The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials)

by Heather McGhee

The volume of credit card debt Americans owed had tripled over the course of the 1990s, and among cardholders, black and Latinx families were more likely to be in debt.

United States had deliberately created a white middle class through racially restricted government investments in homeownership and infrastructure and retirement security, and that it had only recently decided that keeping up those investments would be unaffordable and unwise.

thinking about a more diverse future changed white Americans’ policy preferences about government.

Those of us seeking unity told that version of the zero-sum story; the politicians seeking division told the other version—is it any wonder that many white people saw race relations through the lens of competition?

what if racism is actually driving inequality for everyone?

the economic benefit of the racial bargain is shrinking for all but the richest.

The coronavirus pandemic is a tragic example of governments and corporations failing to protect black, brown, and Indigenous lives—though, if they had, everyone would have been safer.

the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the average white scoring of anti-black bias was 3.6, but whites rated anti-white bias as a 4.7, and opined that anti-white bias had accelerated sharply in the mid-1970s.

The U.S. economy depended on systems of exploitation—on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders. This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people.

The First Congress’s answer, in the 1790 Naturalization Act, was to confine citizenship to “free white persons,” encoding its cultural understanding of whiteness as free—in opposition to blackness, which would be forever unfree.

It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World; if

Yes, the zero-sum story of racial hierarchy was born along with the country, but it is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division. It has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.

The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite.

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

in selective college admissions, any given white person is far more likely to be competing with another white person than with one of the underrepresented people of color in the applicant pool.

the majority of people receiving government assistance, like the majority of people in poverty, are white;

the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

Because the southern “oligarchs of the lash,” as he called them, had done so little to support education, innovation, and small enterprise, slavery was making southern whites poorer.

it wasn’t the degree of inequality that was correlated with poverty today; it was the fact of slavery itself,

A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.

the word public did not mean “of the people.” It meant “of the white people.”

Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.

new form of racial disdain took over: racism based not on biology but on perceived culture and behavior.

“today, we say, prejudice is preoccupied less with inborn ability and more with effort and initiative.”

It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

white New Dealer could turn against the Great Society after the civil rights movement turned government from enforcer of the racial hierarchy to upender of it.

basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; it’s about what some (okay, most) of them do. He

even though black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.

The hurdle conservatives faced was that they needed the white majority to turn against society’s two strongest vessels for collective action: the government and labor unions. Racism was the ever-ready tool for the job, undermining white Americans’ faith in their fellow Americans.

The majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee for president ever since the party became the party of civil rights under Lyndon Johnson. The Republican Party has won those votes through sheer cultural marketing to a white customer base that’s still awaiting delivery of the economic goods they say they want. Despite the dramatic change in white Americans’ support for government antipoverty efforts, the typical white voter’s economic preferences are still more progressive than those of the Republican politicians for whom they vote.

On taxes, nearly half of Republican voters support raising taxes on millionaires by 4 percent to pay for schools and roads, but the Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy.

there are still some New Deal–type economic policies that the majority of white Americans support, like increasing the federal minimum wage and raising taxes on the wealthy.

“We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18 percentage points.”

Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.”

When the public meant “white,” public colleges thrived.

student debt payments are stopping us from buying our first home, the irreplaceable wealth-building asset. It’s even contributing to delays in marriage and family formation.

White and black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate black people for a drug crime.

three million senior citizens who still owe $86 billion in student loans can attest that the “madness” doesn’t really end. Seniors with student loans are more likely to report rationing medical care, and the government garnishes Social Security payments for seniors in default.

Healthcare works best as a collective endeavor, and that’s at the heart of why America’s system performs so poorly. We’ve resisted universal solutions because when it comes to healthcare, from President Truman’s first national proposal in 1943 to the present-day battles over Medicaid expansion, racism has stopped us from ever filling the pool in the first place.

The pool of national health insurance would have been mainly for white Americans, but the threat of sharing it with even a small number of black and brown Americans helped to doom the entire plan from the start.

The closest the United States has come to a universal plan is the Affordable Care Act, created by a black president carried into office with record turnout among black voters and passed with no congressional votes from the Republican Party.

whites with higher levels of racial resentment and more anti-black stereotypes grew more opposed to healthcare reform after it became associated with President Obama.

Without Medicaid expansion, people of color in those states struggle more—they are the ones most likely to be denied health benefits on the job—but white people are still the largest share of the 4.4 million working Americans who would have Medicaid if the law had been left intact.

a states’ rights legal theory most often touted to defend segregation struck at the heart of the first black president’s healthcare protections for working-class people of all races.

they’re so stigmatized that people whose lives would be transformed by them don’t even want them for fear of sharing the stigma.

“If we didn’t have these sharp divisions based on race, we could make enormous progress in terms of making sure that people are not hurting as badly as they are, [or] deprived of what clearly are the necessities of life. And I would like to think it was possible if we had a sense of social solidarity.”

tail effects may even eclipse those of the Depression in terms of lost wealth.

Homeownership rates reversed

5.6 million foreclosed homes during the Great Recession.