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

by Heather McGhee

Psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson presented white Americans with news articles about people of color becoming the majority of the population by 2042. The study authors then asked the subjects to “indicate their agreement with the idea that increases in racial minorities’ status will reduce white Americans’ status.” 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.”

This zero-sum paradigm was the default framework for conservative media—“makers and takers,” “taxpayers and freeloaders,” “handouts,” and “special favors”; “they’re coming after your job, your safety, your way of life.” Without the hostile intent, of course, aren’t we all talking about race relations through a prism of competition, every advantage for one group mirrored by a disadvantage for another?

What’s clearer now in our time of growing inequality is that the economic benefit of the racial bargain is shrinking for all but the richest. 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 logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it.

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.

why did so many people seem to blame the last folks in line for the American Dream—black and brown people and new immigrants who had just started to glimpse it when it became harder to reach—for economic decisions they had no power to influence?

Norton and Sommers had begun their research during the first Obama administration, when a white Tea Party movement drove a backlash against the first black president’s policy agenda. They had been interested in why so many white Americans felt they were getting left behind, despite the reality of continued white dominance in U.S. life, from corporations to government. (Notwithstanding the black president, 90 percent of state, local, and federal elected officials were white in the mid-2010s.) What Norton and Sommers found in their research grabbed headlines: the white survey respondents rated anti-white bias as more prevalent in society than anti-black bias. On a scale of 1 to 10, the average white scoring of anti-black bias was 3.6, but whites rated anti-white bias as a 4.7, and opined that anti-white bias had accelerated sharply in the mid-1970s.

“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.”

I sensed that this core idea that’s so resonant with many white Americans—there’s an us and a them, and what’s good for them is bad for us—was at the root of our country’s dysfunction.

The story of this country’s rise from a starving colony to a world superpower is one that can’t be told without the central character of race—specifically, the creation of a “racial” hierarchy to justify the theft of Indigenous land and the enslavement of African and Indigenous people.

I use quotes around the word racial when referring to the earliest years of the European colonialization of the Americas, because back then, the illusory concept of race was just being formed.

In the seventeenth century, influential Europeans were starting to create taxonomies of human beings based on skin color, religion, culture, and geography, aiming not just to differentiate but to rank humanity in terms of inherent worth. This hierarchy—backed by pseudo-scientists, explorers, and even clergy—gave Europeans moral permission to exploit and enslave. So, from the United States’ colonial beginnings, progress for those considered white did come directly at the expense of people considered nonwhite. 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 fo...

Black people in bondage were not allowed the freedom to marry legally and had no rights to keep their families intact. Tearing apart families by selling children from parents was so common that after Emancipation, classified ads of black people seeking relatives buoyed the newspaper industry. 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.

So, how is it that white people in 2011, when Norton and Sommers conducted their research, believed that whites were the victims? I tried to give their perspective the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it was affirmative action. The idea of affirmative action looms large in the white imagination and has been a passion among conservative activists. Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free—when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have.

Is it welfare? The characters of the white taxpayer and the freeloading person of color are recurring tropes for people like Norton and Sommers’s survey respondents. But 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.

Unable to countenance the idea of sharing the pool with black people, city leaders eventually formed a private “Park Association” whose sole job was to administer the pool, and the city leased the public asset to the private association for one dollar. Only white residents were allowed admission. Warren and Montgomery were just two of countless towns—in every region in America, not just the South—where the fight over public pools revealed that for white Americans, the word public did not mean “of the people.” It meant “of the white people.”

The council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well.

Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every black person in sight around the Fairground Park.

On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers attended, joining three brave black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims—down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.

Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs.

white people with high levels of resentment against black people have become far more likely to oppose government spending generically: as of the latest ANES data in 2016, there was a sixty-point difference in support for increased government spending based on whether you were a white person with high versus low racial resentment. Government,

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.

“Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; it’s about what some (okay, most) of them do.

“Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”

Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government. The idea tapped into an old stereotype of black laziness that was first trafficked in the antebellum era to excuse and minimize slavery and was then carried forward in minstrel shows, cartoons, and comedy to the present day.

To this day, even though black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs. Nonetheless, the idea that black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hardworking taxpayers—the “makers”—has become a core part of the zero-sum story preached by wealthy political elites.

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. Sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which is more widely used by African Americans than whites, are about eighteen times harsher than penalties for the powder version of the drug, which is used more often by whites. For decades before policy changes in 2010, this sentencing disparity was about one hundred to one.

Between 2004 and 2008, black and Latinx homeowners with good credit scores were three times as likely as whites with similar credit scores to have higher-rate mortgages.

According to an analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice of 2.5 million mortgage loans made from 2004 to 2008 by Countrywide, black customers were at least twice as likely as similarly qualified whites to be steered into subprime loans; in some markets, they were eight times more likely to get a subprime loan than white borrowers with similar financial histories.