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

by Heather McGhee

Act for the financial crisis that the FCIC had to devote pages of its report to refuting t...

Such financial malfeasance was allowed to flourish because the people who were its first victims didn’t matter nearly as much as the profits their pain generated. But the systems set up to exploit one part of our society rarely stay contained.

And all of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through black and brown communities across the nation. Instead, the predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too—and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency. 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.

I saw how money can obscure even the most obvious of truths. I learned that in order to exploit others for your own gain, you have to first sever the tie between yourself and them in your mind—and racist stereotypes are an ever-ready tool for such a task.

The first mortgages and collateralized

debt instruments in the United States weren’t on houses, but on enslaved people,

The obsession with which America drew the color line was all-consuming and absurd.

Any white person was now deputized to enforce the exclusion of black people from white space, a terrible power that led to decades of sadistic violence against black men, women, and children.

Public policy created this problem, and public policy should solve it. Because of our deliberately constructed racial wealth gap, most black and brown families can’t afford to rent or buy in the places where white families are, and when white families bring their wealth into black and brown neighborhoods, it more often leads to gentrification and displacement than enduring integration. The solution is more housing in more places that people can afford on the average incomes of workers of color.

What gets in the way is objections about the costs—to real estate developers, to public

budgets, and to existing prop...

Reducing segregation to the national median would have an impact on Chicago’s notoriously high homicide rate—by an estimated 30 percent—increasing safety for everyone while lowering public costs for police, courts, and corrections facilities; raising real estate values; and preserving the income, tax revenue, and priceless

human lives of the more than two hundred people each year who would be saved from a violent death. By reducing the segregation between white and Latino residents, the researchers found, Chicago could increase life expectancy for both.

that segregation sends distorting messages not just to black and brown but also to white children—was lost in the triumphalism of Brown.

“The most profound message of racial segregation for whites may be that there is no real loss in the absence of people of color from our lives,” wrote Robin DiAngelo. “Not one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that there was loss to me in segregation; that I would lose anything by not having people of color in my life.”

even when one controlled for partisanship, racial resentment (“a general orientation toward blacks characterized by a feeling that blacks do not try hard enough and receive too many favors”) was highly correlated with climate change denialism.

“Conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”

“The economy” that they were referring to was their economy, the economic condition of people like them, seen through the lens of a zero-sum system of hierarchy that taught them to fear any hint of redistribution. Value-neutral admonitions about protecting “the economy” allowed them to protect their own status while resting easy knowing that they were not at all racist, because it wasn’t about race—it was about, well, “the economy.”

But if white American men who buy the zero-sum story don’t see themselves as suffering, their bias will be toward retaining a status quo that rewards them, even if it leads to suffering for others. Jylhä told me about unpublished

“It’s also about wanting to [resist] change [in] the society and wanting to maintain societal structures where, for example, discrimination is accepted and where the [native-born]…groups

groups and men have the power positions that they [are] used to hav[ing].”

“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.”

Racism has a cost for everyone. And with the environment and climate change, many white people’s skeptical worldview, combined with their outsize political power, has life-or-death consequences for us all.

It all seemed to come back to the zero-sum story: climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action. The claims are racially innocent—we won’t risk the economy for this dubious idea—but those using them are willing to take immense risks that might fall on precisely the historically exploited: people of color and the land, air, animals, and water. Like the zero-sum story, it’s all an illusion—white men aren’t truly safe from climate risk, and we can have a different but sustainable economy with a better quality of life for more people. But how

powerful the zero-sum paradigm must be to knock out science and even a healthy sense of self-preservation. And how dangerous for us all.

It’s elites’ blindness to the costs they pay that keeps pollution higher for everyone. Professor Ash let exasperation creep into his voice when he said, “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.”

“And when…you try to give them a clue, they become very defensive. Because no one wants to think that they are benefiting from a system that hurts other people. It’s much easier just to pretend like you don’t know.”

As Bonilla-Silva puts it, if racism is no longer actively limiting

the lives of people of color, then their failure to achieve parity with whites in wealth, education, employment, and other areas must mean there is something wrong with them, not with the social systems that somehow always benefit white people the most.

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.

Denial that racism still exists; denial that, even if it does exist, it’s to blame for the situation at hand; denial that the problem is as bad as people of color say it is—these denials are the easy outs that the dominant white narrative offers to people. Wellesley College professor Jennifer Chudy’s research finds that only one in five white Americans consistently

expresses high levels of sympathy about anti-black discrimination.

By denying the reality of racism and their own role in it, Berry explained, white Americans have denied themselves critical self-knowledge and created a prettified and falsified version of American history for themselves to believe in, one built on the “wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.” Of course, he understood the impulse of white people—himself included—to protect themselves from “the anguish implicit in their racism.”

A few years before Berry published The Hidden Wound, James Baldwin, as keen an observer of human behavior as there’s ever been, wrote his own account of what happens when white people open their eyes to racism. “What they see is

disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it.” Baldwin went on to observe that white Americans “are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know ...

Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes. Ken’s attachment to American innocence made him take the side that opposed his own stated beliefs, just as our nation has done time and time again. It’s the moral upside down of racism that simultaneously extolls American virtues in principle and rejects them in practice.

Racism destroys every path to that promised land, for all of us. As Wendell Berry writes, “If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless

suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.”