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

by Heather McGhee

More voters of all races meant more competitive elections; for the first time since the end of Reconstruction, a white supremacy campaign wasn’t enough. Candidates had to promise to deliver something of value to southern families, white and Black. In Sharing the Prize, Wright writes that “after the Voting Rights Act…southern…gubernatorial campaigns increasingly featured nonracial themes of economic development and education.”

Since the early 1970s—not coincidentally, shortly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act began to dramatically increase the voting participation of African Americans—the donor class in America has grown more powerful and more secretive, but the number of donors who give contributions large enough to require tracking (above $200) is minuscule, less than 1.2 percent of the entire adult population. Their outsize donations totaled more than 71 percent of all campaign contributions during the 2018 election cycle.

Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to Black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between Black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of Black and white homes in those communities.

Nationwide, overwhelmingly white public school districts have $23 billion more in funding than overwhelmingly of-color districts, resulting in an average of $2,226 more funding per student. If we recall how much of white wealth is owed to racist housing subsidies, the decision to keep allowing local property taxes to determine the fate of our children becomes even less defensible.

“Yeah. And also, the class differences are more. Because we don’t have these types of class—I mean, we do also have class inequality in Sweden. But people who are poor, they are guaranteed to have their own apartments. They have food. And they have treatment if they have mental health issues, physical health issues. It’s not like people are left, just thrown out from the system.” 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.”

You can’t find a starker contrast between two versions of society that are both wealthy democracies. But the Nordic model of democracy rests on a mostly homogenous “demos”; unlike the United States, Finland didn’t have mass slavery and genocide to cut their empathic cord at the country’s birth.

The Federal Housing Authority guaranteed the developer’s financing on the condition that none of the seven hundred new homes be sold to anyone “not wholly of the Caucasian race.” Barred by law from living in most of the rapidly developing county, Black workers and their families were forced into an area known as North Richmond. North Richmond was an unincorporated area—meaning, not an official town at all, with no government services whatsoever: no roads, streetlights, water, or sewage. The African American wartime workers had to fend entirely for themselves while their white co-workers had all their housing needs met by government subsidy, policy, and planning.

“We have the idea that this environmental bad can be displaced on to a socially excluded community, that primes the pump for doing more of it. And then you end up with uncontrollable amounts that are bad absolutely for everyone.”

Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while Black people are dramatically overrepresented. Yes, violent crime rates are higher in disinvested neighborhoods of color than in well-resourced white enclaves, but once you control for poverty, the difference disappears.

Suicide attempts with a gun have an 85 percent success rate, compared to a 3 percent rate for the most frequently used suicide method, drug overdose. 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.

Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.

What’s more, the organization surveyed high school seniors from across the country and found that only 8 percent knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. I’ve got to admit, my jaw dropped when I read that statistic. Eight percent! Two-thirds of seniors didn’t know that a constitutional amendment was required to outlaw slavery. Nor could the vast majority (78 percent) explain how slaveholders benefited from provisions in the Constitution.

“So, we said they weren’t. They weren’t humans made in the image of God. What we did is we threw away Imago Dei. We threw it away to justify what we’re doing….white supremacy was America’s original sin….At the heart of the sin was a lie,” he said. It’s this history of the American church’s complicity with white supremacy that explains why, today, white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to hold racially resentful and otherwise racist views than religiously unaffiliated white people, according to a new analysis by Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.

a local Bangladeshi Muslim family whose business, a restaurant named Gandhi Mahal, a few doors down from the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, had caught fire in the protests. After losing his family’s business, the father, Ruhel Islam, reportedly said, “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.” Racism taught generations of white Americans that we were no more than property.

Social isolation has been found to lower life expectancy by a degree comparable to smoking almost a pack of cigarettes a day.

The country was caught without public health capacity largely because of the drained pool—antigovernment sentiment that has hobbled the public health infrastructure, and decades of cuts to public hospitals in low-income and of-color communities that left half of low-income areas without a single ICU bed when the pandemic hit.

They’re warning that demographic changes are the unmaking of America. What I’ve seen on my journey is that they’re the fulfillment of America. What they say is a threat is in fact our country’s salvation—for when a nation founded on a belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief, then and only then will we have discovered a New World.