 not discouraged, I'm annoyed and I'm angry, right? That we are still dealing with issues that we should not be dealing with. And in many cases, the solutions, I think, are very simple. And so Sadie Alexander noted the importance of really popularizing economics, increasing economic literacy. And I think that that is so needed. Hello, and welcome to the State of Working America podcast, where we strive to provide a reality check on how workers from all walks of life are impacted by the economy. And one needs to be done to address workplace inequalities. Today, we delve into the economic ideas and analyses of our nation's first black economist, Sadie Alexander, in a discussion with the author of the book on Alexander's writings. Her economic insights on how to deter racism are prescient and are critical for the discussions, even today, on what our nation needs to do to finally wipe out the inequalities black workers are still confronting. I'm Eve Tachman-Giolu, the communications director for the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank focused on leveling the economic playing field for all Americans and their families. So even though Sadie Alexander was our nation's first black economist, she was unable to find work as an economist when she graduated in 1921 because of the color of her skin and her gender. That did not stop Sadie Alexander for spending her life influencing the discussion around how a strong economy and job opportunities can impact and potentially derail racism. Through Alexander's writings dating back to the 1920s, we're provided a window into what black workers face, how things have changed and haven't changed, and also a roadmap for writing the economic inequalities black workers have long faced. We're able to see into Sadie's window thanks to the painstaking work of Nina Banks, who spent years unearthing Alexander's writings and putting them together in her just released book, Democracy, Race and Justice, the Speeches and Writings of Sadie T.M. Alexander. Nina is herself an economist. She's associate professor of economics at Bucknell University and president of the National Economic Association. She's also a board member of the Economic Policy Institute. Also joining us is Kyle Moore. He's an economist at EPI working with our program on race, ethnicity and the economy, something called PRE. Thanks, Kyle and Nina for coming on the podcast today. Nina, I'd like to start by saying that after reading your book, I thought Sadie would have fit in, fit right in as an economist for EPI given so much of her economic perspectives, especially her take on how full employment, how full employment can diminish the gap between black and white unemployment that still persists today. So I've got so many questions for you. I love the book. I couldn't put it down. Here I've got it up here from your right. So I want to start out with maybe, and Kyle and I would go back and forth and ask you a few questions. Can you provide some background on how this book came about? Sure. And thank you, Eve and Kyle, for having me on your podcast. I'm really happy to be here today. So as you said, this was a very long time in the making. I started doing research on Sadie Alexander in 2003. At that time, it was thought that she was the first African American woman economist, but that after she was not able to find employment as an economist, she gave up her interest in economics. And so when I went to the archives at the University of Pennsylvania where her records are stored over 81 boxes of files, I was really looking to see if in fact she had any interest in economics. And that's when I discovered that she had spent her life talking about economic issues affecting African Americans and challenging racial disparities affecting African Americans with respect to the labor market. So I found out that I was startled to find that. And then in around 2005, I contacted the director of the archives at Penn to find out if I could publish a book on her economic speeches, because I had published, I was, you know, I was trying to gather the materials together to publish some articles. And I did publish some articles. But what I found is that the articles were not sufficient to cover the breadth of her economic thought with respect to issues tied to economic justice. Penn gave me permission in 2005. It took a long time, as you noted, to be able to bring this volume together. And when I finally secured funding to be able to then go and do the research over a long period of time, that was in 2014, started giving lots of public presentations and podcasts on Sadie Alexander. And an editor at Yale University Press listened to a podcast or watched a video, contacted me about my interest in writing a book. And by that time, I really knew that I needed to write not only a book, an edited volume of her speeches and writings, but also a biography of her extraordinary life. So so that I think is, you know, kind of a long winded response to your question. I love that. And you know, I had heard of her, but just, you know, reading about her life was great. And the introductions you do to each grouping of the essays and writings was such a good primer to go into that with that backstory. So what drew you to Alexander? Good question. Right. Because I'm often asked about the motivation for the work which was tied to the work of other feminist economist and Julian Malvau's article on missed opportunity. But what drew me to Sadie Alexander was her brilliance. Not just the fact that her thought was very prescient, as you stated, but her brilliance, the fact that she spent a lifetime challenging racial and economic disparities. But I think beyond that, I was also drawn to her because of her wit. She was very humorous. I was drawn to her because of her deep sense of morality and the importance of the dignity of all people and their their the dignity of worth their work as well. And so I think on some level, I was also drawn to her because she reminded me of my own grandmother, who was also very extraordinary in her own right, not like Sadie Alexander, because nobody was like Sadie Alexander. But I had a grandmother who was similar in other ways in terms of her status within her own community. So the more I did the research, what I really came to feel was love for Sadie Alexander. And I said that because I read a tweet the other day, where an economist said that economics is a dispassionate discipline. And I thought, you know, it's not the case. It certainly was not the case for me, because had I not felt such a deep emotional attachment to Sadie Alexander, I would not have continued to do this work for almost two decades. And whoever wrote that tweet should read the book, because that is so not the case. And she's amazing. I couldn't wait to get back to her. And she made me feel like I haven't done enough in my life. Oh, no, and she really is right on there. So now we're going to tag team you a little bit. Kyle's got some questions so we can go back and forth. Kyle, I'll pass it to you. Absolutely. And I think Dr. Banks, what you said about Sadie Alexander being brilliant is, I think it's so true, at least in my readings of what her influence was and, you know, what her influence even maybe could have been in economics. And I'm just glad to be able to have this conversation. I think today is the 100 year anniversary since Sadie Alexander got her PhD, right? I think that's today. One month ago. Oh, okay. Well, maybe close enough to honor her 100 100 year anniversary. Why are you doing it today? I'm not sure. But at any rate, um, yeah, I'm just glad to be able to have this conversation today about Sadie Alexander and about her influence on economics and the discipline. So here's my question. So Sadie Alexander's relationship with the economic profession, as you've stated, thus far, was complicated, you know, despite her status as the nation's first black PhD economist, or perhaps because of it, she was not welcomed into the arms of academic economics. And she pursued her career elsewhere while still maintaining this deep interest and involvement with the field at its margins. And in previous research of my own, I worked with some sociologists with the American Sociological Association. We found that the career trajectories of black and Hispanic economists even today are marked by this complicated relationship with the academic profession. So first question in your view, how is the house academic economics evolved over the past century with respect to welcoming black economists? And in our other spaces within the academic economics for black economists, still rare to find are still hard fault and in your estimation, are things improving? Thanks, Kyle, for your question. So let me start let me back up and say that Sadie Alexander received her doctorate degree in economics on June 15th, 1921. And so when she received it, she was the second African American woman in our history to get the doctorate degree. So 1921 is a milestone in our history because three African American women received the doctorate degree for the first time in our history. Okay, 1921. And the other two were in English and German. And so the way that you set up your question, I think is really important because there's a lot of misinformation about Sadie Alexander and her relationship to the economics profession. So I'm glad you you you framed the question as you did because I think it captures some of, you know, the noise that is out there about Sadie Alexander and the economics profession. Sadie Alexander did not have a relationship with the economics profession at all. And so if we go back to 1921, she finishes her doctorate degree looks for a job. What we know is that she was not able to find employment from public and private institutions in the north. That's what we know. We don't know where she surged. And so I think there's a tendency for people to think that the economics profession, which is a problematic profession towards it, which is certainly racially hostile towards African Americans, that we tend to think that that was the case in 1921. But we don't have specific information. It was often the case that when people applied for jobs or when people got jobs in the academy, it was because a college president wanted them to to get a job. So it's important to also note that none of the three African American women who were who received their doctorates for the first time in our history were hired at a level that was commensurate in their in their fields. So the humanities, social sciences, none of them were because black women were confronting something that was was larger and that was discrimination against them based on race and gender. So I don't look at this as something that is tied to the economics profession with respect to to Sadie Alexander. And throughout her life, as I went through her archival records, there was no engagement with the economics profession. Her concern was not the economics profession. When she became a lawyer, her concern was to open up opportunities for African Americans. We don't know why she chose to study economics. There's no record of that. What we do know is that she chose to go into law in order to open up opportunities for African Americans. Okay, so then your question was about black economists today. And are they welcomed into the profession? Are there spaces for African American economists in the academic arena? Right? Right. And I would say, unfortunately, no, that there are not a lot of opportunities for African American economists still within the Academy. I think that there are more opportunities for black economists outside of the Academy. And so last year, for example, I was the only African American economist in the state of Pennsylvania. I have an African American colleague, but he was he's been on leave for several years. So so last year, the only African American economist, there are a couple of other or several other black economists from the global South, right? But I think that that is typical that in many places that there are very few African American economists still most African American or black economists are employed at HBCUs rather than predominantly white institutions. And so those of us who are in that position are often left feeling as if we are tokens. And I say that not as a reflection of our worth, but really as I think sad commentary on the way in which we are perceived by non black people within the the discipline and within our departments. So what you said too earlier about Sadie and what her motivation was, I kept thinking that she's a civil rights leader. We didn't know a lot about, like, more than being an economist, just based on what she wrote. Did you see her as that? You know, and also there's another part of my question, but would you say she was a civil rights leader given the influence she had and where she spoke? Yes, right. And so what we didn't know about Sadie Alexander prior to my research was her economic thought. Kenneth Mack is a legal scholar at Harvard who has done a great deal of research on Sadie Alexander's legal strategies, right, and her practice as a lawyer. Fran Ruson Wilson, who is a historian, has done a great deal of research on Sadie Alexander as a professional African American woman. So there is that body of research. What there wasn't was a body of literature on Sadie Alexander's economic thought. But she was a political economist. So when I excavated her economic thought, it also goes to, you know, broader concerns that are tied to civil rights issues. And she relieved in the economics with that, which was just fascinating. Yes. So now Alexander talked a lot about the divinity of work and seemed to evolve a bit in some ways from putting the onus at one point on blacks to combat racism and to do more themselves to pushing for government and then the society as a whole to overhaul the nation's racist system. Can you discuss that evolution? Sure. In the 1920s, and that's really the beginning of her speeches, right. And so so much of what I've pulled together is in terms of reconstructing her thought is based on her speeches, but also on her her correspondence because she was active in a lot of civic organizations such as the National Urban League. In the 1920s, Sadie Alexander did put the the onus, the burden, I think, on African Americans, because this is a period of time where African Americans have the opportunity for the first time in our history to be employed in large numbers in the industrial sector as a result of the demand for world for workers during World War One. And I'm talking primarily about blackmail workers. And so she studies the great migration. And when she starts to write about African Americans and the industrial sector, she really puts forward the idea that African Americans should avail themselves of these opportunities and that African Americans, in fact, should go to business schools and also become manufacturers. But by the 1930s, there is a shift in her focus away from placing the burden on African Americans to focusing on the important role of government. And this happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal policies where she saw the possibilities for having legislation that would provide more opportunities or equal opportunities to African Americans as provided to white workers. But what she came to realize during that period of time by the mid 1930s is that those policies which were racially neutral on paper were, in fact, not racially neutral when it came to their impact that they had a disparate impact on African Americans, either because of exclusions with respect to occupations and industries or the way in which they were administered. So by the 19, mid 1930s, she shifts. She's still focused on the role of government and taking on the responsibility for change. But she was also mindful that government needed to have programs that were compensatory. And we see that really by the 1960s now where African Americans have become ghettoized in slums, often in northern areas, right? So it's still this population that she had been focusing on in her dissertation and African Americans who are ghettoized are facing employment discrimination that's ongoing and persistent. They have access to substandard schools. They live in unsafe neighborhoods and dilapidated housing. And so the focus then shifts to providing race conscious programs for African Americans and with respect to jobs in 1963. She advocated for affirmative action for African Americans, right? So that's two years before Johnson issued his executive order for affirmative action. She was calling for affirmative action for African Americans because she believed that racial discrimination was the norm. It was the standard, the default. And so she said that anything other than affirmative action for employment constituted discrimination, right? And I think I've answered your question, right, in terms of the burden. And then the religion, right, the notion changed. That makes so much sense. Right. And then let me just say that the last part of it, right, 1960s. So she goes, right, her thinking goes from focusing on the burden for African Americans and the role of government. And then at the end, I think by the 1960s, mid to late 1960s, there's also this growing sense of frustration on her part that that we have been trying so many things to confront racial discrimination and oppression and to alleviate economic deprivation. And it hasn't worked. And so by that period of time now, she's calling for a, you know, a radical reappraisal of methods that are used to combat these problems and also calling for a restructuring of our society that brings together members of the community and civil rights organizations in the educational sector and government, labor and industry, right, to provide, as she said, the guarantee of work, meaningful work for people who have been left out, especially for Negro youth, because she was focusing on the goal of their ability to realize their potential. Wow, so much so much of that evolution of thought that you that you that you mentioned there and in her in her story reminds me of another another black scholar and person who worked in political economy. I think who is who is Du Bois? I think I think so much of her evolution there reminds me of Du Bois's evolution. And there are also parallels in the sense that Du Bois did early work in his early work in political economy and was also not for various reasons, not working as an economist, you know, working as a more sociologist. But there's so many parallels between those stories. And sometimes I wonder when thinking about Sadie Alexander, the extent to which her path through law instead of into academic economics, for example, may have influenced the way that she was able to speak publicly about economic issues, the way she was able to tie them to policy in ways that may have been even restricted. Had she been in academia or, say, for example, had to take an academic position at a lower qualification level, like you had mentioned. So she's just such an interesting figure to me. But I wanted to ask about the the the historical aspects of this work, right? So because this is an academic economics and archival work with an academic economics is generally rare and not valued by the profession as compared to quantitative empirical work, despite its obvious value to scholarship and to our profession. Right. So what would you say to other economists who are interested in pursuing this kind of work in the history of economics? Right. What is and what is a major challenge that you faced in trying to complete this work? OK, so and if I forget that second part, please remind me. So the first part of your question is what would I say to other scholars who are interested in doing archival work? Yeah, it is very rare and I don't think that it is sufficiently valued, but it is essential research when we try to uncover or excavate the lived experiences of people from racially marginalized communities or even on the basis of gender. So doing archival research allows the researcher to hear the voice of of people, right, as events for unfolding. And it also allows us to understand what their priorities were also in the context of what was unfolding during their lives at a particular point of time. So I think that that that it's essential research that we need to be interviewing our elders. We need to conduct the oral histories and collect primary documents because this is a history that has been denied and distorted, unseen. And so the way to recover that history and to recover those voices is to do the painstaking work that is often archival. Your other question was what were my challenges? And the right, I had a lot. And that's why it took almost two decades. And when I was on an NPR show a couple of weeks ago and the host kept saying, you know, almost two decades and it took you almost two decades to do this. I felt bad a little bit at first. But the more I thought about it, I thought it's OK because Sadie Alexander's economic thought, I think, will resonate with audiences today in a way that they would not have resonated 10 years ago, for example. I had a lot of challenges when I started in 2003. I had a little toddler and I had a baby on the way. And then I, yeah, yeah. So that was tough. But I was on leave. And so I would make the trek to the archives, which was three hours away from where I lived. And then I became a lone parent. And so it was just it was impossible to be able to get up at the crack of dawn, which is what I was doing to try to get them to daycare and drive three hours to the archives and get back for school or daycare, whatever the case may have been. It wasn't possible. And so the archives had hours that were during the work during the weekday. So from 9.30 until 4.30, they were open during the weekday, not open on weekends, right? So there's a problem of distance and child care. There is the problem then of funding, because what I realized is that I would have to be in Philadelphia, live in Philadelphia for a sustained period of time in order to do the research, especially as my children got older. And so I applied for external grants, was turned down for it. And publishing was also a problem eventually because so few economists are trained in the history of economic thought. And when they are, they've studied European men, for the most part, or white American men. And they haven't studied the histories of African Americans and African American women. And to be able to think critically about Sadie Alexander's political economic analysis meant situating her within the context of what other African Americans and African American women in particular were doing. And then I think one of the biggest challenges was Sadie Alexander's handwritten. Very, very difficult to read. Over the years I had, and think back, I had permission from Penn in 2005 to publish the speeches. And so I had a huge stack of speeches, but her early speeches were handwritten. I could glean the meaning, but I had a very difficult time reading them in order to be able to then type and put into a volume. I had lots of assistance from students over the years who tried to help with that. And finally, the turning point for the research was 2014. I get funding from Bucknell University. I go to the archives. I take my kids with me to stay in an extended stay hotel. I start to disseminate it through speaking engagements and podcasts and so on. And that's of course what brought it to the attention of Yale University Press. But the handwriting remained a challenge. And 2018, I had a dedicated research assistant, Lily Shourney, who worked with me over two academic years on this volume of speeches. And a large part of that was spent in trying to decipher the handwriting. And not just the handwriting on the early speeches, but the type speeches which had scribbles and strikeouts, crossouts, writing all over them, the front, the back, the margin. So this was a really, really, so this was a really, I think, enormous undertaking. And that's why it took so long. So having two kids and just with everything else you've added, that was in a long time, two decades. It feels like, because it feels like my career is just now getting underway, now that my children are in high school and college and the book is finally out. That's great. So you mentioned not wanting to understand history, how important that is and with what's going on right now, folks wanting to push aside history, especially African-American history. What I found so fascinating in the book is there are quite a few sections that resonate with what's happening today. One particular section titled Economic Status of Negro Women, that was 1930, stood out to me. I'll just read an excerpt here. Never did a better opportunity present itself than today when legislation to protect the masses is being generally enacted. If we do not advocate or present legislation that particularly benefits our masses, we cannot blame others to hope to share the results of a liberalism in government. Not only must we place on the statute books legislation that is of special benefit to the Negro worker, but we must with equal force and zeal see that the Negro worker receives his or her full share of all relief legislation. Never since reconstruction has there existed such a favorable chance for the federal government to influence the condition of the Negro masses. And maybe think a bit about what EPI economists have been calling for during a post pandemic, a time where bright light has been shined on the persistent inequalities that we see in this country. Do you think a lot of her work, her recommendations do make sense today? Yes, thanks for the question. And it goes to write the fact that I think that the book will resonate more today than it would have about 10 years ago because we were talking about systemic racism, for example, and her book is about structural racism or systemic racism. One of the policies in particular that I think is very much relevant and in need today is a federal job guarantee. Sadie Alexander believed that everybody who was willing and able to work and wanted to have work should be entitled to have a job. She thought that unemployment was the biggest economic problem the nation faced. In fact, she thought that it was, you know, the biggest problem globally, right? So she advocated for a federal job guarantee based on the experiences of World War II. And so in World War II, we were able to achieve full employment through direct government investments and public works programs. And one of the things that President Roosevelt called for as a result of full employment policies that were engendered during World War II is the need for a second bill of rights that would enhance economic security. And he issued that, you know, call for a second bill of rights in 1944 in a state of the union address. So in 1945, Sadie Alexander gives a speech where she picks up on, you know, this notion of full employment and also argues that we need to have full employment policies. But unlike Roosevelt, she linked it to racial issues because of the persistence of racial discrimination against African Americans. So she called for it to deal with the fact that African Americans typically faced long periods of unemployment. So the other thing I think, which is really interesting and relevant is that she believed that full employment could be achieved through, yeah, federal job guarantee that also focused heavily on public works programs that involved investments in public infrastructure or social infrastructure, I should say, right? So not just the typical infrastructure of putting money into the building industries because that tends to be biased in favor of white men, but putting public money into social infrastructure, into programs that targeted social needs. And so when she talked about in 1945, she focused on rebuilding slums, urban slums, and also addressing or providing electricity for people who lived in rural areas. Today we could think about that in terms of public investments in social infrastructure, not only in childcare, we're hearing a lot about that, but also we could think about it in terms of the utilities such as making sure that everybody has access to clean drinking water, for example, or access to broadband internet, right? And of course there's an ongoing need to address blighted areas and to rebuild our urban communities. So yeah, I think that her recommendations very much make sense today. And going back to the idea of full employment and a strong economy, and once she backs throughout with her deep knowledge of world history, just it's amazing what she brings to the discussion, understanding history and how important it is again, she makes that case that hatred among groups intensifies, right, as the economy deteriorates because everybody feels like they're competing against each other. Can you discuss a little bit, clearly she made that case, but how does that play out in the economy, the larger US economy? How do you think it should play out going forward in terms of making sure policy makers realize how important it is to have full employment, to have a thriving economy debating that right now? Yeah, thanks, great question. So when Sadie Alexander was working on her dissertation, right, during World War I, there was a lot of racial scapegoating and mob violence directed against African Americans, right? So it took place in Philadelphia, for example, in 1918. In 1919, there was the Red Summer, which was not just confined to a summer, but there's mob violence and over, I think 30 cities across the country against African Americans. And that's taking place as white vets are coming back from World War I. They see African Americans in areas that they believe are their areas, their spaces, and in jobs, there's also, so after World War I, there's an economic downturn that takes place. And so during that period of time, there's heightened racial hostility, right? 1919, and then in 1921, of course, there was the Tulsa massacre, which took place just two weeks before she graduated from Penn. And so racial violence and a sense of economic uncertainty on the part of white Americans always informed her thinking about the state of the economy. And she didn't think that unemployment caused racial violence, but she believed that economic uncertainty helped to ignite it, that it often was used as a pretext that led to racial scapegoating. And then in the 1930s, she gave a speech called Coming Events Cast Their Shadow in 1939, which I think is one of her most important and certainly eloquent speeches. And she gave this speech because she was alarmed by a number of events that had taken place in the United States where there were open expressions of racial hostility against immigrants and African Americans. And she linked it to events that took place in the early 1930s in Germany against Jews. And so she was alarmed that these types of large scale racial hostilities could also take place within the United States. And then by the end of World War II, as there's the prospect of increased unemployment with cutbacks from the war production board, she was worried that white workers would once again scapegoat black workers in the context of job loss as they did in earlier downturns. And that is what happened after World War II. There was an increase in racial violence, especially directed against African American men who were vets, who were vets. And that of course led to the formation of the Truman Committee on which she served. So the issue of I think racial scapegoating and racial violence and the need to have economic policies that would diminish that tendency and to safeguard democracy was certainly very important to her thinking. You asked me another question, I think as well. Well, I was gonna say that do you ever feel at all discouraged that sometimes it seems like we're talking about the same issues that when you do read history, sometimes like are we moving forward or not moving forward? I know Kyle and all of us at EPI work so hard and wanna know we're moving forward. So what's your thought on that? Yeah, and I think that Sadie Alexander was frustrated. That's what you get from her speeches in the 1960s. I'm not discouraged, I'm annoyed and I'm angry, right? That we are still dealing with issues that we should not be dealing with. And in many cases, the solutions I think are very simple and so Sadie Alexander noted the importance of really popularizing economics, increasing economic literacy. And I think that that is so needed. I thought about that with the great recession that we need to have teams of economists to spread out across the country and provide information on how economies recover from a Keynesian perspective. I think that that is of vital importance to our nation and that would go a long way towards helping to deal with a lot of the assumptions that people make about the economy which are simply unfounded. So yeah, so I'm angry that we are still dealing with a lot of these issues when we could have an economy where we have shared prosperity and we would all be so much better off. You know this at the Economic Policy Institute, better than I do. Right, Kyla, it sounds like we need a road show. Something like, you know, I tend to think that, or I tend to hope that it's not just that the data, we know the data's out there. The data has been out there for a long time, especially from some of these long-standing, persistent disparities, employment and wealth pay gaps. These statistics have been out for a very long time and yet the problems persist. To me, that says a couple of things. One, that the frameworks that folks have are perhaps bad for interpreting the data as it comes in and hopefully some of our work can be presenting folks with better frameworks for thinking about the data when they see it. But the other aspect of this is that I think this work will always continue, right? Progress is never an inevitable thing. It is never something that will stick. So there's always going to be folks having to continue that struggle and continue that push and I think it's great that you've been able to lift up Sadie Alexander's contribution to that struggle and so they haven't been forgotten and that they can again like have that second impact, you know, because you wrote it and spoke it and now you're bringing it to the forefront so folks can see it again and understand it. Again, full employment was being talked about, you know, 60 years ago, 80 years ago, you know, that's an amazing thing to be able to have that work help us as well as we continue to push for the same sorts of goals. Thank you, Kyle. Yeah, progress is not linear by any means and I think this also speaks to the fact that racial oppression is a central organizing feature of our economy. It's not going away anytime soon and so we need to, you know, as Sadie Alexander said, we need to have a radical reappraisal of our methods and also I think a restructuring of the way that we've been doing business. Definitely. So, Nita, if there's one takeaway and I know this is always hard for all of us from the book that you want folks who are listening to this to, you know, I consider you to your book to take away maybe something that would empower them, what would that be? Could be a couple of two things. You know, yeah, and the thing is, I've read those speeches so many times and I reread them and I get different things at different times, you know, depending on what's going on in our history or in my own life. And now I think what I'm thinking about is really the tragedy of anti-blackness. That anti-blackness really takes a tremendous toll on individuals, and I said this in the book, as well as our potential, not only as individuals, but also collectively our potential. So for me, the takeaway is to really think about the tremendous toll that anti-blackness places on people who experience it and suffer from it, and to perhaps then think about the possibilities or imagine what our nation could be like if we were willing to fully invest in all of our children and all of our people and to draw on their rich sources of knowledge and talents. I love that, Nina, thank you. Thank you so much for this great conversation. Again, Nina's book is Democracy, Race, and Justice, The Speeches and Writings of Sadie T.M. Alexander. To hear more of EPI's State of Working America podcast, check out YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or visit us at epi.org, fax slash podcast. For our latest analysis, check out epi.org and follow us on social media via at economic policy. Thank you again. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Nina.