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Indivisibles,

Welcome to the monthly Leah and Ezra newsletter, where we take a step back
and talk about what we’re grappling with.

This monthly letter is fully dedicated to a book you need to read -- The
Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, former head of Demos (and a founding member
of Indivisible’s board!).

Heather spent years analyzing how racism has been used to strategically
divide Americans, what racism has cost us all, and what’s possible when we
refuse to be divided. Her book opens with a simple, haunting question:
“Why can’t we have nice things?”

The drained pool

At the center of Heather’s book is the story of public pools in America.
You may know -- I certainly didn’t -- that we used to have a network of
thousands of enormous, beautiful public pools across the country. These
community institutions were often built with public investment during the
New Deal. For decades, they were reserved for white people. As
desegregation progressed, cities and towns overwhelmingly made the choice
to fill in, abandon, or privatize the public pools rather than allow them
to be shared with Black people.

This is, first and foremost, a story of anti-Black oppression. But it’s
also a story about what racism costs everyone. It’s a story about how our
political imagination has been limited, because for generations, so many
of us white people have chosen to go without rather than to share.

Drained pools are everywhere - and that suits the rich just fine

Once you’ve heard the story of the drained pools, you start to see it
constantly in American life. You feel it in the things we don’t have -- a
real social safety net, universal health insurance, good jobs, childcare,
or eldercare.

You hear it in the racially coded appeals that Republicans and some
Democrats (hi, Joe Manchin!) used to dismiss, undermine, and often
successfully destroy the idea of universal programs. You see it in the
racist attacks that regularly form the center of the Republican message.

Because, as Heather notes, this doesn’t happen accidentally. Racism is
weaponized, and stoked, and used strategically to undermine the
possibility of public goods or cross-race solidarity. Someone benefits
from hollowing out public life. When the public pools are drained, or the
public schools are gutted, the rich get to keep their taxes low. When
faith in government and collective action is destroyed, corporations can
rake in profits, evade regulations, and crush worker power.

The drained pool of democracy

At Indivisible, we think a lot about why our democracy is under threat and
what could make it truly inclusive and functional. Heather’s book offers a
historical frame for the arc that we’re living through.

Our democracy is young. It began not in 1776 but in 1965 with the Voting
Rights Act, which finally guaranteed, at least on paper, the right for all
to vote. The lost era of bipartisanship, so often fetishized by pundits in
Washington, was rooted in the exclusion of whole classes of people from
the halls of power. It’s a lot easier to agree on things if everyone at
the table is a rich, white man. Now that those halls of power are a bit
more diverse, voices that had long been excluded are being heard -- and
not everyone’s happy about that.

As our democracy becomes more diverse and more representative, there’s a
backlash, just like the backlash to desegregation. Our first Black
president faced a rise in white grievance politics, first in the form of
the Tea Party and then in the rise of Donald Trump. And over the last
decade, there’s been an effort -- through voter suppression, extreme
gerrymandering, packing the courts, and most shockingly, a literal violent
attack on the Capitol -- to enshrine minority rule.

Some people -- specifically, some white people -- would prefer minority
rule, if they’re the ones whose group will remain represented in power.

This may sound overly dramatic. Unfortunately, it’s not. Look no further
than what happened in the Senate this week, where Republicans filibustered
the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They are, quite literally, opposed to
the successor to the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- the very law that made us
an actual democracy.

In other words, the fight over our democracy right now is a fight over
whether to drain the pool or share it. We can have a democracy. We can
have health care, public goods, and a government that works for us. We
can’t be naive about the power of racial grievance -- it’s the central
force in American politics (and our political campaigns, policy solutions,
and strategies have to reflect that). But we have joined across lines of
difference in the past to make our country better before, and we can do it
again.

A multiracial democracy with a government that works for all of us is
possible in this country; in fact, it’s on the horizon. We have to fight
for it.

What can you do?

Well, it’s Indivisible, so first, we’re going to tell you [ [link removed] ]you need to
call your senators and tell them to end the filibuster so we can pass the
Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

Then, let’s pass those game-changing policies that improve peoples’ lives
and show them they have more to gain from solidarity than division. That’s
the Build Back Better Act, and now that Congress has passed the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Framework (BIF), we need to complete the Biden economic
agenda by moving Build Back Better forward. [ [link removed] ]Tell your representative
and [ [link removed] ]tell your senators that you want the Build Back Better Act passed
now -- no more excuses, no more delays.

And of course, [ [link removed] ]you should read The Sum of Us. It’s incredibly rich,
and, perhaps even more precious in this moment, it’s deeply optimistic. It
will give you a sense of not only what’s at stake, but also the good
things that are possible if we come together and build solidarity and some
of the ways that people are trying to do that work right now. It’s also
just a great read -- I finished it in about 24 hours. Read it, give it to
your friends, and try out some of the frames that Heather uses, and see
how they work in your own life.

In solidarity,

Leah Greenberg
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

P.S. -- It’s not a monthly newsletter without a picture of Zeke, our
1-year-old! Here we are trick-or-treating together as Calvin, Hobbes, and
Susie Derkins.

[5]Ezra Levin, Leah Greenberg, and their son Zeke dressed as Calvin,
Hobbes, and Susie from Calvin and Hobbes

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