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

by Heather McGhee

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.

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.

But did white people win? No, for the most part they lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.

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

The people of our country are so productive and generate so much wealth, but most of the gains go to a small number, while most families struggle to stay afloat.

As the descendant of enslaved Africans and of a line of black Americans who were denied housing, equal education, jobs, and even safety from white lynch mobs, I am well aware that the ledger of racial harms is nowhere near balanced.

The logic that launched the zero-sum paradigm—I will profit at your expense—is no longer sparing millions of white Americans from the degradations of American economic life as people of color have always known it.

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 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.

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.

“the fragile middle class,” all income from volatile earnings and no inherited wealth or assets to fall back on.

the American Dream was as easy to achieve as it ever was or has been since, with good union jobs, subsidized home ownership, strong financial protections, a high minimum wage, and a high tax rate that funded American research, infrastructure, and education.

“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.”

The U.S. economy depended on systems of exploitation—on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders.

In very stark and quantifiable terms, the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of African and Indigenous American people turned blood into wealth for the white power structure.

In 1705, a new Virginia law granted title and protection to the little property that any white servant may have accumulated—and simultaneously confiscated the personal property of all the enslaved people in the colony.

The colonies would not have been able to afford their War of Independence were it not for the aid provided by the French, who did so in exchange for tobacco grown by enslaved people.

In decade after decade, threats of job competition—between men and women, immigrants and native born, black and white—have perennially revived the fear of loss at another’s gain.

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

the majority of people receiving government assistance, like the majority of people in poverty, are white; and people of color pay taxes, too.

The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America. Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, 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.

Hinton Rowan Helper published a book called The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Helper had taken it upon himself to count how many schools, libraries, and other public-serving institutions had been set up in free states compared to slave states. In New Hampshire, for instance, he counted 2,381 public schools; in Mississippi, just 782. Maine had 236 libraries; Georgia, 38. The disparity was similar everywhere he looked.

Helper argued that owners should actually have to compensate the rest of the white citizens of the South, because slavery had impoverished the region.

Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic: counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.

“societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.”

When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too.

I can’t create my own electric grid, school system, internet, or healthcare system—and the most efficient way to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants)

During the Great Depression, the American government told banks it would insure mortgages on real estate if they made them longer-term and more affordable (offering tax deductions on interest along the way)—but the government drew red “Do Not Lend” lines around almost all the black neighborhoods in the country with a never-substantiated assumption that they would be bad credit risks.

The mortgage benefit in the GI Bill pushed the postwar white homeownership rate to three out of four white families—but with federally sanctioned housing discrimination, the black and Latinx rates stayed at around two out of five, despite the attempts of veterans of color to participate.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.

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.

antitrust protections worked to prevent monopolies.

The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans, which I would argue are not financial aid at all. Yes, student loans enable Americans to pay their college bills during enrollment, but the compounding interest means they must pay at least 33 percent more on average than the amount borrowed.

Fundamentally, we have to ask ourselves, how is it fair and how is it smart to price a degree out of reach for the working class just as that degree became the price of entry into the middle class?

A third of developed countries offer free tuition, and another third keep tuition lower than $2,600.

In the story of how America drained the pool of our public college system, racism is the uncredited actor.

In 1978, a ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes.

By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities. The path to this system of mass incarceration is another story of racist policy making creating unsustainable costs for everyone.

Robert Settle Jr. was sixty years old in 2016, and although he is completely disabled and lost all his savings in the financial crisis of 2008, he is still being sued for $60,000 in private student loans he obtained while working for a master’s degree to advance his career.

The physicians’ lobby joined in, running newspaper ads with a photo of Senator Pepper with Paul Robeson, the black actor and Communist activist. The racist red-baiting campaign worked. Universal healthcare’s biggest Senate champion lost his 1950 race by more than sixty thousand votes.

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 zero-sum story again. As with the public swimming pools, public healthcare is often a benefit that white people have little interest in sharing with their black neighbors.

The stories of the declining public university and the shuttered public pools have parallels across the country, from the infrastructure we have (collapsing bridges and poisoned pipes) to the public goods we are desperately missing (universal childcare and healthcare).

Racial scapegoating about “illegals,” drugs, gangs, and riots undermines public support for working together. Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story; we had to be honest about racism’s role in dividing us in order to call people to their higher ideals.

the New Deal era of the early 1930s—a period of tremendous expansion of government action to help Americans achieve financial security—was also a period in which the federal government cemented residential segregation through both practice and regulation.