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

by Heather McGhee

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.

As racist structures force people of color into the mines as the canary, racist indifference makes the warnings we give go unheeded—from the war on drugs to the financial crisis to climate disasters. 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 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.

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 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.

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.

To be clear, the beneficiaries of Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white, as white people at the time made up 90 percent of the U.S. population. Few Americans, Black or white, had private insurance plans, and the recent notion that employers would provide it had yet to solidify into a nationwide expectation. 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.

Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692—these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020; adults without children are usually ineligible.

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.

If you sell someone a prime-rate, 5 percent annual percentage rate (APR) thirty-year mortgage in the amount of $200,000, they’ll pay you back an additional $186,512—93 percent of what they borrowed—for the privilege of spreading payments out over thirty years. If you can manage to sell that same person a subprime loan with a 9 percent interest rate, you can collect $379,328 on top of the $200,000 repayment, nearly twice over what they borrowed. The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out. The refinance loans stripped homeowners of equity they had built up over years of mortgage payments. That’s why these diseased loans were tested first on the segment of Americans least respected by the financial sector and least protected by lawmakers: Black and brown families.

There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes.

The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.

Many workers credited the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement for raising their consciousness about the unfairness of working in poverty for profitable corporations. In fact, fast food was the most unequal industry in the economy; Demos research calculated an over one-thousand-to-one average CEO-to-worker pay gap.

The truth is, we have never had a real democracy in America. The framers of the Constitution broke with a European tradition of monarchy and aspired to a revolutionary vision of self-governance, yet they compromised their own ideals from the start. 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.

In the years that followed, federal troops traveled across the South registering seven hundred thousand recently freed Black men. The white backlash to Black suffrage was immediate, and not just by elites who saw their political privilege threatened. 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.

No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.)

Those who say we can’t sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection are failing to account for the economic costs of climate change that are already upon us: an estimated $240 billion a year in the United States currently, due to increased extreme weather. That figure represents nearly half the average annual growth of the U.S. economy from 2009 to 2019. Some scientists also say that we are in a new era of mass extinction, having lost half the animal population over the past forty years due to “habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change.” The news gets worse the more you read.

In our peer countries, the conservative political parties draw contrast with the center and left by advocating for corporate climate solutions over government programs and regulations. Only in the United States does our conservative party, with very few exceptions, flat-out deny that there’s a problem. The opposition of the American conservative political movement is the primary reason the United States has not taken stronger legislative action to reduce greenhouse gases; our inaction is one of the main reasons the world has continued to warm. In short, the loss of human and animal life and habitats that we are already experiencing is in no small part due to the American conservative political faction. And that political faction is almost entirely white.

According to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, fewer than 25 percent of white people said they were willing to join a campaign to convince government to act on climate change. The majority of white Americans fell into the categories the researchers called “Cautious,” “Disengaged,” “Doubtful,” or “Dismissive,” meaning they don’t know enough, don’t care, or are outright opposed to taking action. By contrast, 70 percent of Latinx and 57 percent of Black people are either “Alarmed” or “Concerned.” Like so many issues in public life, race appears to significantly shape your worldview about climate change.

Indeed, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that of the six categories of American opinion about climate change, the “Dismissive” were more likely to be white, male, and have higher incomes.

Hearing her describe Sweden’s more humane society helped me connect the dots on how living in a society like ours could shape your perception of your own climate change risks. “That comes back to your social dominance orientation, right?” I asked. “If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it’s okay for people to suffer, then it’s okay for people to suffer. And if your wealth has protected you from that suffering, then your wealth can probably protect you from another kind of suffering.”

We now know that color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement—that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy, or structure. The moral logic and social appeal of color blindness is clear, and many well-meaning people have embraced it. But when it is put into practice in a still-racist world, the result is more racism.

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.

In 2019, police officers nationwide shot and killed more than one thousand people; there were only twenty-seven days that year when no civilians died from police shootings. Black people constituted 28 percent of those killed, more than twice our presence in the population. Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, Black people were three times more likely to be killed by police. Indigenous Americans are killed by police at shocking rates as high as or higher than those for African Americans.

White men are now one-third of the population but three-quarters of the gun suicide victims. And twice as many people die from gun suicides in America each year as from the gun homicides people have been so conditioned to fear.

It dawned on me as a teenager that many white people must fear, at some deep level, that given half a chance, people of color would do to them what they have long been doing to us. Later I would learn that this dynamic of assigning others your own worst attributes has a name: projection.

Even in the face of anti-immigrant policies and the absence of vehicles for mobility such as unions and housing subsidies, today’s immigrants of color are revitalizing rural America. A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.

THE MOUNTING CHALLENGES we face in society are going to require strength and scale that none of us can achieve on her own. The crises of climate change, inequality, pandemics, and mass involuntary movements of people are already here, and in the United States, each has exposed the poverty of our public capacity to prevent and react. Save for the ultra-wealthy, we’re all living at the bottom of the drained pool now. The refusal to share across race has created a society with nothing left for itself. With falling support for government over the past fifty years has come falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century.

An analysis Demos did in the middle of the Great Recession found that one hundred billion dollars spent directly hiring people could create 2.6 million public service jobs; spending the same amount on tax cuts trickles down to just one hundred thousand jobs.

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.

A race-conscious housing effort to close the Black-white gap in homeownership could be the centerpiece of a national effort for reparations for the economic harms of slavery, systematic discrimination, wealth suppression, and theft. Given the potential benefits to all of us from racial equity, the imperative for racial reparations becomes more urgent.