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

by Heather McGhee

Here we have this structure that facilitated…white homeownership, and therefore the creation of white wealth at a heretofore unprecedented scale—and [that] explicitly prevented people of color from having those same benefits. To a very large degree, this was the genesis of the incredible racial wealth gap we have today.”

The government agencies most responsible for the vast increase in home ownership—from about 40 percent of Americans in 1920 to about 62 percent in 1960—were also responsible for the exclusion of people of color from this life-changing economic opportunity.

As a result of this activism, Congress passed reforms to the discriminatory lending market in the 1970s, finally giving residents tools to combat redlining. 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.

the secret was mortgage securitization: lenders were selling mortgages to investment banks who bundled them and sold shares in them to investors, creating mortgage-backed securities. Instead of mortgage originations being driven by how much cash from deposits banks had to lend, now the driver was the virtually limitless demand from Wall Street for new investments.

I learned how our democracy is even less equal than our economy—and the two inequalities are mutually reinforcing.

Our election system is full of unnecessary hurdles and traps—some set by malice and some by negligence—but I would argue that all are a product of the same basic tolerance for a compromised republic that was established at our founding, in the interest of racial slavery.

Over the past fifty years, the Kochs organized vast sums of money to advance a vision for America that includes limited democracy, a rollback of civil rights, and unfettered capitalism.

award-winning book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Buchanan co-wrote a memo to Virginia legislators and advocated in support of using public funds for private (and therefore segregable) schools, which could be economically efficient if the state used the revenue from public assets like school buildings.

Over the past few decades, a series of money-in-politics lawsuits, including Citizens United, have overturned anticorruption protections, making it possible for a wealthy individual to give more than $3.5 million to a party and its candidates in an election cycle, for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to get candidates elected or defeated, and for secret money to sway elections.

The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.

And most white Americans spend their lives on a path set out for them by a centuries-old lie: that in the zero-sum racial competition, white spaces are the best spaces. White people are the most segregated people in America.

Segregation was first developed in the northern states before the Civil War. Boston had a “Nigger Hill” and “New Guinea.” Moving west: territories like Illinois and Oregon limited or barred free black people entirely in the first half of the 1800s. In the South, white dependence on black labor, and white need for physical control and access to black bodies, required proximity, the opposite of segregation.

the American conservative political movement is the primary reason the United States has not taken stronger legislative action to reduce greenhouse gases;

white people in America are much less likely than people of color to rank environmental problems as a pressing concern.

My first instinct is always to follow the money and power: Are powerful interests using race to sell climate denialism to white people? Polling shows that the racial divide on support for climate change action sharpened as Barack Obama made it a priority during his administration, negotiating the international Paris Climate Accord, instituting higher fuel economy standards on automobiles, and launching a Clean Power Plan for states to switch to renewable energy.

“Conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”

a “social dominance orientation” was predictive of climate change denial.

“There is some sort of unconscious risk calculation going on there, kind of like…Should we really do all these changes? Are the risks so high?…Social dominance orientation comes into play here. Based on this risk allocation, they think that, ‘Hmm, it sounds quite horrible, but I don’t think that I will be the one who would suffer if it’s true.’…Future generations will suffer. Animals will suffer. And people in, for example, developing countries and in islands and so on, are already suffering because of climate change.” But if white American men who buy the zero-sum story don’t see themselves as suffering, their bias will be toward retaining a status quo that rewards them, even if it leads to suffering for others.

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.

Perhaps it makes sense, if you’ve spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of a zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal; that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the players’ skill and merit.

race was the most important predictor of proximity to hazardous waste facilities in America

black people are 1.5 times more likely to breathe polluted air and drink unsafe water than the overall population.

If a set of decision makers believes that an environmental burden can be shouldered by someone else to whom they don’t feel connected or accountable, they won’t think it’s worthwhile to minimize the burden by, for example, forcing industry to put controls on pollution.

As history shows us, once a group is criminalized, they’re outside the circle of human concern.

The elite adds in the urgency of the zero-sum story—they are taking what you have; they are a threat to you—and it’s enough to keep a polity focused on scapegoats while no progress is made on the actual economic issues in most Americans’ lives.

Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics…[W]hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” Such explanations “exculpate [white people] from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”

The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others. Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system.

“Scared of what? Don’t be scared of black kids. Be scared for them.”

white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while black people are dramatically overrepresented.

Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

“As long as white people—even, you know, good-hearted, well-meaning, progressive white people—think that the issue of race is mostly about people of color and minorities and what has happened to them and what happens to them that we could help with—as long as that’s the mindset, they’re still stuck,” he told me. And they will remain stuck “until we understand as white people that the problem of racism is about us.”

“Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.” I had read Mr. Islam’s next words with tears in my eyes: “We can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human.”

His opponents’ agenda had already included three major tax cuts for the wealthy that squeezed public services and led to higher property taxes on the working and middle class.

Maine once had the largest Ku Klux Klan membership outside of the South, and the textile mills that made the city of Lewiston were, of course, processing southern cotton.

We have no choice but to start aiming for a Solidarity Dividend.

refill the pool of public goods, for everyone. When our nation had generous public benefits, they were the springboard for a thriving middle class—but they were narrowly designed to serve white and soon-to-be-white Americans.

It’s time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.

the entire middle class owns less than the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans), fewer people can play at all.

Extreme inequality robs too many people of the means to start businesses, invest in their families, and invent new ideas and solutions—and then it isn’t a problem just for those families.

When you believe the dominant story that you’re on your own, responsible for all your own successes and failures, and yet you’re still being paid $7.25 an hour, what does that say about your own worth?

There’s a better way. It’s called “targeted universalism,” a concept developed by law professor and critical race scholar john a. powell—he

With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal and then develop strategies to achieve the goal that take into account the varied situations of the groups involved.

the color-blind home mortgage interest deduction, which allows people to deduct from their tax bill interest paid to lenders on all real estate properties they own. The problem is, this massive subsidy is upside down, bestowing the largest benefits on the richest people and effectively rewarding people with wealth for having it,

If the United States adopted policy interventions to close the racial disparities in health, education, incarceration, and jobs, the economy would be eight trillion dollars larger in 2050,

“if racial gaps for blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.”

A study modeling COVID-19 transmission routes in a representative U.S. city found that the majority of the city’s infections came from situations where racism was driving higher exposure. “Any

from lower-quality, under-resourced hospitals; to transportation inequity; to well-warranted suspicion of the medical system that, combined with the generic message to stay at home, meant that far too many black people stayed at home until they were already dying.

That’s why it’s essential that women of color are at least as represented in government as we are in society.

when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus.