TV: “It’s only writing about race when we’re talking about Black and Brown people, right? That seems to be the dividing line, and I’m like well have we not, I mean, I just have, I get told that all the time. 'You’re dividing.' So I had an example where my Black working class story came out and it really pointed out, with this whole narrative of the white working class that’s fine, but let’s look at the numbers of wealth in Black and Latino communities, let’s look at the percentages, I had hard data and a lot of anecdotes and experts and all that, and I had a reader email me and say, ‘Look, I’m white, lost a lot in the recession, my house is underwater, I’m not convinced that your story is you know one that I can really understand because I’ve also been impacted.’ I said, ‘I get it, we’re not talking about you personally,’ and that’s what I think a lot of people need to understand. When we talk about race, for these stories we’re talking about hundreds of years of systemic oppression, of history of systemic institutional bias and racism, it is in the numbers, it is in the data, that is why it’s being covered, it is in healthcare, it is in housing, it is in all of these areas that we write about, all of them across the board. So, to suddenly say that talking about these issues are making it worse, that’s absolutely incorrect. So I emailed the reader back and I said, ‘Great, you want data? Here you go.’ I mean I sent him like a three paragraph email really, and I didn’t, I wasn’t angry at him because he asked. He was like, ‘I don’t get it.’ You don’t get it? No problem, let me explain it to you, you know, and I took the time out because I felt that was an important way to really be receptive to that question that I get all the time and respond to it in a thoughtful way, but at the end of the day we can’t, this country was founded on a very complicated history and that hasn’t gone away.”