how are you? Lorella?
I am so excited to talk with you. It's been
(18:54):
way too long. You are always on the front lines
of trying to help people and trying to make change.
Ange and maybe you could just give our listeners a
little background of you know, how you ended up in
the United States, and uh, you know what your life
was like here. Yeah. I had a car accident when
I was two and a half and that resulted in
(19:16):
the amputation of my right leg. So for many years,
we actually did a lot of trips between Peru and
the States. And then my family decided to move here
when I was ten years old. And I grew up
in Connecticut, in New Melford, Connecticut. Of all the places
my parents could have picked, that was their choice, you know.
And then I got here and I was a young
(19:37):
brown girl with one leg um navigating the world in
a different language. And I then found out I was undocumented.
You know, it didn't come until later. So it's been
a lot of ups and downs, but I would say
all of my downs have come with a tremendous opportunity
to learn. Do you remember the moment when you learned
(19:59):
you were undocumented and what that meant to you? I
think it happened around your desire to apply for college, right,
I mean it was it was devastating. I actually think
I knew that I was undocumented long before I internalized
what that meant. And I had had many conversations with
(20:22):
my mother where I asked, you know, well, how come
I can't do this, or how come we can't do this?
And she would always say, oh, it's you know, you
can't get a driver's license because you can't drive because
of your leg I think really it was her way
of protecting me. And when I found out I was undocumented,
it was devastating. For that moment, and I would say
(20:43):
for the next several years, I carried a lot of shame.
I was really embarrassed and I was afraid. It was
almost as if I thought that I was walking around
and you know, I carried a label that said undocumented
on my forehead. And you know, I remember I was driving.
Anytime I drove and a police car showed up behind me,
(21:05):
I would just my whole body, would my whole this
whole state and physiology of my body would change. And
I would very nervously begin to think about when is
when is the earliest turn that I could make where
the police would not follow me? And what about becoming
a dreamer? Talk about you know, the movement, the dream act.
(21:26):
You know, I walked into a room at a field
planning meeting that United we Dream, the largest immigrant youth
let network where I spent a good really was my
first political home in this country. And a lot of
young people were wearing these shirts that said undocumented and unafraid,
and I was just looking at them, like, I don't
know what world you're living in. I am very much
(21:49):
undocumented and I am very afraid. And I learned there
that organizing is the art of the possible, and to
believe that, even though there were many people who have
been fighting on our behalf and telling our stories, that
if we wanted to change the laws in this country,
if we wanted to fight for citizenship for everyone, then
(22:10):
we had to step into our full power and our
full truth, reject the stories that had been told about us,
and begin to paint a different narrative. I know that
you know, you got married in you got your green card,
You were then among the group sworn in as American
citizens by President Obama in during this time that you
(22:36):
were undocumented, and now, of course as an American citizen,
how have you thought of yourself as an American and
how have you understood the American dream? How has it
how has it been defined for you? And buy you.
So to me, the most powerful part of the American
dream is the way that it challenges each one of
(22:59):
us to reshape and reimagine what our country can be.
And so, you know, I think being American is realizing
that the truth that this country holds might be self evident,
but they are not self executing. How do we look
at America every day and say I will not settle
(23:21):
for that because I know another world is possible. To me,
that is really the American dream. And the fact that
I get to do that as someone who was not
born here but who is committed to making all of
these things real, that maybe that is only possible in
a place like the United States. It's important to keep
(23:41):
the movement going, to keep the organizing going, to make
the case even if people get discouraged or disappointed, to
persuade them not to give up. So what are you
seeing out there? Oh man? Um? We are living through
a really hard period right now, nearly for intent Black
(24:02):
and Hispanic households right now with children are struggling to
feed their families, and so that is consuming people's minds
because parents are having to make very hard choices about
how to make sure that they can stay in their apartment,
how to make sure that they can feed their families,
And to me, all of these things are a policy choice.
(24:26):
Mass unemployment is a policy choice. Right food and security
is a policy choice. Mass evictions is a policy choice.
And so I think that people are living through and
we are going to continue to lift through this very
hard period. And I also feel like there's a tremendous
amount of hope. You have always epitomized that to me,
(24:46):
and you shared a story in the past about how
when you lost your leg in that accident when you
were a two year old, your parents told people not
to help you. My dad Yeah, um, your dad said,
you know no, she's going to stand up on her own.
She's going to get around on her own. And somehow
in my head I see this analogy because these days,
(25:10):
staying strong and telling people stay strong and keep going
and let's try to make a big change is quite
an ask. That Trump administration has done so much to
insult and undermine and demean immigrants, separating kids at the border,
(25:31):
restricting DOCCA, demonizing people list obviously goes on and on.
So how do you personally find the strength to get
back up every day? Keep going, keep fighting, and keep
using your extraordinary voice and example to convince others to
(25:52):
do that with you. I mean, part of me believes
that some of it was my father's training from when
I was very little, that the you you can do
this exercise every time I fell, and I felt a
lot when I was learning how to walk with a
prosthetic leg, when I was moving around with crutches when
I was little. I remember, in particular, a moment when
(26:12):
we were at maybe it was a carnival, and I
fell and one of my shoes also fell off, and
I was I was in a lot of pain, and
all of these people were rushing towards me, you know,
to help me up, and he just sort of he
had this motion, just sort of pushed people away just
by looking at them and moving his hand. And I
(26:32):
was angry. I was angry that he didn't help me up,
And you know, I think about it now and I'm
just grateful, you know, I think that it was lessons
learned for the future, and those lessons learned we're about
remembering that in life, we are going to fall, and
we're going to get up, and we're going to fall again,
and you're going to get up again. Um now we
(26:54):
we can make the getting up easier. And that's what
gives me hope. This believe that there's the world as
it should be, and then there was the world as
it is, and we as organizers, we as people, if
we vote, if we make our voices heard, we can
play a role in closing that gap, the gap that
(27:15):
exists between the world as it should be in the
world as it is, and in this time in particular,
because of all that the pandemic has exposed. My dream
is that we take the pain and the fear and
the anguish that so many people are feeling right now,
particularly in black, brown and immigrant communities, and that we
(27:36):
use that to create an America where people feel seen
and heard and where everyone can thrive. And if we
believe that that is possible, then we can fight to
overturn all these structural barriers that have been put in place,
and we could make it easier for people to stand
up after they fall, because that is a part of life.
(27:59):
I love that, Lorella. I am in your corner. I'm
one of your biggest fans and admirers, and uh, I
just can't wait to see what you do next. Keep
that energy, keep that optimism, keep that sense of hopefulness
in the face of setbacks, because it's contagious when people
see you do it and then they feel like I'm
(28:21):
going to do it too. So thank you, my friend,
Thank you for talking to me today. Thank you for
more information on the organization that Lorella leads, Community Change,
and the work they're doing on voter engagement, immigrant rights,
and affordable childcare. Please visit community change dot org. Tan
(28:46):
and Lorella each have their own American Dream success stories,
but at the same time, lots of Americans are struggling
just to get by. There's food insecurity, in other words,
people don't have enough food. The jobs that have been law,
many of them haven't come back and may not come back.
People have burned through their savings trying to keep themselves afloat.
(29:07):
You know, for many people, the American Dream has never
felt more out of reach. That's why I wanted to
talk with economists Roger Chetty. You know, he is the
expert on this issue. Last year, the Atlantic magazine ran
a profile of him called the Economist who Could Fix
(29:28):
the American Dream. Well, that caught my attention, So let's
get right to it. What do we mean, what do
you mean when we talk about the American dream? And
what about it needs fixing? Yeah, So, one way I
think about it just from a personal perspective, I was
(29:49):
a kid who grew up in India until I was
eight years old, uh came to the US at that point,
and the image many people have of America is it's
a place where, no matter what your background is, if
you work hard, you have a shot of making it
that there's kind of no ceiling, right, And to me,
that's at least one key aspect of the American dream.
(30:11):
And so I then think about how do you measure
that in the data? Are we living up to that aspiration?
Are we really a land of opportunity where anyone can
rise up? And one way people have thought about measuring
the concept historically is that America is a place where
most kids can expect to go on to have a
higher standard of living than their parents did. And so
(30:33):
we did a study a couple of years ago where
we tried to measure a very simple statistic, what fraction
of kids go on to earn more than their parents
did when we measure both kids incomes and their parents
incomes in their mid thirties around when they're forty years old.
And what we found, I think was a really disturbing
and worrisome pattern, which is back in the middle of
(30:56):
the last century. If you look at kids born, say
in the nineteen forties or nineteen fifties, of kids went
on to earn more than their parents did. But if
you look at what's happened over time, you see a
dramatic feeding of the American dream. We find that for
kids who are turning thirty today, there's only a fifty
fifty shot of earning more than your parents did. And
(31:18):
so it's that sort of trend that I think animates
my interest in figuring out how you can make America
land of opportunity once again. You were part of a
team that built something called an Opportunity Atlas. I just
love that title, which maps the level of opportunity in
our country literally down to neighborhoods. And part of what's
(31:42):
so remarkable about this Opportunity Atlas is that you can
see just a few streets separate areas where a kid
is likely to grow up and improve his or her
economic status from areas where a kid isn't. What makes
(32:02):
some neighborhoods economically mobile, creating more opportunity and other neighborhoods
less so, and maybe explain how you and your team
were able to aggregate the data that created this opportunity ATLAS, Yeah,
absolutely so. A lot of what we do is using
(32:23):
big data, and so in this case, we used anonymized
information from Census and Social Security and tax data. Information
the government has to be essentially mapped the lives of
millions of kids, tracing their outcomes in adulthood, their levels
of income, college attendance rates, teenage birth rates, things like that,
(32:43):
back to the neighborhoods in which they grew up. And specifically,
what we were able to do analyzing data for twenty
million families is compare kids who grew up in families
at the same income level, and what we calculate is
what are the odds of rising up for the kids,
What are the chances they reached the middle class? What
are the chances they earn you know, more than eighty
(33:05):
thousand or hundred thousand dollars a year in adulthood? And so,
as you noted, you find incredibly large differences across nearby
neighborhoods and that from a social science perspective, is first
of all, useful to note in its own right, because
there's a great deal of effort in the federal government
to try to reduce segregation and help families move to
(33:27):
higher opportunity areas, and this kind of data can be
really useful for supporting that sort of work. But it
can also be useful to your question in understanding what
is it that makes opportunity more available in some neighborhoods
relative to others. And we've looked at a variety of
different factors and basically distill it to three or four
(33:47):
things that seem like systematic strong patterns. So the first
is that more mixed income areas tend to have higher
levels of upward mobility. Uh second major factor is the
availability of social capital. So social capital is kind of
a complicated concept that is a bit hard to define
(34:08):
that the way I think about it is just will
someone else in your community help you out even if
you're not doing well. So as an example, people often
talk about Salt Lake City with the Mormon Church as
an example of a place with a lot of social capital,
And in our data, Salt Lake City looks like a
place where low income kids have great chances of rising up.
(34:28):
A third very important factor, which is intuitive, is the
quality of public schools in an area. And then a
fourth factor, which i'll mention, illustrates. I think the complexity
of the issues is there's a very strong correlation between
rates of upward mobility and measures of family structure. So
areas with more two parent families tend to have higher
(34:49):
rates of upward mobility. But in understanding this, it's very
important to note that it's not literally about whether your
own parents are married or not. Even if your own
parents are married, kids who grow up in areas with
a larger share of single parents tend to be less
likely to climb the income letter. And so the reason
(35:10):
I provide that additional nuances it shows you that the
mechanism is not maybe the first thing lots of people
would think of that it your own parents marital structure
is the critical thing. It's again something about the community
that's getting picked up. There. We'll be right back. You know,
we're in the midst of this nationwide pandemic health crisis.
(35:32):
It's revealed again more inequities and our health care systems,
the job markets, and even education. What do you think
the long term effects of COVID will be on social mobility,
especially on the communities that you've been studying that don't
have a lot of opportunity to spare. So in our team,
(35:55):
the way we've been thinking about COVID, everyone I think
is within how can they contribute to this crisis? And
so our thought was, can we use the big data
approach again to measure the impacts of COVID more rapidly,
in a very precise way. How is it affecting different
people and businesses in America? And in this case, we
found that the best approach was not to turn the
(36:16):
government data, but actually to data from private companies which
have the best real time information on what is happening
in our economies. Let me give you an example. If
you want to see what is happening to consumer spending
in America, get data from companies that process credit and
debit card transactions. So you swipe your credit card, We
(36:37):
collect all of that information and anonymized way, and three
or four days later we have a sense of what
is happening to spending in America. And that is incredibly
valuable because when you look at the sort of data
you can see the effects of various policy changes. So,
for instance, when the stimulus checks went out literally on
April sixteen, relative to April fourteen, you see a huge
(37:00):
uptick in spending, especially for low income folks who were
really strapped for cash. Right. And so with that sort
of real time data from private companies of various types,
we have been studying what is happening to economic outcomes
and economic opportunity in the COVID crisis, And so, you know,
there are lots of issues in the short run, how
do we get Americans back to work, and what is
(37:22):
happening to businesses and so forth. And I'm happy to
talk about that, but I want to tie this back
to the longer term kind of conversation we've been having
on economic opportunity, and I want to share one piece
of data that to me is very alarming. So we've
been tracking data on an online math learning platform called zern,
which about a million students in the US use in
(37:45):
their schools to do math lessons. And we basically look
at what happened when schools shut down to progress on
this platform. And what we find is that for kids
in high income families when schools went to remote instruction,
there was a temporary debt in the amount of progress
they were making, but they very quickly rebounded back to
(38:05):
the levels that they were at when they were in school.
For kids in low income families, you see a sixty
percent drop off in terms of the progress they're making
in math, and there's absolutely no recovery basically, and that
I think is incredibly alarming for all of the reasons
that we've been talking about earlier in the conversation, which
is these early childhood formational years are incredibly important, uh
(38:29):
in determining kids long term outcomes. And my worry is
the COVID crisis is bring to the forefront many of
the inequalities that I think have been a little bit
hidden to many Americans at least, And in a sense,
we're going to be seeing the impacts of this crisis
if we don't respond appropriately, not just in the coming months,
but ten twenty years from now, because of these impacts. Well,
(38:52):
I mean, one of the findings that you have shown
is that you know, a really great kindergarten teacher can
underrate hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings for students.
But because of COVID, kids are not in school, or
if they are, it's kind of a sporadic you know,
we're in, we're out. And it's absolutely clear, as you
(39:16):
pointed out, how this is going to have long term
impacts on low income kids. It will probably creep up
the income ladder somewhat more than you might find at
other times because families aren't able to get back to work, namely,
mothers are not able to get back to work, so
the standard of living drops, plus the education is not
(39:40):
proceeding the way it needs to be. I agree with
you that we we have a lot of long term
problems we're going to have to unpack and then try
to address. But but let me wrap up by asking
you this. I'm hoping for a change in the November
election where we might actually get back to making policy
(40:00):
based on evidence and data and facts and reason and
lots of uh, you know, challenges to that in the
current administration, but we're going to have to really have
an organized effort to move quickly. So, if you were
asked by an incoming administration, Okay, what are the three things,
(40:23):
professor Chetty that we need to do as soon as
we can to try to make up for you know,
not just historic inequity, but the incredibly damaging impact of COVID.
What would be your three most important policy suggestions. Yeah,
so we need to have a solid based in the
(40:45):
short run to be able to build towards long term solutions.
And so the first set of policy efforts that I
would focus on our short term, targeted supports to the
people and the places that have been hard as to
by this crisis to help restore employment at kind of
a basic level. I would then push towards trying to
(41:08):
address what I see as the structural factors that are
leading to the inequalities that are becoming apparent in this crisis. So,
I think one response to what we're seeing in terms
of the educational inequity that we just talked about in
the COVID crisis is, oh, that just happened in the
context of COVID. We need to fix that now, but
then things are going to be fine afterwards. I think
that's the wrong way to look at it. It's actually
(41:31):
a you're seeing at the surface a much deeper problem
that's been around for many, many years, and I think
what we should do is use this as an opportunity
to do something that will be much more trans transformational.
So you know, my one positive hope coming out of
the COVID crisis is in the same way that the
Great Depression, I think was an incredible shock to the country,
(41:55):
it also led to I think a transformative set of
policies that paved the way for an incredible amount of
inclusive growth in America over the next many decades. And
I think this is the moment to try to seize
the opportunity and make a similar effort. And so what
does that then involve? Reducing segregation in America? So that
(42:15):
can be through affordable housing policy, it can be through
zoning changes, the way we collect taxes, and so forth.
Their number of specifics, but I think that is one
major area to focus on. Another major area to focus on,
given that opportunity seems to emerge so locally, is place
based investments. So traditionally when people talk about place based investments,
(42:35):
it's often things like tax credits for businesses or things
focused on the labor market. But as we've been discussing,
the foundations I think are really in the context of childhood.
And so when I think about place based efforts, it's
about how do you provide in specific communities, better schools,
more social capital, and importantly do it in a way
(42:58):
that doesn't just end up raising house prices and creating
gentrification such that the people you were trying to help
end up having to move out. So I think that's
a second major area of focus. And then third, uh
the universities that provide important pathways to opportunity for many folks.
There's I think another crisis in America playing out there
(43:20):
where there are many colleges that produce good outcomes for
kids but are inaccessible to kids from lower income backgrounds,
either because they can't afford it, or because those colleges
for various reasons, are not admitting as many kids from
low income backgrounds. And so I think a push towards
essentially making your contribution to social mobility a key factor
(43:42):
that determines how a college is regarded, perhaps even how
much funding federal funding college gets. I think is is
another important area for focus. So, you know, just to
provide some perspective that those may seem like things that
are not directly about COVID, but I think that longer
term perspective is incredibly important combined with short run solutions. Well,
(44:06):
I agree completely and that longer term perspective combined with
the short term solutions, is one of the ways I
hope that we can work together as a nation to
revitalize the American Dream. And if we lose the idea
and the reality of the American dream, we really do
see a continuing fraying of our social fabric in ways
(44:29):
that I know distress you and certainly distress me. So
thank you, rog Please keep up your extraordinary commitment to
helping us understand how we can actually improve opportunity in
America for many, many more Americans. Thank you so much,
my pleasure. You can learn more about Roger's projects and
(44:52):
find lots of cool maps and data visualization at Opportunity
Insights dot org. Well that's it for this week's show.
You and Me Both is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
We're produced by Julie Supran and Kathleen Russo, with help
from Whoma Aberdeen, Nikki e Tour, Oscar Flores, Brianna Johnson,
(45:18):
Nick Merrill, Lauren Peterson, Rob Russo and Lona Valmorrow. Our
engineer is Zack McNeice and the original music is by
Forest Gray. Our podcast is recorded on the riverside platform,
and a big thanks to the Riverside team for they're
helping make a podcast during a pandemic. If you like
(45:41):
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And while you're there, please leave us a review. We'd
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(46:04):
or your best fashion advice. Do You and Me both
pod at gmail dot com. Come back next week when
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America Ferrara, the Unbelievable Glennon Doyle, The Dynamics Orlina Maxwell,
(46:25):
and more, Let's win this thing together.
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
Do I hope that in your spare time you hung
around in sweats? Yes? I do? Well, Yeah I am,
I am okay, But yeah, I thought it was so
appropriate and you made more of an effort than I've
ever seen any money necessarily make in those situations, and
(00:21):
I really appreciated it. I'm Hillary Clinton, and this is
You and Me Both, where I get into some of
today's biggest questions with people I admire. On today's episode,
we're talking about the American Dream. What exactly do we
mean when we say that? And is it still possible
to achieve? You know, I think the American dream is
(00:44):
still achievable, but I think we have our eyes wide
open about how hard it is for so many people.
There are all kinds of obstacles that have to be
overcommon individual lives. And I'm interested not only in that,
but also what do we need to do to change
our economy and our society and our culture and our
mindset to make sure more people have a chance to
(01:08):
fulfill whatever they think is their American Dream. So I'm
talking to three people today. Lorella pray Lee is a
former dreamer. She's an advocate for immigrants and low income
Americans and has an amazing story. Raj Chetty is an
economist who studies opportunity. In other words, how do we
(01:30):
help more people fulfill their dreams? What needs to be
done to make that happen? But first, Tan France Now
you Know. Tan is the fashion expert on Netflix's Queer Eye,
which was rebooted in Team You Know. It's a really
(01:51):
fun and heartwarming show. In each episode, Tan and the
rest of the Fab five team hit the road to
spend time with someone who is pursuing their dream or
just trying to get by, and to give them a
little boost. This show has made Tan a household name.
He's one of the first openly gay South Asian and
(02:14):
Muslim men on TV in the United States, and as
you'll hear, he is completely charming. He lives in Salt
Lake City, Utah, with his husband Rob and their two kids.
He's author of the memoir Naturally Tan, I love that title.
There were so many reasons why I wanted to talk
(02:34):
to him about the American dream. He recently became a
US citizen, and because he spends so much time helping
people live their own dreams, he has some pretty good
insight into what it takes to, you know, have the
American dream in the twenty one century. You know, let
me start by congratulating you, because I know you became
(02:56):
a US citizen this past June. I should what did
that feel like? You know, I don't think I've still
quite possessed it. I've been working on this for so long.
I wanted to be an American citizen pretty much my
whole life. Since I was a little boy and I
was sat there watching American TV. I dreamt of this,
and so the moment that it happened, I was so
(03:18):
overcome with emotion that all I could do was eat
donuts because that was the most American thing I could
think of. I went to the donut shop down the
street and eight donuts, and that was my version of
being a true American. Well, I think that's a very
American response, you know, to the emotion of the you know,
of the minute. Um, Where were you actually sworn in
(03:40):
in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is where I live
right now. Well, now, explain how you went from New
York to Salt Lake What was that connection? Well? I
never heard of Utah, and quite honestly, when I tell
my friends and family in England, they have no idea
where it might be on the map. And so I
was living in New York. I had a housemate who
was from Salt Lake City, Utah, and he suggested that
(04:01):
I go and visit. And I had no idea what
it might be like, what it might look like. It
sounded very country, and I was surprised to see that
they have a proper city, and I fell in love
with the city pretty much immediately. Within an hour, I
decided I was going to make this my home. Was
there something about Salt Lake that you felt connected to
(04:22):
because of your you know, growing up in different cultures
and different countries. You grew up in Britain, your parents
or immigrants from Pakistan, you were raised Muslim. How did
it come to be that going to Salt Lake, well
known as a beautiful cosmopolitan city but also the home
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
(04:46):
became the magnet for you. I don't know how honest
you would like me to be. If it spent to
be light hospital, I'm going to give you my deep,
deep Okay, So my honest, honest answer is this, so
you sin that I was a child of immigrants. I am.
My parents came from Pakistan and Kashmir, India, respectively, and
(05:07):
I was raised in the UK. And I don't know
what experience you have with the South Asian community in
the UK, but we are kind of seen as second
lass citizens in that you wouldn't really take us home
to meet your parents. If you were to date us,
it wouldn't We would be the undesirable dating community. And
that was definitely the case when I was a kid,
(05:29):
and especially after nine eleven and I was seven team
and nine eleven happened. And so when I came to Utah,
the reason why I seven in the first hour is
because we went to a restaurant. I didn't know what
it was at the time, but it turned out to
be Chili's. And within an hour or so, I had
had so many people just smile and ask where I
(05:49):
was from, and somebody here on me during that time,
and I had never experienced anything like it where my
call at the color of my skin and my ethnicity
seemed to be the thing that made people want to
get to know me as opposed to make people not
want to talk to me. And that thought so special. Oh,
that's so interesting, and that was like almost immediate immediate.
(06:12):
I really wanted to ask you. You know, this is
not our nation's brightest moment. We are struggling with, you know,
so much turmoil and so many challenges. What do I
feel like officially to become an American at this pretty
messy and divisive time? You know? I my husband asked me.
(06:33):
My husband's name is Rob, and he asked me the
same question. He said, does it feel weird after wanting
this your whole life to get to the point where
you are are now an American citizen? And we actually
do have a lot to be ashamed of? And I
say that as a true patriot. I and I do
class myself as a patriot. Even though I'm an immigrant.
I fought my whole life to be able to live here.
(06:55):
I love this country, truly, I do, and it's sad
that I became and during this time. However, I've always
been an incredibly optimistic person my whole life. The thing
that actually drives many people crazy is that I always
see hope, even though sometimes I probably isn't very much. However,
even now I see true hope, and so for me.
(07:17):
I was excited to be able to vote this year.
I thought, what better year than to get my citizenship
when I can finally vote and encourage people to vote.
And I've been encouraging people to vote for quite some time,
but it didn't really mean enough when I wasn't able
to vote myself and to say, I mean it with you.
And so the way I see is, yes, it was
a very strange year to become a citizen. However, I
(07:38):
will forever remember it as the first time I voted
was a time when I desperately wanted my vote to
be here. Absolutely. Well. You know, since um, you've had
the opportunity to criss cross our country. You have been
all over America. You've met Americans. Oh wow, So you
you really are talking with people literally on the ground,
(08:02):
and you're having very personal conversations. I mean when you,
you know, hold up somebody's pajamas and say, you know,
you're not gonna have sex in these pajamas, and the
stuff that you tell them, Um, you know, you're really
in their lives in a way that most of us
never get a chance to be. So how has that
affected your feelings about you know, both the country and
(08:25):
you know your place in it. It's been interesting going
to places I've never been before. Within this country. I
had lived here for ten years or nine years at
the time when I got the job, and open to
that point, i'd probably visited three or four states. I
felt like I knew that you talking men too well enough.
The New York I been too well enough. But going
across the country has really opened my eyes, not just
(08:48):
with where I go to universities across the country and
do speaking engagements and speak with college students who are
at that impressionable age and talk about what they're going through.
And it's been interest in learning what has happened with
their lives since two thousand eighteen. And it feels like
so many people have fed up, they feel stuck in
(09:08):
what they don't feel hid and that has been the
most common interaction we've had with people, is that they
don't feel seeing, they don't feel loved enough. That really
resonates with me because I think when you sort of
strip it all down, um, loving and being loved is
at the core of the you know, human experience, and
(09:30):
you see that with the people that you're working with
and that you're visiting with. Do you get the sense
that this divisiveness that we see in the country can
be reconciled and healed with different attitudes, not just from leaders,
but from all of us. I would like to believe.
So I think that what Netflix did super well. And
(09:50):
if this isn't just a sales pitch for Netflix, that
believe me. I just truly believe they did this very well.
They decided that they were going to bring back where
I time when we knew that things were going to
become more divided than they have been in a very
long time, and so Netflix saw our community as the bridge.
We get to speak with people in a way that
(10:12):
most people aren't afforded. For example, I can speak with
women without them feeling bettened at all by me. I
can speak with men without them worrying that we might
be trying to get their women or trying to compete
for their job. We are a community that they're not
majorly threatened by, and they're willing to open up to us,
and we use our skills, which are very personal, as
a vehicle to be able to have conversations. And so
(10:35):
we are in a very fudge position where people will
open up to us. More so than they would most
other people. When I'm in somebody's closet and I'm seeing
them in their underwear, they are in their most vulnerable state.
I can ask them pretty much anything at that point
and they'll likely answer. I think that that timing was crucial.
Netflix saw us as the bridge between the Democrats and Republicans,
(10:57):
quite honestly, and we went in with the mission we
wanted to meet as many people who didn't sing from
our hymn sheet that the people who had no interest
ordinarily in hearing outside of the story. But when you're
in your underwear, and you're probably more likely to tell
me what you think because I've got you trapped, And
that feels very special, and we put a face to
(11:18):
what people may see as a threat. They don't understand
our community, and the five of us represent many communities,
and so they get a personal interaction with a person
that they've probably never spoken to before. And so I'm
able to say to somebody, when you vote for somebody
like Trump, you are voting against me, You're voting against
(11:41):
my people, you voting against everything that we represent. So
it's not just a blind vote for a Republican. And
I think that's My biggest concern with a lot of
Americans who vote, they will vote for whoever it is,
as long as it's their party. And I will never
understand that. I don't think most Brits vote that way.
If we don't like somebody, we're not going to vote
with them, regardless of whether there are patty or not.
(12:03):
And I wish that we had more of that mentality here,
and so I feel the opportunity that we have with
Queer I is to have those conversations and say, I
am the person you're actually voting against. Here we're taking
a quick break. Stay with us. When you think about,
you know, Queer I and being part of it now,
it's so much more than a makeover. It really is
(12:27):
about meeting people where they are, giving them a boost,
trying to give them some sense of meaning and purpose
and even a financial boost. And I really love what
the Fab five does for these folks that you meet,
but it also kind of makes me sad that there
are so many millions of people who will never meet you.
(12:50):
Maybe they'll get you vicariously by watching the program. So
have you thought about, you know, if you could waive
the proverbial magic wand what are a couple of things
that you think could be changed that would help more
people than you'll ever possibly be able to get to.
The one thing for me personally that I try to
communicate as much as possible wherever ever I am, whether
(13:11):
it be in person, on the show or if I'm
doing TV, and I will always try and put this
one agenda. All the things that we're offering are just
as I've mentioned, for a vehicle to have a conversation
and to really encourage a certain kind of self esteem
in a person and to encourage them to see themselves
as better than they believe they are. And the main
(13:32):
thing I want people to take away is that we
are incredibly mean to ourselves when we look in the mirror.
The things that we think about ourselves are seldom things
that people are thinking of us. And so to look
in the mirror and remind ourselves and the things that
are actually wonderful about us, the reason why we have
friends and family who love us. I want people to
realize that those things are so much more important than
(13:55):
the new wardrobe I might give them, all the new
sofa that Bobby might give them. They're just the things
that make a good TV show our show is reminding
them that they are so much more than they think
they are, and so we're just kind of holding up
a merrit to them and saying, look at you. I
want you to tell me, basically, in a nutshell, what
(14:15):
you think that everybody else sees in you that you
clearly don't. Why do people love you? There's a reason why.
But you went through that whole process yourself. I mean
your memoir, naturally, Tan, you know, talks about your struggles
and your conflicts and your doubts, and you know, very
personal aspects of how you became who you are today.
(14:35):
I mean, we see you, We see the confidence, the optimism,
the joy in your life. But it wasn't always like that,
was it. No. I think if anybody ever suggests that
they have always been happy and that there's never a
time when they've suffered hardship, I just wouldn't believe it.
I think to get to the point where you can
be as optimistic as I am, you have to have
(14:57):
seen some bad things and experienced a lot. Then you
you've overcome it, and you've overcome it through great strength.
It does require great strength. There were times when I
struggled with my businesses. When I first moved to America,
I started my business as it was the American dream
that I was desperate to fulfill, and I did. But
it didn't get to that point without a few years
(15:17):
of hallacious hard work and as a child going through
the racism that we went through so regularly, and just
then that there was light of the tunnel. Even though
somebody may not have liked us for our skin color
or religion, my sexuality, there was still so much more
that I liked about myself, even if those strangers couldn't
see it. And so that is the message I desperately
(15:38):
want to push forward on the likes of CERA or
any platform I have, is that yes, people may throw stones,
but the one thing I say to everyone, I refused
to be the reason I'm unhappy. No matter what has
gone on in my life, I refused to be the
reason I'm unhappy. They can say what they want. I
have more control of my feelings than they do, and
so I will find a way to make myself happy. Man,
(16:00):
and I just have to thank you for being naturally
you and talking with me today. I hope we get
to meet in person at some point whenever the pandemic.
We can I encrupt you. Go right ahead, Dan, I
know that people, many people had their opinions on what
(16:21):
you are during your campaign. I am not just saying
this because I've adored you for my whole life. You
looked wonderful. Here's the thing. I will mention this also,
it didn't matter. It shouldn't matter. Trump turned up looking
like a joke every time, and nobody seem to care
that much. But you clearly made an effort. I love
(16:42):
that you did so many times the full modoco look
where you would go for a full blue or a
full whatever. But I thought you looked regal almost. Do
I hope that in your spare time you hung around
in sweats? Yes, I do, but going okay, but yeah,
I thought it was so appropriate and you made more
(17:05):
of an effort that I've ever seen any money necessarily
make in those situations. And I really appreciated it. Thank you,
Thank you, I love you even more. Tan France is
the author of Naturally Tan, a memoir. Season six of
Queer Eye, which will be filmed in Austin, Texas, one
(17:27):
of my favorite American cities is on hold due to
the pandemic. But you can watch the most recent season,
as well as his other show Next in Fashion on Netflix. Now,
I'll be talking to Lorella pray Lee. Lorella is a
dreamer who became a US citizen and she's an incredible organizer.
(17:50):
I can speak from experience. I was lucky enough to
have her working on my twenty sixteen presidential campaign and
she was everywhere. No matter where I went, there she was.
She just has a natural ability to draw people to
her to the causes that she is advocating. She was
(18:12):
born in Peru. Her parents brought her to the United
States as a very young child for medical treatments, and
you're going to hear about that now. At just thirty
two years old, she's president of Community Change, an organization
that empowers low income Americans to fight for a more
(18:32):
just future for themselves, their children, and generations to come.
As you're about to hear, Lurella is a kind of
person who makes you want to get up and go
out and change the world. Hello, Corella, how are you? Lorella?
I am so excited to talk with you. It's been
(18:54):
way too long. You are always on the front lines
of trying to help people and trying to make change.
Ange and maybe you could just give our listeners a
little background of you know, how you ended up in
the United States, and uh, you know what your life
was like here. Yeah. I had a car accident when
I was two and a half and that resulted in
(19:16):
the amputation of my right leg. So for many years,
we actually did a lot of trips between Peru and
the States. And then my family decided to move here
when I was ten years old. And I grew up
in Connecticut, in New Melford, Connecticut. Of all the places
my parents could have picked, that was their choice, you know.
And then I got here and I was a young
(19:37):
brown girl with one leg um navigating the world in
a different language. And I then found out I was undocumented.
You know, it didn't come until later. So it's been
a lot of ups and downs, but I would say
all of my downs have come with a tremendous opportunity
to learn. Do you remember the moment when you learned
(19:59):
you were undocumented and what that meant to you? I
think it happened around your desire to apply for college, right,
I mean it was it was devastating. I actually think
I knew that I was undocumented long before I internalized
what that meant. And I had had many conversations with
(20:22):
my mother where I asked, you know, well, how come
I can't do this, or how come we can't do this?
And she would always say, oh, it's you know, you
can't get a driver's license because you can't drive because
of your leg I think really it was her way
of protecting me. And when I found out I was undocumented,
it was devastating. For that moment, and I would say
(20:43):
for the next several years, I carried a lot of shame.
I was really embarrassed and I was afraid. It was
almost as if I thought that I was walking around
and you know, I carried a label that said undocumented
on my forehead. And you know, I remember I was driving.
Anytime I drove and a police car showed up behind me,
(21:05):
I would just my whole body, would my whole this
whole state and physiology of my body would change. And
I would very nervously begin to think about when is
when is the earliest turn that I could make where
the police would not follow me? And what about becoming
a dreamer? Talk about you know, the movement, the dream act.
(21:26):
You know, I walked into a room at a field
planning meeting that United we Dream, the largest immigrant youth
let network where I spent a good really was my
first political home in this country. And a lot of
young people were wearing these shirts that said undocumented and unafraid,
and I was just looking at them, like, I don't
know what world you're living in. I am very much
(21:49):
undocumented and I am very afraid. And I learned there
that organizing is the art of the possible, and to
believe that, even though there were many people who have
been fighting on our behalf and telling our stories, that
if we wanted to change the laws in this country,
if we wanted to fight for citizenship for everyone, then
(22:10):
we had to step into our full power and our
full truth, reject the stories that had been told about us,
and begin to paint a different narrative. I know that
you know, you got married in you got your green card,
You were then among the group sworn in as American
citizens by President Obama in during this time that you
(22:36):
were undocumented, and now, of course as an American citizen,
how have you thought of yourself as an American and
how have you understood the American dream? How has it
how has it been defined for you? And buy you.
So to me, the most powerful part of the American
dream is the way that it challenges each one of
(22:59):
us to reshape and reimagine what our country can be.
And so, you know, I think being American is realizing
that the truth that this country holds might be self evident,
but they are not self executing. How do we look
at America every day and say I will not settle
(23:21):
for that because I know another world is possible. To me,
that is really the American dream. And the fact that
I get to do that as someone who was not
born here but who is committed to making all of
these things real, that maybe that is only possible in
a place like the United States. It's important to keep
(23:41):
the movement going, to keep the organizing going, to make
the case even if people get discouraged or disappointed, to
persuade them not to give up. So what are you
seeing out there? Oh man? Um? We are living through
a really hard period right now, nearly for intent Black
(24:02):
and Hispanic households right now with children are struggling to
feed their families, and so that is consuming people's minds
because parents are having to make very hard choices about
how to make sure that they can stay in their apartment,
how to make sure that they can feed their families,
And to me, all of these things are a policy choice.
(24:26):
Mass unemployment is a policy choice. Right food and security
is a policy choice. Mass evictions is a policy choice.
And so I think that people are living through and
we are going to continue to lift through this very
hard period. And I also feel like there's a tremendous
amount of hope. You have always epitomized that to me,
(24:46):
and you shared a story in the past about how
when you lost your leg in that accident when you
were a two year old, your parents told people not
to help you. My dad Yeah, um, your dad said,
you know no, she's going to stand up on her own.
She's going to get around on her own. And somehow
in my head I see this analogy because these days,
(25:10):
staying strong and telling people stay strong and keep going
and let's try to make a big change is quite
an ask. That Trump administration has done so much to
insult and undermine and demean immigrants, separating kids at the border,
(25:31):
restricting DOCCA, demonizing people list obviously goes on and on.
So how do you personally find the strength to get
back up every day? Keep going, keep fighting, and keep
using your extraordinary voice and example to convince others to
(25:52):
do that with you. I mean, part of me believes
that some of it was my father's training from when
I was very little, that the you you can do
this exercise every time I fell, and I felt a
lot when I was learning how to walk with a
prosthetic leg, when I was moving around with crutches when
I was little. I remember, in particular, a moment when
(26:12):
we were at maybe it was a carnival, and I
fell and one of my shoes also fell off, and
I was I was in a lot of pain, and
all of these people were rushing towards me, you know,
to help me up, and he just sort of he
had this motion, just sort of pushed people away just
by looking at them and moving his hand. And I
(26:32):
was angry. I was angry that he didn't help me up,
And you know, I think about it now and I'm
just grateful, you know, I think that it was lessons
learned for the future, and those lessons learned we're about
remembering that in life, we are going to fall, and
we're going to get up, and we're going to fall again,
and you're going to get up again. Um now we
(26:54):
we can make the getting up easier. And that's what
gives me hope. This believe that there's the world as
it should be, and then there was the world as
it is, and we as organizers, we as people, if
we vote, if we make our voices heard, we can
play a role in closing that gap, the gap that
(27:15):
exists between the world as it should be in the
world as it is, and in this time in particular,
because of all that the pandemic has exposed. My dream
is that we take the pain and the fear and
the anguish that so many people are feeling right now,
particularly in black, brown and immigrant communities, and that we
(27:36):
use that to create an America where people feel seen
and heard and where everyone can thrive. And if we
believe that that is possible, then we can fight to
overturn all these structural barriers that have been put in place,
and we could make it easier for people to stand
up after they fall, because that is a part of life.
(27:59):
I love that, Lorella. I am in your corner. I'm
one of your biggest fans and admirers, and uh, I
just can't wait to see what you do next. Keep
that energy, keep that optimism, keep that sense of hopefulness
in the face of setbacks, because it's contagious when people
see you do it and then they feel like I'm
(28:21):
going to do it too. So thank you, my friend,
Thank you for talking to me today. Thank you for
more information on the organization that Lorella leads, Community Change,
and the work they're doing on voter engagement, immigrant rights,
and affordable childcare. Please visit community change dot org. Tan
(28:46):
and Lorella each have their own American Dream success stories,
but at the same time, lots of Americans are struggling
just to get by. There's food insecurity, in other words,
people don't have enough food. The jobs that have been law,
many of them haven't come back and may not come back.
People have burned through their savings trying to keep themselves afloat.
(29:07):
You know, for many people, the American Dream has never
felt more out of reach. That's why I wanted to
talk with economists Roger Chetty. You know, he is the
expert on this issue. Last year, the Atlantic magazine ran
a profile of him called the Economist who Could Fix
(29:28):
the American Dream. Well, that caught my attention, So let's
get right to it. What do we mean, what do
you mean when we talk about the American dream? And
what about it needs fixing? Yeah, So, one way I
think about it just from a personal perspective, I was
(29:49):
a kid who grew up in India until I was
eight years old, uh came to the US at that point,
and the image many people have of America is it's
a place where, no matter what your background is, if
you work hard, you have a shot of making it
that there's kind of no ceiling, right, And to me,
that's at least one key aspect of the American dream.
(30:11):
And so I then think about how do you measure
that in the data? Are we living up to that aspiration?
Are we really a land of opportunity where anyone can
rise up? And one way people have thought about measuring
the concept historically is that America is a place where
most kids can expect to go on to have a
higher standard of living than their parents did. And so
(30:33):
we did a study a couple of years ago where
we tried to measure a very simple statistic, what fraction
of kids go on to earn more than their parents
did when we measure both kids incomes and their parents
incomes in their mid thirties around when they're forty years old.
And what we found, I think was a really disturbing
and worrisome pattern, which is back in the middle of
(30:56):
the last century. If you look at kids born, say
in the nineteen forties or nineteen fifties, of kids went
on to earn more than their parents did. But if
you look at what's happened over time, you see a
dramatic feeding of the American dream. We find that for
kids who are turning thirty today, there's only a fifty
fifty shot of earning more than your parents did. And
(31:18):
so it's that sort of trend that I think animates
my interest in figuring out how you can make America
land of opportunity once again. You were part of a
team that built something called an Opportunity Atlas. I just
love that title, which maps the level of opportunity in
our country literally down to neighborhoods. And part of what's
(31:42):
so remarkable about this Opportunity Atlas is that you can
see just a few streets separate areas where a kid
is likely to grow up and improve his or her
economic status from areas where a kid isn't. What makes
(32:02):
some neighborhoods economically mobile, creating more opportunity and other neighborhoods
less so, and maybe explain how you and your team
were able to aggregate the data that created this opportunity ATLAS, Yeah,
absolutely so. A lot of what we do is using
(32:23):
big data, and so in this case, we used anonymized
information from Census and Social Security and tax data. Information
the government has to be essentially mapped the lives of
millions of kids, tracing their outcomes in adulthood, their levels
of income, college attendance rates, teenage birth rates, things like that,
(32:43):
back to the neighborhoods in which they grew up. And specifically,
what we were able to do analyzing data for twenty
million families is compare kids who grew up in families
at the same income level, and what we calculate is
what are the odds of rising up for the kids,
What are the chances they reached the middle class? What
are the chances they earn you know, more than eighty
(33:05):
thousand or hundred thousand dollars a year in adulthood? And so,
as you noted, you find incredibly large differences across nearby
neighborhoods and that from a social science perspective, is first
of all, useful to note in its own right, because
there's a great deal of effort in the federal government
to try to reduce segregation and help families move to
(33:27):
higher opportunity areas, and this kind of data can be
really useful for supporting that sort of work. But it
can also be useful to your question in understanding what
is it that makes opportunity more available in some neighborhoods
relative to others. And we've looked at a variety of
different factors and basically distill it to three or four
(33:47):
things that seem like systematic strong patterns. So the first
is that more mixed income areas tend to have higher
levels of upward mobility. Uh second major factor is the
availability of social capital. So social capital is kind of
a complicated concept that is a bit hard to define
(34:08):
that the way I think about it is just will
someone else in your community help you out even if
you're not doing well. So as an example, people often
talk about Salt Lake City with the Mormon Church as
an example of a place with a lot of social capital,
And in our data, Salt Lake City looks like a
place where low income kids have great chances of rising up.
(34:28):
A third very important factor, which is intuitive, is the
quality of public schools in an area. And then a
fourth factor, which i'll mention, illustrates. I think the complexity
of the issues is there's a very strong correlation between
rates of upward mobility and measures of family structure. So
areas with more two parent families tend to have higher
(34:49):
rates of upward mobility. But in understanding this, it's very
important to note that it's not literally about whether your
own parents are married or not. Even if your own
parents are married, kids who grow up in areas with
a larger share of single parents tend to be less
likely to climb the income letter. And so the reason
(35:10):
I provide that additional nuances it shows you that the
mechanism is not maybe the first thing lots of people
would think of that it your own parents marital structure
is the critical thing. It's again something about the community
that's getting picked up. There. We'll be right back. You know,
we're in the midst of this nationwide pandemic health crisis.
(35:32):
It's revealed again more inequities and our health care systems,
the job markets, and even education. What do you think
the long term effects of COVID will be on social mobility,
especially on the communities that you've been studying that don't
have a lot of opportunity to spare. So in our team,
(35:55):
the way we've been thinking about COVID, everyone I think
is within how can they contribute to this crisis? And
so our thought was, can we use the big data
approach again to measure the impacts of COVID more rapidly,
in a very precise way. How is it affecting different
people and businesses in America? And in this case, we
found that the best approach was not to turn the
(36:16):
government data, but actually to data from private companies which
have the best real time information on what is happening
in our economies. Let me give you an example. If
you want to see what is happening to consumer spending
in America, get data from companies that process credit and
debit card transactions. So you swipe your credit card, We
(36:37):
collect all of that information and anonymized way, and three
or four days later we have a sense of what
is happening to spending in America. And that is incredibly
valuable because when you look at the sort of data
you can see the effects of various policy changes. So,
for instance, when the stimulus checks went out literally on
April sixteen, relative to April fourteen, you see a huge
(37:00):
uptick in spending, especially for low income folks who were
really strapped for cash. Right. And so with that sort
of real time data from private companies of various types,
we have been studying what is happening to economic outcomes
and economic opportunity in the COVID crisis, And so, you know,
there are lots of issues in the short run, how
do we get Americans back to work, and what is
(37:22):
happening to businesses and so forth. And I'm happy to
talk about that, but I want to tie this back
to the longer term kind of conversation we've been having
on economic opportunity, and I want to share one piece
of data that to me is very alarming. So we've
been tracking data on an online math learning platform called zern,
which about a million students in the US use in
(37:45):
their schools to do math lessons. And we basically look
at what happened when schools shut down to progress on
this platform. And what we find is that for kids
in high income families when schools went to remote instruction,
there was a temporary debt in the amount of progress
they were making, but they very quickly rebounded back to
(38:05):
the levels that they were at when they were in school.
For kids in low income families, you see a sixty
percent drop off in terms of the progress they're making
in math, and there's absolutely no recovery basically, and that
I think is incredibly alarming for all of the reasons
that we've been talking about earlier in the conversation, which
is these early childhood formational years are incredibly important, uh
(38:29):
in determining kids long term outcomes. And my worry is
the COVID crisis is bring to the forefront many of
the inequalities that I think have been a little bit
hidden to many Americans at least, And in a sense,
we're going to be seeing the impacts of this crisis
if we don't respond appropriately, not just in the coming months,
but ten twenty years from now, because of these impacts. Well,
(38:52):
I mean, one of the findings that you have shown
is that you know, a really great kindergarten teacher can
underrate hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings for students.
But because of COVID, kids are not in school, or
if they are, it's kind of a sporadic you know,
we're in, we're out. And it's absolutely clear, as you
(39:16):
pointed out, how this is going to have long term
impacts on low income kids. It will probably creep up
the income ladder somewhat more than you might find at
other times because families aren't able to get back to work, namely,
mothers are not able to get back to work, so
the standard of living drops, plus the education is not
(39:40):
proceeding the way it needs to be. I agree with
you that we we have a lot of long term
problems we're going to have to unpack and then try
to address. But but let me wrap up by asking
you this. I'm hoping for a change in the November
election where we might actually get back to making policy
(40:00):
based on evidence and data and facts and reason and
lots of uh, you know, challenges to that in the
current administration, but we're going to have to really have
an organized effort to move quickly. So, if you were
asked by an incoming administration, Okay, what are the three things,
(40:23):
professor Chetty that we need to do as soon as
we can to try to make up for you know,
not just historic inequity, but the incredibly damaging impact of COVID.
What would be your three most important policy suggestions. Yeah,
so we need to have a solid based in the
(40:45):
short run to be able to build towards long term solutions.
And so the first set of policy efforts that I
would focus on our short term, targeted supports to the
people and the places that have been hard as to
by this crisis to help restore employment at kind of
a basic level. I would then push towards trying to
(41:08):
address what I see as the structural factors that are
leading to the inequalities that are becoming apparent in this crisis. So,
I think one response to what we're seeing in terms
of the educational inequity that we just talked about in
the COVID crisis is, oh, that just happened in the
context of COVID. We need to fix that now, but
then things are going to be fine afterwards. I think
that's the wrong way to look at it. It's actually
(41:31):
a you're seeing at the surface a much deeper problem
that's been around for many, many years, and I think
what we should do is use this as an opportunity
to do something that will be much more trans transformational.
So you know, my one positive hope coming out of
the COVID crisis is in the same way that the
Great Depression, I think was an incredible shock to the country,
(41:55):
it also led to I think a transformative set of
policies that paved the way for an incredible amount of
inclusive growth in America over the next many decades. And
I think this is the moment to try to seize
the opportunity and make a similar effort. And so what
does that then involve? Reducing segregation in America? So that
(42:15):
can be through affordable housing policy, it can be through
zoning changes, the way we collect taxes, and so forth.
Their number of specifics, but I think that is one
major area to focus on. Another major area to focus on,
given that opportunity seems to emerge so locally, is place
based investments. So traditionally when people talk about place based investments,
(42:35):
it's often things like tax credits for businesses or things
focused on the labor market. But as we've been discussing,
the foundations I think are really in the context of childhood.
And so when I think about place based efforts, it's
about how do you provide in specific communities, better schools,
more social capital, and importantly do it in a way
(42:58):
that doesn't just end up raising house prices and creating
gentrification such that the people you were trying to help
end up having to move out. So I think that's
a second major area of focus. And then third, uh
the universities that provide important pathways to opportunity for many folks.
There's I think another crisis in America playing out there
(43:20):
where there are many colleges that produce good outcomes for
kids but are inaccessible to kids from lower income backgrounds,
either because they can't afford it, or because those colleges
for various reasons, are not admitting as many kids from
low income backgrounds. And so I think a push towards
essentially making your contribution to social mobility a key factor
(43:42):
that determines how a college is regarded, perhaps even how
much funding federal funding college gets. I think is is
another important area for focus. So, you know, just to
provide some perspective that those may seem like things that
are not directly about COVID, but I think that longer
term perspective is incredibly important combined with short run solutions. Well,
(44:06):
I agree completely and that longer term perspective combined with
the short term solutions, is one of the ways I
hope that we can work together as a nation to
revitalize the American Dream. And if we lose the idea
and the reality of the American dream, we really do
see a continuing fraying of our social fabric in ways
(44:29):
that I know distress you and certainly distress me. So
thank you, rog Please keep up your extraordinary commitment to
helping us understand how we can actually improve opportunity in
America for many, many more Americans. Thank you so much,
my pleasure. You can learn more about Roger's projects and
(44:52):
find lots of cool maps and data visualization at Opportunity
Insights dot org. Well that's it for this week's show.
You and Me Both is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
We're produced by Julie Supran and Kathleen Russo, with help
from Whoma Aberdeen, Nikki e Tour, Oscar Flores, Brianna Johnson,
(45:18):
Nick Merrill, Lauren Peterson, Rob Russo and Lona Valmorrow. Our
engineer is Zack McNeice and the original music is by
Forest Gray. Our podcast is recorded on the riverside platform,
and a big thanks to the Riverside team for they're
helping make a podcast during a pandemic. If you like
(45:41):
this episode, how about telling someone else about it or
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And while you're there, please leave us a review. We'd
love to hear from you. Send us your questions, your comments,
(46:04):
or your best fashion advice. Do You and Me both
pod at gmail dot com. Come back next week when
we're going to hold your hand and help you get
through this election day. Along with my special co host
America Ferrara, the Unbelievable Glennon Doyle, The Dynamics Orlina Maxwell,
(46:25):
and more, Let's win this thing together.
Host
Hillary Clinton
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