WEBVTT - Introducing: White Picket Fence 0:00:03.360 --> 0:00:06.560 Hey, everyone, it's Rebecca Greenfield, the co host of The Paycheck. 0:00:07.240 --> 0:00:09.000 I wanted to tell you about a show from a 0:00:09.000 --> 0:00:12.360 wonder media network you might really like. I'm not a 0:00:12.440 --> 0:00:15.520 parent myself, but I know a lot of parents, and 0:00:15.560 --> 0:00:19.040 I've read a lot about parenting during the pandemic. I 0:00:19.120 --> 0:00:24.000 know how difficult it's been, between the zoom homeschooling or 0:00:24.000 --> 0:00:27.600 the constant threat of closures because of COVID cases, not 0:00:27.680 --> 0:00:31.280 to mention fears about the virus itself. In season two 0:00:31.360 --> 0:00:34.520 of White Picket, Fence, Post and Single Mom, Julie Kohler 0:00:34.600 --> 0:00:38.159 asks why did it have to be this way? She 0:00:38.240 --> 0:00:41.720 talks to experts, activists, and parents as they unpack the 0:00:41.760 --> 0:00:45.559 caregiving crisis in America and reveal why the conditions were 0:00:45.600 --> 0:00:50.560 set long before COVID nineteen ever hit American shores. Julia 0:00:50.640 --> 0:00:54.920 explores the myths about race, gender, families, and the economy 0:00:55.000 --> 0:00:56.920 that have gotten us to a point where so many 0:00:57.000 --> 0:01:01.640 parents and especially mothers, are cracking. She also looks at 0:01:01.640 --> 0:01:04.720 how the pandemic could change things. It could be a 0:01:04.760 --> 0:01:09.320 tipping point. We could build an alternative economic approach, one 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:13.360 that puts caregiving at the center of the economy. Stay 0:01:13.400 --> 0:01:15.880 tuned to hear the latest episode, and don't forget to 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:26.760 subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you listen to 0:01:26.800 --> 0:01:29.600 this show, you probably already realized that I'm a bit 0:01:29.640 --> 0:01:33.120 of a political junkie. I spend a lot of my 0:01:33.200 --> 0:01:37.640 day thinking about, discussing, and writing about politics and policy, 0:01:38.920 --> 0:01:40.880 so it shouldn't come as a surprise to hear that 0:01:40.920 --> 0:01:44.120 I've been following the debate over President Biden's Build Back 0:01:44.160 --> 0:01:49.400 Better Act pretty closely. Several months ago, I noticed a 0:01:49.440 --> 0:01:53.640 lot of prominent conservatives leveling a coordinated attack against the 0:01:53.680 --> 0:01:59.200 acts childcare provisions. Specifically, they argued that investments in childcare 0:01:59.680 --> 0:02:02.720 would penalized families in which a parent stays home to 0:02:02.800 --> 0:02:08.160 raise children. It sounded kind of ludicrous. I mean, how 0:02:08.240 --> 0:02:11.799 is someone who doesn't need childcare penalized by its availability? 0:02:12.760 --> 0:02:15.840 The Build Back Better Act wouldn't require anyone to use childcare. 0:02:16.560 --> 0:02:18.960 Parents could choose to access child care for their children 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:22.000 or not. They could choose to take advantage of free 0:02:22.000 --> 0:02:25.280 pre K or not. But then I realized that this 0:02:25.360 --> 0:02:30.400 argument was tapping into something more fundamental fear. We need 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:34.320 to take this argument seriously because, as we'll talk about today, 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:36.800 fear is what's been used to block investments in child 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:40.680 care for decades, in any public benefit that would help families. 0:02:42.639 --> 0:02:46.160 This fear evokes the same nostalgic undertones for the traditional 0:02:46.240 --> 0:02:49.320 nuclear family that we talked about last week, and by 0:02:49.320 --> 0:02:52.840 framing child care is a preference of elite families, they're 0:02:52.840 --> 0:02:56.120 tapping into the anti feminism that was used the last 0:02:56.120 --> 0:02:59.160 time we had a political debate over child care fifty 0:02:59.240 --> 0:03:02.639 years ago. But if we're going to talk about fear 0:03:02.800 --> 0:03:04.800 and how it's been used to block investments in the 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:07.239 common good, then we're also going to have to talk 0:03:07.240 --> 0:03:14.440 about something else, racism. I'm Julie Cohler, and this is 0:03:14.480 --> 0:03:18.800 White Picket Fence. This season, we're exploring our country's caregiving 0:03:18.880 --> 0:03:24.640 crisis and the ideologies about race, gender, families, the economy, 0:03:25.040 --> 0:03:29.160 and yes, white women that have blocked public investment in 0:03:29.240 --> 0:03:31.760 care and let us to a point where so many 0:03:31.800 --> 0:03:37.520 of us are cracking. As we've talked about a lot, 0:03:37.800 --> 0:03:41.160 the US does not have a national child care system, 0:03:41.160 --> 0:03:46.040 and our lack of investment has had devastating effects on women, children, 0:03:46.360 --> 0:03:50.760 and our economy. Right now, with the Build Back Better Act, 0:03:51.360 --> 0:03:55.200 the Biden administration might deliver a four hundred billion dollar 0:03:55.320 --> 0:03:59.160 investment in universal pre K and childcare. It would be 0:03:59.160 --> 0:04:04.320 a revolutionary step. Here's the thing, though, this is not 0:04:04.400 --> 0:04:09.120 our country's first rodeo with national childcare. The system once existed. 0:04:10.400 --> 0:04:14.160 During World War Two, our government spent seventy eight million 0:04:14.200 --> 0:04:19.039 dollars creating high quality child care centers. These centers helped 0:04:19.120 --> 0:04:22.680 Rosie the Riveter and thousands like her enter the workforce. 0:04:23.560 --> 0:04:27.799 Seven percent of Richmond ship builders were women. Feminine workers 0:04:27.800 --> 0:04:31.320 with small children inspired the founding of thirty five nursery 0:04:31.360 --> 0:04:36.000 school units and then extended daycare centers, which mothered over 0:04:36.240 --> 0:04:41.080 fourteen hundred youngsters at a time. But after the war 0:04:41.440 --> 0:04:46.520 funding evaporated, these centers disappeared and the number of women 0:04:46.520 --> 0:04:53.719 working plummeted. Then came the sixties, second wave feminism, civil rights, 0:04:54.279 --> 0:04:58.640 a dramatic rise in women's employment, and suddenly there was 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:03.719 political interest in child care again. In fact, fifty years ago, 0:05:04.000 --> 0:05:07.920 the Comprehensive Child Development Act landed on President Nixon's desk. 0:05:08.760 --> 0:05:12.080 It had passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support, 0:05:12.960 --> 0:05:16.919 and Nixon vetoed it. He warned of a communal approach 0:05:16.960 --> 0:05:21.160 to child wearing, and the bill's family weakening implications. Those 0:05:21.200 --> 0:05:24.440 are direct quotes, says, the two billion dollars to have 0:05:24.440 --> 0:05:27.320 been spent on the first year for childcare would be, 0:05:27.360 --> 0:05:29.679 as he put it, a long leap into the dark. 0:05:31.080 --> 0:05:35.360 The Build Back Better Act is facing familiar opposition from conservatives, 0:05:35.720 --> 0:05:39.800 peddaling Nixon era rhetoric. Some have invoked fears of a 0:05:39.880 --> 0:05:43.800 government takeover of daycare. Others have claimed that investments in 0:05:43.880 --> 0:05:47.920 childcare would be unfair to so called traditional families, where 0:05:47.960 --> 0:05:51.080 mothers stay at home with their kids. This plan is 0:05:51.120 --> 0:05:54.360 meant to get as many parents, especially mothers, into the workforce. 0:05:54.720 --> 0:05:58.120 I stopped and say, well, why do we want that. 0:05:58.240 --> 0:06:01.920 Let me be clear, Radical Democrats are not the party 0:06:01.960 --> 0:06:05.160 of parents, and they're certainly not the party for children. 0:06:05.560 --> 0:06:08.640 Their interests in passing universal child care and universal pre 0:06:08.720 --> 0:06:13.080 k is just to start indoctrinating our kids sooner. Children 0:06:13.120 --> 0:06:16.760 are not entitled to government daycare. What children are entitled 0:06:16.760 --> 0:06:21.679 to is love from their own parents. But this time 0:06:22.040 --> 0:06:25.160 the rhetoric is falling short. It looks like the childcare 0:06:25.200 --> 0:06:28.839 bill might pass. The Build Back Better Act would create 0:06:28.960 --> 0:06:31.919 free universal pre K for three and four year olds. 0:06:32.600 --> 0:06:36.320 It would limit childcare expenses to seven percent of family's income, 0:06:37.120 --> 0:06:40.159 nine and ten American families with young children would gain 0:06:40.200 --> 0:06:44.120 access to affordable childcare. It really makes you wonder why 0:06:44.120 --> 0:06:48.200 it took fifty years to happen, to understand why we 0:06:48.279 --> 0:06:55.559 need to first understand what went wrong back in Here's 0:06:55.640 --> 0:06:59.600 Nancy Cohen, president of the Gender Equality Policy Institute. Let 0:06:59.600 --> 0:07:04.360 me still art with setting the scene of the women's 0:07:04.400 --> 0:07:07.839 movements and the feminist movements of the late sixties and 0:07:07.960 --> 0:07:13.800 early seventies. It was really one of the only times 0:07:13.800 --> 0:07:19.120 in American history that the women's movement, very broad based, 0:07:19.440 --> 0:07:26.080 very diverse, was a mass movement by n had significantly 0:07:26.200 --> 0:07:30.840 changed public opinion in favor of a lot of issues 0:07:30.880 --> 0:07:36.280 that we would consider central to women's equality and gender equality. 0:07:36.880 --> 0:07:42.480 At the same time, you have a reactionary President Mixon 0:07:42.840 --> 0:07:45.360 in office. So in the middle of all of that 0:07:45.680 --> 0:07:50.600 entered a Midwestern senator with a big idea. What you 0:07:50.720 --> 0:07:55.720 have in setting the scene for this bill being introduced. 0:07:56.360 --> 0:08:00.120 Senator Walter Mondale had always been a strong at the 0:08:00.200 --> 0:08:04.320 kit for children, true progressive. Came from a poor family 0:08:04.840 --> 0:08:10.200 himself and had a very precarious childhood, so his interest 0:08:10.320 --> 0:08:13.520 in this came a little bit out of understanding what 0:08:13.600 --> 0:08:16.720 it was like for children. Fans of the show will 0:08:16.720 --> 0:08:21.000 remember this fun fact from last season's prologue, Walter Mondale, 0:08:21.280 --> 0:08:25.640 former Minnesota Senator and vice president, winning the Democratic nomination 0:08:27.440 --> 0:08:30.560 was the catalyst for my own passion for politics. He's 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:33.560 kind of my guy, so it's no surprise to me 0:08:33.640 --> 0:08:37.040 that he championed this effort. And at the time, lots 0:08:37.080 --> 0:08:42.120 of things, public opinions, social movements, political influence, we're coming 0:08:42.120 --> 0:08:45.920 together just right in favor of positive change. There was 0:08:45.920 --> 0:08:51.840 a convergence of civil rights movements, of women's movements, child 0:08:51.880 --> 0:08:58.240 development experts who realized that the US had already reached 0:08:58.280 --> 0:09:03.400 a crisis where with women in the workforce, and so 0:09:03.760 --> 0:09:07.319 through a lot of maneuvering, this Comprehensive Child Development Act 0:09:07.760 --> 0:09:12.400 came through and passed the Senate by more than a 0:09:12.400 --> 0:09:16.200 two thirds majority on a bipartisan vote, had a little 0:09:16.240 --> 0:09:19.839 bit more difficulty in the House, but still passed the House. 0:09:20.360 --> 0:09:24.840 The US was still in the tail end of President 0:09:24.920 --> 0:09:28.680 Johnson's War on poverty, so there was very much a 0:09:29.240 --> 0:09:33.320 sense of this was an economic justice bill and a 0:09:33.400 --> 0:09:37.559 racial justice bill. These same social and political movements also 0:09:37.640 --> 0:09:41.920 contributed to Nixon's veto all of those factors coming together 0:09:42.800 --> 0:09:48.560 set the scene for Nixon vetoing the bill with a 0:09:48.640 --> 0:09:55.839 really unhinged Vito message, warning that it would sovietize America, 0:09:56.400 --> 0:10:01.040 that it was basically a communist plot. On one hand, 0:10:01.080 --> 0:10:06.000 he's reaching to anti communist rhetoric, but it really was 0:10:06.440 --> 0:10:10.359 a dog whistle to patriarchy. It may not sound surprising 0:10:10.480 --> 0:10:14.640 that a Republican president shot down a childcare bill today, 0:10:14.679 --> 0:10:17.320 that's kind of a given, but at the time it 0:10:17.400 --> 0:10:22.040 was shocking. Nixon's own administration had helped draft the bill, 0:10:23.040 --> 0:10:28.000 and Nixon was conflicted. He even requested two speeches, one 0:10:28.040 --> 0:10:31.640 for signing the bill and one for vetoing it. So 0:10:31.679 --> 0:10:36.440 who tipped the scales a guy named Pat Buchanan Back 0:10:36.440 --> 0:10:40.440 then he was nixon speechwriter. He convinced the president that 0:10:40.559 --> 0:10:43.600 killing the bill would boost his standing with an emerging 0:10:43.640 --> 0:10:48.320 base of conservative activists. The real reason for the veto, 0:10:49.600 --> 0:10:53.760 based on my research, is that it was a play 0:10:53.840 --> 0:10:58.880 to the right. This is December one. Within a few weeks, 0:10:59.160 --> 0:11:02.839 Nixon is go going to be running in the New 0:11:02.880 --> 0:11:08.319 Hampshire primary for re election, and he faced an opponent 0:11:08.400 --> 0:11:11.440 on his right who was very much playing to the 0:11:11.480 --> 0:11:15.960 anti communist wings of the party. So Nixon had his 0:11:16.040 --> 0:11:21.800 finger in the wind about where Republican primary voters were going. 0:11:22.600 --> 0:11:26.640 I just want to emphasize that at the time there 0:11:26.679 --> 0:11:31.960 are lots of feminists within the Republican Party and they 0:11:32.000 --> 0:11:37.200 actually held sway over the anti feminists in the party. 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:41.920 The family values rhetoric that Nixon used wasn't actually mainstream. 0:11:42.000 --> 0:11:44.920 The idea of women working was just not that political. 0:11:45.880 --> 0:11:48.440 But Nixon saw where the grassroots energy and the party 0:11:48.520 --> 0:11:52.199 was going. His vtail was the beginning of the end 0:11:52.240 --> 0:11:56.760 for universal childcare. In the years that followed, Walter Mondale 0:11:56.760 --> 0:12:00.679 tried to revive the bill, scaling back at scope. A 0:12:00.800 --> 0:12:04.720 revised version passed the Senate ine, but it died in 0:12:04.760 --> 0:12:09.120 the House. Talk of childcare proposals started to resurface a 0:12:09.120 --> 0:12:13.559 couple of years later, but this time white conservative women 0:12:13.760 --> 0:12:18.280 mobilized a massive counterattack. Now it was still tiny numbers 0:12:18.320 --> 0:12:24.160 compared to the support that feminism had, and particularly these 0:12:24.559 --> 0:12:30.160 pretty mainstream feminist ideas of providing childcare and equal pay. 0:12:30.240 --> 0:12:33.760 But basically these women um mostly in the South, some 0:12:33.920 --> 0:12:38.040 in the West in anti feminist groups got wind of 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:46.520 the childcare bills coming forward and in really an explicit 0:12:46.559 --> 0:12:53.160 defense of patriarchy and women's suppordination in the family mobilized 0:12:53.400 --> 0:13:00.240 and flooded Congress with thousands of letters opposing these childcare bills, 0:13:01.000 --> 0:13:03.120 and that was it. That was the end of it. 0:13:03.280 --> 0:13:09.360 For quite some time, anti feminism and anti socialism have 0:13:09.559 --> 0:13:11.920 always been at the heart of the opposition to child 0:13:11.960 --> 0:13:15.240 care or any of the supports that would make raising 0:13:15.320 --> 0:13:19.600 children easier. We've been hearing these ideas recycled in the 0:13:19.640 --> 0:13:23.480 debate over the Build Back Better Act, but opposition is 0:13:23.520 --> 0:13:29.240 intrinsically linked to something else too, racism. We've talked about 0:13:29.240 --> 0:13:32.800 how women of color, especially black women, have long provided 0:13:32.800 --> 0:13:37.280 the domestic labor that keeps more affluent families afloat, and 0:13:37.280 --> 0:13:40.800 their labor helped create this vision of the traditional nuclear family. 0:13:41.880 --> 0:13:45.920 Our government's continued refusal to invest in childcare keeps that 0:13:45.960 --> 0:13:51.600 work undervalued and underpaid. Here story and Warren, co president 0:13:51.640 --> 0:13:55.520 of Community Change and co founder of the Economic Security Project. 0:13:56.720 --> 0:14:00.920 I think to understand the care economy, pol sees again, 0:14:01.000 --> 0:14:03.200 we have to go back to the founding and think 0:14:03.280 --> 0:14:07.440 about the nature of care work and how devalued it 0:14:07.480 --> 0:14:10.920 has been from for centuries. And this is not just 0:14:10.960 --> 0:14:14.600 in the US, this is across the world where care 0:14:14.640 --> 0:14:18.600 work has been defined in very stark gendered terms as 0:14:18.679 --> 0:14:24.240 women's work and therefore um not deserving of dignity, of 0:14:24.440 --> 0:14:29.440 value and of renumeration for that labor. And then you 0:14:29.520 --> 0:14:33.240 add in the American racial context of who is doing 0:14:33.280 --> 0:14:36.000 the care work for the first couple of hundred years 0:14:36.000 --> 0:14:38.600 of this country, well, it was black women in particular. 0:14:39.240 --> 0:14:42.320 And so if you look at the composition of who 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:45.560 is doing the care work in terms of women of color, 0:14:45.600 --> 0:14:49.400 black women, immigrant women, if you think about essential workers today, 0:14:49.640 --> 0:14:53.400 it's no coincidence to me that the composition of who 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:56.320 performs that work and the devaluation of that work goes 0:14:56.400 --> 0:14:59.600 hand in hand. So this has been a long, long 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:03.000 effort to try to do the political work and the 0:15:03.120 --> 0:15:08.560 cultural work to value care work as work as labor. 0:15:08.680 --> 0:15:12.400 The death of child care bill didn't just hurt middle 0:15:12.400 --> 0:15:15.840 class women who wanted to work outside the home. It 0:15:15.960 --> 0:15:18.680 was part of a long history of policies that kept 0:15:18.720 --> 0:15:23.080 a certain kind of work and worker low paid at 0:15:23.080 --> 0:15:26.120 the margins of our economy. I have to point out 0:15:26.360 --> 0:15:31.480 just to say the rules of our economy also helped 0:15:31.520 --> 0:15:34.520 solidify the evaluation of care work. So I'm thinking here 0:15:34.600 --> 0:15:39.160 of how domestic workers in particular were excluded from New 0:15:39.200 --> 0:15:42.360 Deal social policies. Um, if you think of the Wagner 0:15:42.400 --> 0:15:45.000 Act and the right to organize into a union domestic 0:15:45.000 --> 0:15:47.320 and agricultural workers, Nope. If you think of the Fair 0:15:47.360 --> 0:15:50.480 Labor Standard deck which is our minimum wage, domestic workers 0:15:50.480 --> 0:15:54.720 and agricultural workers excluded. So domestic workers in particular have 0:15:55.280 --> 0:16:00.640 always always been seen as another as those who are 0:16:00.680 --> 0:16:04.840 only supposed to perform certain duties for wealthy and elite 0:16:05.040 --> 0:16:08.400 and privileged people. And I think because of the decades 0:16:08.440 --> 0:16:12.760 of organizing, we're at a potentially different and maybe even 0:16:12.800 --> 0:16:15.080 transformative moment when it comes to care work. Right now, 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:20.000 like Nancy said, Nixon was reading the tea leaves, he 0:16:20.040 --> 0:16:23.520 could see that a conservative grassroots movement was coming. It 0:16:23.600 --> 0:16:28.040 was anti feminist, sure, and strongly antisocialist, but there was 0:16:28.080 --> 0:16:32.080 something more. Racist backlash was at the heart of the 0:16:32.120 --> 0:16:36.080 modern day conservative movement. Over the next couple of decades, 0:16:36.520 --> 0:16:40.360 childcare became central to how that backlash would manifest itself 0:16:40.360 --> 0:16:44.720 in our politics, and no one embraced that strategy more 0:16:44.800 --> 0:16:49.280 clearly than an actor with big political ambitions Ronald Reagan. 0:16:50.160 --> 0:16:57.360 Understanding Reagan as part of he is the exemplification. He 0:16:57.480 --> 0:17:01.560 is sort of the maturity of the backlash against the 0:17:01.600 --> 0:17:04.280 civil rights and black freedom movement in the sixties. He 0:17:04.359 --> 0:17:08.280 comes out of, you know, very Goldwater and the conservative 0:17:08.359 --> 0:17:13.840 West Coast politicians who were searching for ways to resist 0:17:14.359 --> 0:17:17.920 the efforts at racial justice and racial equity. From the start, 0:17:18.080 --> 0:17:22.040 Reagan embraced the racist dog whistle. He launched his presidential 0:17:22.080 --> 0:17:27.280 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site where civil rights activists 0:17:27.359 --> 0:17:31.879 James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Scharner were murdered for 0:17:31.960 --> 0:17:36.480 trying to register black voters in four I know they're 0:17:36.520 --> 0:17:41.159 speaking to this brow speaking what it has to be 0:17:41.200 --> 0:17:52.040 a dog night Democrat. I just bid fight party affiliation. 0:17:52.160 --> 0:17:56.040 I didn't mean how you feel now. I was a 0:17:56.119 --> 0:18:02.000 Democrat post of my life myself, and that is not 0:18:02.080 --> 0:18:05.040 an accident. He knew exactly what he was doing. That 0:18:05.119 --> 0:18:08.320 was political strategy, and it was an explicit anti black 0:18:08.320 --> 0:18:11.920 political strategy to really signal to white voters, especially white 0:18:11.960 --> 0:18:14.640 Southern voters, I'm one of you, and I will take 0:18:14.720 --> 0:18:18.040 up the lost cause. And he didn't stop there. And 0:18:18.080 --> 0:18:21.240 then on the campaign trail, he tells this story over 0:18:21.320 --> 0:18:25.240 and over and over, and it always enrages me every 0:18:25.240 --> 0:18:27.399 time I even think about it, because it's very personal 0:18:27.400 --> 0:18:29.440 for me. Tells the story of a black woman from Chicago. 0:18:30.080 --> 0:18:32.240 Chicago is my hometown, so it's very personal for me, 0:18:32.560 --> 0:18:35.520 and it's the welfare queen story. And he's telling this 0:18:35.560 --> 0:18:38.080 story over and over all there's this woman in Chicago 0:18:38.280 --> 0:18:40.919 and she has Cadillac and for coats and buy stakes 0:18:40.960 --> 0:18:44.199 with her food, sad and all this stuff that becomes 0:18:44.200 --> 0:18:48.920 the dominant narrative around welfare. Reagan ran on a platform 0:18:49.160 --> 0:18:53.520 that's now synonymous with the Republican Party, low taxes, small government. 0:18:54.600 --> 0:18:57.600 His welfare queen story was meant to be a cautionary 0:18:57.640 --> 0:19:01.760 tale of wasteful government spending. But it was no coincidence 0:19:01.920 --> 0:19:04.119 that the woman at the center of that story was black. 0:19:04.480 --> 0:19:07.600 So Reagan is telling the story about wealth, you know, 0:19:07.640 --> 0:19:10.919 the welfare queen over and over the Republican Party and 0:19:10.960 --> 0:19:16.960 conservatives are repeating the story, and then Democrats at the time, 0:19:17.520 --> 0:19:21.719 let's talk about it. We're also quick to jump in 0:19:21.720 --> 0:19:25.320 on the story on the broader narrative around who is 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:28.960 deserving and who is not deserving. And we know what 0:19:29.200 --> 0:19:33.200 both parties meant by that white people are deserving non 0:19:33.240 --> 0:19:37.200 white people not deserving. We've been living with that legacy 0:19:37.320 --> 0:19:42.520 for forty years. By stoking fear of so called undeserving 0:19:42.680 --> 0:19:47.800 black single mothers, Reagan transformed our national conversation about public benefits, 0:19:48.480 --> 0:19:52.320 and he wasn't alone. In the nine nineties, President Bill 0:19:52.320 --> 0:19:56.080 Clinton reformed welfare. What was previously a program of cash 0:19:56.119 --> 0:20:00.560 assistance for poor women and children became temporary system with 0:20:00.600 --> 0:20:05.439 work requirements. President George W. Bush took welfare reform to 0:20:05.440 --> 0:20:09.399 the next level. He dumped millions of dollars into marriage 0:20:09.440 --> 0:20:13.680 promotion programs, literally government programs that encouraged poor women to 0:20:13.720 --> 0:20:17.960 get married. These programs did nothing to reduce poverty or 0:20:18.040 --> 0:20:22.000 increase marriage, but they further the belief that being poor 0:20:22.080 --> 0:20:26.399 was the result of bad personal decision making. Common sense 0:20:26.440 --> 0:20:32.760 policies like child care Bill became politically toxic. Any government 0:20:32.800 --> 0:20:37.919 benefit evoked that welfare queen image. A lot of beliefs 0:20:37.960 --> 0:20:40.680 about gender and race have made the U S an 0:20:40.680 --> 0:20:45.919 inhospitable place for families, especially mothers and other caregivers. But 0:20:46.040 --> 0:20:48.280 at the root of all of this is a fear 0:20:48.560 --> 0:20:52.040 that helping the vulnerable will somehow hurt the rest of us. 0:20:52.960 --> 0:20:57.680 It's what some call is zero sum scarcity framework. This 0:20:57.760 --> 0:20:59.800 fear is what kept the US from creating a child 0:21:00.160 --> 0:21:04.919 system back in. It's what prompted politicians from both parties 0:21:04.960 --> 0:21:07.400 to get our social safety net in the following decades, 0:21:08.560 --> 0:21:11.560 and it's what conservatives trotted out again in the debate 0:21:11.600 --> 0:21:16.440 over the Built Back Better Act. Its origins run deep well. 0:21:16.480 --> 0:21:20.639 I think the origins of our zero some scarcity framework 0:21:21.280 --> 0:21:23.800 essentially come from the origins of this country, and so 0:21:23.960 --> 0:21:28.760 um due respect to Nicolahannah Jones, the sixteen nineteen project, 0:21:29.160 --> 0:21:32.000 I think we can start there in the structuring of 0:21:32.080 --> 0:21:38.080 a country. First of taking of land from indigenous inhabitants 0:21:38.080 --> 0:21:42.000 who already were on that land. That's already the beginning 0:21:42.480 --> 0:21:47.520 of a zero sum framework. And notion that somehow the 0:21:47.560 --> 0:21:51.600 folks who were already here did not deserve the land 0:21:51.640 --> 0:21:55.720 of this country like these white settlers, and so that's 0:21:55.760 --> 0:21:57.480 the beginning of zero some. And then you add in 0:21:57.520 --> 0:22:00.760 and servants, and then of course those who were enslave, 0:22:00.760 --> 0:22:05.240 particularly from the continent of Africa, and the notion that, um, 0:22:05.280 --> 0:22:10.919 it was divinely ordained that some people did not deserve 0:22:11.480 --> 0:22:14.679 the same freedoms as others, and particularly not only deserved 0:22:14.680 --> 0:22:19.040 the same freedoms were meant to be exploited for others wealth. 0:22:20.080 --> 0:22:22.679 So I tend to think of American history and in 0:22:22.800 --> 0:22:27.879 three numbers and five, and those represent decades. So the 0:22:27.880 --> 0:22:32.560 first twenty five decades system of chattel slavery and human bondage. 0:22:33.400 --> 0:22:36.240 Then we had a civil war and a little period 0:22:36.280 --> 0:22:40.120 called reconstruction, which was the idea was to reconstruct our 0:22:40.160 --> 0:22:44.439 democracy and economy. And then that short period ended, it 0:22:44.480 --> 0:22:48.800 was fought against, and we had another ten decades of 0:22:48.920 --> 0:22:52.400 Jim Crow, what some scholars called slavery by another name. 0:22:53.080 --> 0:22:57.600 So that's twenty five decades of slavery, then ten decades 0:22:57.720 --> 0:23:00.879 or a hundred years of Jim Kroll, and then the 0:23:01.000 --> 0:23:04.760 last number is five. The last five decades or fifty 0:23:04.880 --> 0:23:08.399 years or so, we have seen the opening up in 0:23:08.480 --> 0:23:12.359 many ways of this country in terms of full citizenship, 0:23:12.440 --> 0:23:16.880 particularly for black people. But that's a recent amount. That's 0:23:16.880 --> 0:23:19.600 a small amount of time in the great sweep of history. 0:23:19.640 --> 0:23:22.520 And so if you think of the first twenty five 0:23:22.560 --> 0:23:25.840 decades and then the second ten decades, zero sum thinking 0:23:25.960 --> 0:23:30.320 pervaded our country throughout that entire time. And so it's 0:23:30.440 --> 0:23:34.640 not an accident that here we are. You know, five 0:23:34.680 --> 0:23:38.120 decades after the civil rights movement and the women's movement, 0:23:38.359 --> 0:23:42.800 and the gay liberation movement and others, that we're still 0:23:42.920 --> 0:23:45.439 dealing with this fundamental framework that has to find the 0:23:45.440 --> 0:23:50.320 country from the founding. One piece of legislation can't undo 0:23:50.359 --> 0:23:53.760 this foundational framework, but I believe that it can be 0:23:53.800 --> 0:23:57.720 an important first step. As author and activist Heather McGee 0:23:57.800 --> 0:23:59.879 writes in her book The Some of Us, there's a 0:24:00.040 --> 0:24:04.199 way to defeat the zero sum thinking. It's by cultivating 0:24:04.240 --> 0:24:08.360 what she calls the solidarity dividend, the idea that by 0:24:08.359 --> 0:24:12.080 coming together across race, we can accomplish what we can't 0:24:12.119 --> 0:24:15.400 do on our own. McGee says that the quickest way 0:24:15.400 --> 0:24:18.560 to get there is to refill the pool on public 0:24:18.600 --> 0:24:22.480 goods for everyone. Child Care is one of those critical 0:24:22.520 --> 0:24:26.600 public goods. But to get there, we need not only 0:24:26.640 --> 0:24:30.840 to overcome the nostalgic ideology of family life that continues 0:24:30.880 --> 0:24:33.760 to be evoked today, and not only the racial fear 0:24:33.800 --> 0:24:37.240 and stratification that's been with us since our nation's founding. 0:24:38.640 --> 0:24:41.720 We will need to overcome a theory about the economy 0:24:41.760 --> 0:24:44.640 that has become something close to religious doctrine for much 0:24:44.640 --> 0:24:48.680 of the last half Century next week on White Picket Fence. 0:24:49.800 --> 0:24:52.600 You know, it's kind of like the fish in the 0:24:52.640 --> 0:24:55.800 bowl of water doesn't know that it's in the bowl 0:24:55.840 --> 0:24:58.600 of water until it suddenly finds itself outside the bowl 0:24:58.640 --> 0:25:03.359 of water, gasping for air. White pick of Fence is 0:25:03.400 --> 0:25:07.159 a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddie Foley, 0:25:07.480 --> 0:25:11.960 Eadie Allard, and Taylor Williamson. Executive producer is Jenny Kaplan. 0:25:12.880 --> 0:25:15.800 Special thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the 0:25:15.880 --> 0:25:18.879 Share Descent Fund for their generous support for this season. 0:25:20.560 --> 0:25:24.400 We want to hear about your caregiving experiences, especially during 0:25:24.440 --> 0:25:29.720 the pandemic. Just called to one to six five zero 0:25:29.840 --> 0:25:32.480 four eight and leave us a voicemail with your story. 0:25:33.200 --> 0:25:36.119 We might just play it on the show. That's two 0:25:36.119 --> 0:25:40.040 one to six five zero four eight.