Heather McGhee

Heather McGhee was born and raised in a middle-class Black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, an upbringing that convinced her to dedicate her career to fighting inequality in the United States. After attending the prestigious Milton Academy boarding school in Massachusetts, she went to Yale University, where she completed her degree in American Studies in 2001. After graduation, she briefly worked in Barcelona and Hollywood, then settled in New York City to work as an economic policy researcher for the relatively new, progressive think tank Demos. She spent the next several years researching issues like predatory mortgage lending, credit card debt, and minimum wage laws, all of which came to the fore of national politics several years later, during the financial crisis. After several years, McGhee decided to bolster her policy credentials with a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She briefly worked on John Edwards’s 2008 presidential campaign and helped draft Dodd-Frank, the massive law that transformed the nation’s system for financial regulation after the Great Recession, before returning to Demos. She became the think tank’s president in 2014, at just 33 years old—although her predecessor and colleagues reportedly had to ask her to take the role several times before she finally agreed. During her time leading Demos, she overhauled the organization through an extensive racial justice training. However, as she explains in The Sum of Us, Donald Trump’s election convinced her that simply proposing better policies wouldn’t be enough to improve Americans’ economic prospects. So in 2017, she left Demos to begin writing this book. Besides her role at Demos, she is best known for her popular TED talk and her frequent guest appearances on MSNBC shows like All In with Chris Hayes.