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Demos is the progressive inequality-focused think tank where Heather McGhee spent most of her early career. Although she started out as a junior policy researcher in 2002, she eventually became the organization’s president from 2014-17.
Demos Quotes in The Sum of Us
The The Sum of Us quotes below are all either spoken by Demos or refer to Demos. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
I discovered that if you try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the counter-message that does talk, even implicitly, about race. Racial scapegoating about “illegals,” drugs, gangs, and riots undermines public support for working together. Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story; we had to be honest about racism’s role in dividing us in order to call people to their higher ideals.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10
Quotes
The big and small public works our country needs now should be designed explicitly to foster contact across cultural divides, sending urban youth to rural areas and vice versa, and explicitly building teams that reflect the youth generation’s astonishing diversity. An analysis Demos did in the middle of the Great Recession found that one hundred billion dollars spent directly hiring people could create 2.6 million public service jobs; spending the same amount on tax cuts trickles down to just one hundred thousand jobs.
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Demos Term Timeline in The Sum of Us
The timeline below shows where the term Demos appears in The Sum of Us. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...young woman, McGhee observed the nation’s worsening economic inequality. But working at the think tank Demos in her 20s showed her that information could actually transform policy. So she went to...
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...communities because structural racism already puts those communities at a disadvantage. But while working at Demos, she had an experience that changed her mind.
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...wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies. The problem was especially pronounced in Black and Latinx communities. Demos published a report on this trend and received significant media attention. But lenders spent millions...
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...about how American society works. After Trump’s inauguration, McGhee decided to quit her job running Demos and start researching how factors like “belonging, competition, and status” drive people’s political behavior. In...
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Chapter 2: Racism Drained the Pool
...worst in the industrialized world. A team of researchers whom McGhee met while working at Demos suggested that many Americans don’t even understand what the government does. McGhee suspects that it's...
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Chapter 3: Going Without
...tell stories about the U.S.’s declining public services without mentioning race. But when she ran Demos’s Race-Class Narrative Project, she learned that most Americans will only listen to such stories until...
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Chapter 4: Ignoring the Canary
...long before subprime mortgages triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, McGhee was studying them for Demos by interviewing homeowners who took them out. In theory, subprime loans were supposed to make...
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...widespread in the U.S. in the early 2000s. But when McGhee visited Congress to present Demos’s report on it, nobody listened to her because both parties had long since agreed to...
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Chapter 5: No One Fights Alone
...City went on strike to demand a union and a $15-an-hour wage. (Policy advocates, including Demos, were pushing for $10.10 at best.) The “Fight for $15” movement spread fast around the...
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Chapter 6: Never a Real Democracy
...even more unequal and unjust than its economy, and this has serious consequences. In 2017, Demos helped defend the white veteran Larry Harmon, who was about to lose his right to...
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...2018 thanks to a ballot initiative presented by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) and Demos. Notably, the FRRC always sent white and Black activists together to knock on doors around...
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...of those affected didn’t realize it until election day, when it was already too late. Demos teamed up with a trade union and the deregistered veteran Larry Harmon to sue the...
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Chapter 9: The Hidden Wound
After becoming the president of Demos, which was mostly white, McGhee led a training process to educate the staff about racial...
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