00:00you talk about the pandemic and if you look at some of the issues that a lot of voters or future
00:05voters have been talking about if you look at surveys and polling data people were concerned
00:10about their economic security and having policy for the working poor because you know a lot of
00:17times we talk about the poor as if everyone's just waffling around and not doing anything but you have
00:21so many people who are working numerous jobs and they are still poor so these are not normal times
00:28we can just kind of gallivant around and and um teeter around the edges like this is real
00:33substantive important work so i kind of want to get your thoughts about that this idea that some
00:41poor people are deserving and some some aren't and often that is like racially tamed or racially
00:49motivated do you have any thoughts about that as someone who claimed in a csnbc nbc interview that
00:54you were obsessed about ending poverty what are your thoughts about that yeah i i recognize
00:59particularly in my work as mayor that so much of the narrative around any transformative social
01:06policy but particularly though any policy that helps the working close poor those in poverty etc
01:12it's steeped in like anti-blackness that that there's been such a phenomenal job in a sinister way of
01:20embedding all of us with this idea that people are poor because they're lazy that there's these
01:26welfare queens who just want to have kids just to have kids because that's how they get paid and don't
01:33want to work that there's people who are just sitting at home collecting unemployment checks not doing
01:39anything and the unoccurring of that is it's black people and we but it's been a through line through the
01:45history of the history of this country like you had people working to death for free aka human
01:50traffic humans or or slaves who were called lazy but who were beat for being lazy who were literally
01:57working and creating all the wealth of this country you had after slavery sort of laws on the book
02:03against loitering because black people are lazy they need to be sharecropping they can't be have any
02:08idle time so i guess for me it's frustrating to see how that's been a through line through generations
02:14through centuries this idea that in this country there's a group of people who work and that's
02:19why they have wealth there's a group of people who take and who don't work and that's why they don't
02:24not only do they not have wealth they don't deserve it and that's what we're really up against we saw it
02:29with the center from west virginia's comments allegedly and have post today where they said he
02:33was telling colleagues well i ain't trying to give them money because they're gonna spend on drugs i'm not
02:38gonna give them money because they're not gonna work and it's like it's so divorced from the truth and
02:44that's why a lot of the work i'm focused on now is just being very annoying and just telling the
02:48story like not that's that's a lie that's actually not true and you said it so beautifully we have a
02:55term for it it's called working poor there's like a whole political term for it because millions of
03:02people in our country are working working two jobs being essential workers and still can't pay for
03:08necessities and that's the tragedy that's the crime that's the the thing that's abhorrent not
03:14the fact that despite their efforts they don't have money that's not their fault
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