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

by Heather McGhee

White society had repeatedly denied people of color economic benefits on the premise that they were inferior; those unequal benefits then reified the hierarchy, making whites actually economically superior.

Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.

In railing against welfare and the war on poverty, conservatives like President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored black and brown people over them—but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power.

On taxes, nearly half of Republican voters support raising taxes on millionaires by 4 percent to pay for schools and roads, but the Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy.

“People may fail to report the influence of race on their judgments, not because such an influence is absent, but because they are unaware of it—and might not acknowledge it even if they were aware of it.”

There are many white Americans who think of themselves as nonracist fiscal conservatives and who are sincerely “unaware” of the influence of race on their judgments,

But the racial polarization of our two-party system has forced a choice between class interest and perceived racial interest, and in every presidential election since the Civil Rights Act, the majority of white people chose the party of their race.

1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges. The remainder translated into modest tuition bills—just $617 at a four-year college in 1976, and a student could receive a federal Pell Grant for as much as $1,400 against that and living expenses.

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.

Because wealth is largely shaped by how much money your parents and grandparents had, black young adults’ efforts at higher education and higher earnings aren’t putting much of a dent in the racial wealth gap.

This generation was born too late for the free ride, and student loan repayment is making it even harder for black graduates’ savings and assets to catch up.

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?

And how is it fair or smart to create a new source of debt for a generation when that debt makes it harder for us to achieve the hallmarks of middle-class security: a house, marriage, and retirement savings?

In the United States, recent policy proposals to restore free college are generally popular, though race shapes public opinion. There’s a 30-percentage-point gap in support for free college between white people on the one hand (53 percent) and black and Latinx Americans on the other (86 and 82 percent).

By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.

White and black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate black people for a drug crime.

The option to treat poverty and drug addiction as a public health and economic security issue rather than a criminal one has always been present. Will our nation choose that option now that white people, always the majority of drug users, make up a soaring population of people for whom addiction takes over?

The saddest, most common refrain in dozens of interviews and testimonials from borrowers is “I wish I had never gone to college.” If growing cynicism about higher education is the result of this sudden and total shift from public to private, then our entire society will bear the cost.

We pay more individually and as a nation for healthcare and have worse health outcomes than our industrialized peers, all of whom have some version of publicly financed universal coverage.

Healthcare works best as a collective endeavor, and that’s at the heart of why America’s system performs so poorly. We’ve resisted universal solutions because when it comes to healthcare, from President Truman’s first national proposal in 1943 to the present-day battles over Medicaid expansion, racism has stopped us from ever filling the pool in the first place.