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

by Heather McGhee

Nearby houses lost value: some 95 million households near foreclosed homes lost an estimated $2.2 trillion in property value. Local communities brought in less tax revenue, which led to widely felt cuts in school funding, vital services, and public jobs.

toxins as far as the wind would carry them; in Detroit, a surge in childhood lead poisoning would mark the decade after the recession.

sharp rise in suicides during 2005–2010,

“significantly reduced student achievement in math and English language arts” linked

8.7 million jobs were destroyed.

One reform was the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), which required financial institutions to make public the number and size of mortgages and home loans they made in each zip code or census tract, so that patterns of discrimination could be easily identified.

Another was the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required financial institutions to make investments in any community from which they received deposits.

what was risky wasn’t the borrower; it was the loan.

all these components of a “good job” came from collective bargaining and union advocacy with governments in the late 1930s and ’40s. And the power to win these benefits came from solidarity—black, white, and brown, men and women, immigrant and native-born.

as union density has declined, the portion going to the richest Americans has increased in step.

Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher; for noncollege-educated men, 8 percent higher.

After 2001, the country lost 42,400 factories in just eight years. The United States doesn’t build much anymore; in 2017, the total value of our exports was one of the lowest in the world.

Today, the public sector has a unionization rate more than five times higher than that in the private sector.)

even though they want the union, their racism, that hatred is keeping them from joining.”

the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and divide-and-conquer tactics, going national.

Democracy is a secular religion in America; faith in it unites us.

Since then, in the interest of racial subjugation, America has repeatedly attacked its own foundations. From voter suppression to the return of a virtual property requirement in a big donor-dominated campaign finance system, a segment of our society has fought against democracy in order to keep power in the hands of a narrow white elite, often with the support of most white Americans.

Republicans who score high in what he calls “ethnic antagonism”—who are worried about a perceived loss of political and cultural power for white people in the United States—are much more likely to espouse antidemocratic, authoritarian ideas such as “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,”

The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states; white people who live in larger states that look more like America are the ones underrepresented today.

The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.

150 years later this is still happening

Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous black counties.

19 percent of white people with household incomes below $25,000 have neither a driver’s license nor a passport. The same is true of 20 percent of white people ages 17–20.

Or perhaps the process was working precisely as intended: people of color, renters, and young people are significantly less likely to respond to official mail than are white people, homeowners, and older people, as the Census Bureau had discovered.

It’s always been a power struggle to create a representative electorate, and currently, the forces against equality have the upper hand.

A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population.

In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.

But the resistance of many white Mainers to new people isn’t about just dollars and cents, if we’re honest. It’s also about the fear of a loss of community, of identity, of home.

Everywhere that I found white people paying the spillover costs of racism, I also found that, without exception, their co-workers and neighbors of color were paying even more,

When the rules of the game allow a small minority of participants to capture most of the gains, at a certain point (for example, when the entire middle class owns less than the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans), fewer people can play at all.

the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.