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

by Heather McGhee

“So, when we’re talking about the fiscal picture in 2040 or 2050, we’re also talking about a demographic change tipping point, so where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth…and now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?” Nobody spoke. I checked to see if I’d been muted. No—the light on the phone was still green. Finally, one of the economists spoke into the awkward silence.

“Well, sure, Heather. We know that, and you know that, but let’s not lead with our chin here. We are trying to be persuasive.”

At least that economist had said the quiet part out loud for once. He was just expressing the unspoken conventional wisdom in my field: that we’d be less successful if we explicitly called out the racial unfairness or reminded people that the 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. What was worse, I didn’t have the confidence to tell my colleagues that they were wrong about the politics of it. They were probably right.

Was it possible that even when we didn’t bring up race, it didn’t matter? That racism could strengthen the hand that beat us, even when we were advocating for policies that would help all Americans—including white people?

Why would white voters have rallied to the flag of a man whose agenda promised to wreak economic, social, and environmental havoc on them along with everyone else? It just didn’t add up.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.

In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change. When policies change in advance of the underlying beliefs, we are often surprised to find the problem still with us. America ended the policy of enforced school segregation two generations ago, but with new justifications, the esteem in which many white parents hold black and brown children hasn’t changed much, and today our schools are nearly as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education. Beliefs matter.

The people who agreed most strongly that demographic change threatened whites’ status were most susceptible to shifting their policy views because of it, even on “race-neutral policies” like raising the minimum wage and expanding healthcare—even drilling in the Arctic. The authors concluded that “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”

It is progressive economic conventional wisdom that racism accelerates inequality for communities of color, but what if racism is actually driving inequality for everyone?

To understand when white America had turned against government, I traveled to one of the many places where the town had drained its public swimming pool rather than integrate it.

Black writers before me, from James Baldwin to Toni Morrison, have made the point that racism is a poison first consumed by its concocters.

The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right. The civil rights victories that were so bitterly opposed in the South ended up being a boon for the region, resulting in stronger local economies and more investments in infrastructure and education.

Rather than ending the soul-searching of the Trump era, the 2020 election raised new questions about how much suffering and dysfunction the country’s white majority is willing to tolerate, and for how elusive a gain.

The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything Americans have in common, from our schools to our air to our infrastructure.

“It turns out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for black people, it must be at the expense of white people.”

In sum, the life of a black American under slavery was the living antithesis of freedom, with black people subject to daily bodily and spiritual tyranny by man and by state. And alongside this exemplar of subjugation, the white American yearning for freedom was born.

Eternal slavery provided a new caste that even the poorest white-skinned person could hover above and define himself against.

Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression. White women in slaveholding communities considered their slaves “their freedom,” liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing, and even the sexual demands of their husbands.

For the common white American, the presence of blackness—imagined as naturally enslaved, with no agency or reason, denied each and every one of the enumerated freedoms—gave daily shape to the confines of a new identity just cohering at the end of the eighteenth century: white, free, citizen. It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World; if it could be blacks, it wouldn’t have to be whites.

The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite. (Consider the New York Herald’s publishing tycoon, James Gordon Bennett Sr., who warned the city’s white working classes during the 1860 election that “if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”) The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

Today, we don’t even notice the absence of the grand resort pools in our communities; where grass grows over former sites, there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on. The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.

When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. 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.

The media’s inaccurate portrayal of poverty as a black problem plays a role in this, because the black faces that predominate coverage trigger a distancing in the minds of many white people.

In the Inequality Era brought to us by racist dog-whistle politics, white voters are less hostile to government policies that promote economic equality than the party they most often vote into power. But vote for them they do. Racial allegiance trumps.

One thing that all of the states with the highest hospital closures have in common is that their legislatures have all refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.

“You don’t need someone to be educated if you want them to work menial jobs and feel lucky for doing it.

In Colfax, Louisiana, for example, when a pro-Reconstruction candidate supported by black voters won a fiercely contested gubernatorial race in 1872, the following spring, a mob of armed white men attacked the courthouse where the certification of the election had been held, killing about one hundred black people who were trying to defend the building, and setting the courthouse on fire. The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.

The requirement that we register to vote at all before Election Day did not become common until after the Civil War, when black people had their first chance at the franchise.

“Racial resentment goes through government for us. For most of our history, the government was the racist. But many white people now believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated. And then distrust of government and not wanting government to do anything about climate change…” I made a hand gesture to show that one could naturally follow the other.

It was sad for me to hear that a short time in my country had brought this idealistic Nordic academic a deeper understanding of the social dominance theory she’d been writing about: what it looks like when a group of people demonstrate little empathy for the suffering of others. But of course, it did. The Nordic countries’ social-democratic policies—generous subsidies for housing, education, and retirement and, newly relevant to me, 480 days of parental leave in Sweden—are almost unimaginable in today’s America, because the dominant American political culture would say that people lacking those privileges are responsible for their situations.

For two generations now, well-meaning white people have subscribed to color blindness in an optimistic attempt to wish away the existence of structural racism. But when they do, they unwittingly align themselves with, and give mainstream cover to, a powerful movement to turn back the clock on integration and equality. What my former University of California, Berkeley, law professor Ian Haney López calls “reactionary color blindness” has become the weapon of choice for conservatives in the courts and in politics. Racial conservatives on the Supreme Court have used the logic to rule that it’s racist for communities to voluntarily integrate schools, because to do so, the government would have to “see” race to assign students. Well-funded political groups mount campaigns to forbid the government from collecting racial data because isn’t that what a racist would do? Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.

Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.

America’s symbols were not designed to represent people of color or to speak to us—nonetheless, the ideals they signify have been more than slogans; they have meant life or death for us. Equality, freedom, liberty, justice—who could possibly love those ideals more than those denied them? African Americans became a people here, and our people sacrificed every last imaginable thing to America’s becoming. The promise of this country has been enough to rend millions of immigrants from their homes, and for today’s mostly of-color immigrants, it’s still enough, despite persecution, detention, and death, to keep them dreaming of finding freedom here. The profound love for America’s ideals should unite all who call it home, of every color—and yet America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.

The post–World War II GI Bill is a good example of a well-intentioned policy meant to benefit all veterans that in fact did almost nothing for black veterans for two generations, because the policy ignored the disparate conditions they faced, such as being excluded from most of the educational and home-owning opportunities the GI Bill was supposed to support.