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

by Heather McGhee

At least that economist had said the quiet part out loud for once. He was just expressing the unspoken conventional wisdom in my field: that we’d be less successful if we explicitly called out the racial unfairness

or reminded people that the United States had deliberately created a white middle class through racially restricted government investments in homeownership and infrastructure and retirement security, and that it had only recently decided that keeping up those investments would be unaffordable and unwise. What was worse, I didn’t have the confidence to tell my colleagues that they were wrong about the politics of it. They were probably right.

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.

And it was even more baffling to me how that threat could feel so menacing that these white people would resist policies that could benefit them, just because they might also benefit people of color. Why would they allow a false sense of group competition to become a self-defeating trap?

Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.

It is progressive economic conventional wisdom that racism accelerates inequality for communities of color, but what if racism is actually driving inequality for everyone?

Black writers before me, from James Baldwin to Toni Morrison, have made the point that racism is a poison first consumed by its concocters. 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. 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 old zero-sum paradigm is not just counterproductive; it’s a lie. I started my journey on the hunt for its source and discovered that it has only ever truly served a narrow group of people. To this day, the wealthy and the powerful are still selling the zero-sum story for their own profit, hoping to keep people with much in common from making common cause with one another. But not everyone

is buying it. Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a “Solidarity Dividend,” from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action. And the benefits weren’t only external. I didn’t set out to write about the moral costs of racism, but they kept showing themselves. There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don’t know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but

met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial heal...

The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything Americans have in common, from our schools to

our air to our infrastructure. And everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. I set out on this journey to piece together a new story of who we could be to one another, and to glimpse the new America we must create for the sum of us.

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 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.

The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed. The result was a near genocide that laid waste to rich native cultures in order to fill European treasuries, particularly in Portugal, Spain, and England—and this later fed the individual wealth of white Americans who received the ill-gotten land for free.

In very stark and quantifiable terms, the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of African and Indigenous American people turned blood into wealth for the white power structure. Those who profited made no room for the oppressed to share in the rewards from their lands or labor; what others had, they took. The racial zero sum was crafted in the cradle of the New World.

From the economy to the most personal of relationships to the revolution itself, early America relied on a zero-sum model of freedom built on slavery. The colonies would not have been able to afford their War of Independence were it not for the aid provided

by the French, who did so in exchange for tobacco grown by enslaved people.

new identity just cohering at the end of the eighteenth century: white, free, citizen. It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World; if it could be blacks, it wouldn’t have to be whites.

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

The zero-sum idea that white people are now suffering due to gains

among people of color has taken on the features of myth: it lies, but it says so much. 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.

But Helper argued that

owners should actually have to compensate the rest of the white citizens of the South, because slavery had impoverished the region. The value of northern land was more than five times the value of southern land per acre, he calculated, despite the South’s advantage in climate, minerals, and soil. Because the southern “oligarchs of the lash,” as he called them, had done so little to support education, innovation, and small enterprise, slavery was making southern whites poorer.

When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too. When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today.

These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people.

They found that “although whites’ support for the principles of racial equality and integration have increased majestically over the last four decades, their backing for policies designed to bring equality and integration about

has scarcely increased at all. Indeed in some cases white support has actually declined.”

But my data analyst colleague Sean McElwee and I found that 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, it turned out, had become a highly racialized character in the white story of our country.

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 t...

words, are only for the public we percei...

I often picture it literally—three white men seated in a room, signing a contract: Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers; Charles Wilson, the General Motors chief executive; and President Dwight Eisenhower. Their handshakes seal the deal for a broad, white middle class. Then, in the mid-sixties, there’s a commotion at the door. Women and people of color are demanding a seat at the table, ready to join the contract for shared prosperity. But no longer able to see themselves reflected in the other signatories, the leaders of government

and big business walk out, leaving workers on their own—and the Inequality Era was born.

(The fact that government policy created the ghettos and stripped the wealth and job opportunities from their residents was not part of the story. Nor was the fact that people of color pay taxes, too, often a larger share of their incomes due to regressive sales, property, and payroll taxes.)

(We could eliminate all poverty in the United States by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.)

In the Inequality Era brought to us by racist dog-whistle politics, white voters are less hostile to government policies that promote economic equality than the party they most often vote into power. But vote for them they do. Racial allegiance trumps.

“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.”

Racism, then, works against non-wealthy white Americans in two ways. First, it lowers their support for government actions that could help them economically, out of a zero-sum fear that it could help the racialized “undeserving” as

well. Yet racism’s work on class consciousness is not total—there are still some New Deal–type economic policies that the majority of white Americans support, like increasing the federal minimum wage and raising taxes on the wealthy. 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. That choice keeps a conservative faction in power that blocks progress on the modest economic agenda they could support.

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 woes that devastated communities of color are now visiting white America, and the costs of incarceration are coming due in suburban and rural areas, squeezing state budgets and competing with education. It’s not a comeuppance but a bitter cost of the white majority’s willingness to accept the suffering of others, a cost of racism itself.

Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered

this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded. Lenders, brokers, and investors targeted people of color because they thought they could get away with it. Because of racism, they could.

The public conversation and the media coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis started out

racialized and stayed that way. We’ve had so much practice justifying racial inequality with well-worn stereotypes that the narrative about this entirely new kind of financial havoc immediately slipped into that groove. Even when the extent of the industry’s recklessness and lack of government oversight was clear, the racialized story was there, offering to turn the predators themselves into victims. After the crash, conservatives were quick to blame the meltdown on people of color and on the government for being too solicitous of them. Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation claimed that “some portion of the problem—perhaps a significant portion—may stem from ‘predatory borrowing,’ defined as a transaction

in which the borrower convinces the lender to lend too much.” With this banker-as-victim tale, the casting was familiar: undeserving and criminal people of color aided and abetted by an untrustworthy government. A conservative member of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), Peter Wallison, wrote a vitriolic dissent of the commission’s conclusion that the crisis was the result of insufficient regulation of the financial system. Calling that conclusion a “fallacious idea,” he claimed that “the crisis was caused by the government’s housing policies,” specifical...