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

by Heather McGhee

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.

This is the Inequality Era. Even in the supposedly good economic times before the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, 40 percent of adults were not paid enough to reliably meet their needs for housing, food, healthcare, and utilities. Only about two out of three workers had jobs with basic benefits: health insurance, a retirement account (even one they had to fund themselves), or paid time off for illness or caregiving. Upward mobility, the very essence of the American idea, has become stagnant, and many of our global competitors are now performing far better on what we have long considered to be the American Dream. On the other end, money is still being made: the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.

Public goods are only for the public we deem to be good.

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

Ron said that, in his vision, “nobody in this country is deprived of the necessities of life—whether it’s food, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s housing—in a country that’s as wealthy as ours.”

For those people who are opposed to [government aid] out of an animus to people who look different than they are…that lack of social solidarity causes harm to their own communities.

AmeriQuest, BancorpSouth, Citigroup, Washington Mutual, and many other banks and financial companies contributed to a wave of foreclosures that shrank the wealth of the median African American family by more than half between 2005 and 2009 and of the median Latino family by more than two-thirds.

A man who’d made his fortune in financial information did not know that the mortgages at the root of the crisis were usually refinances, not home purchases, and that creditworthiness was often beside the point. But he knew enough of the elite conventional wisdom to blame the victims of redlining.

As journalist Harold Meyerson puts it, “the South today shares more features with its antebellum ancestor than it has in a very long time. Now as then[,] white Southern elites and their powerful allies among non-Southern business interests seek to expand to the rest of the nation the South’s subjugation of workers.” To a large degree, the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and divide-and-conquer tactics, going national.

Norton and his colleagues would call the psychology behind DiAngelo’s mother’s warnings “last place aversion.” In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status.

“Yeah, we are using the public’s money, but it’s the public’s government, and if you want it to remain the public’s government, you might have to use the public’s money. Otherwise, you’re going to have government by the few who have been paying for government.”

I didn’t share Ken’s reverence for the pageantry, the performative love of country with no room for the truth about that country. But I do love America. I love its ideals: equality, freedom, liberty, justice. It’s what Langston Hughes meant in 1936 when he wrote, “Let America be America again, for it has never been America to me.” It is how Dr. King could say that his dream was rooted in the American Dream. It’s why Kaepernick’s protest says, “Not so fast. This America isn’t living up to the bargain, so I won’t shake hands until she does.”

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 A...

America’s symbols were not designed to represent people of color or to speak to us—nonetheless, the ideals they signify have been more than slogans; they have meant life or death for us. Equality, freedom, liberty, justice—who could possibly love those ideals more than those denied them? African Americans became a people here, and our people sacrificed every last imaginable thing to America’s becoming. The promise of this country has been enough to rend millions of immigrants from their homes, and for today’s mostly of-color immigrants, it’s still enough, despite persecution, detention, and death, to keep them dreaming of finding freedom here. The profound love for America’s ideals sho...

Everything we believe comes from stories we’ve been told.

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.

immigrants have, as European immigrants did a century ago, started businesses, gained education, and participated in civic life (though the Europeans’ transition to whiteness offered a glide path to the middle class unavailable to immigrants of color today). Even in the face of anti-immigrant policies and the absence of vehicles for mobility such as unions and housing subsidies, today’s immigrants of color are revitalizing rural America. A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.

we’ve got to get on the same page before we can turn it.

When the rules of the game allow a small minority of participants to capture most of the gains, at a certain point (for example, when the entire middle class owns less than the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans), fewer people can play at all.

Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords. A 2020 Citigroup report calculated that “if racial gaps for blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.”

It was people of color who could see the dreadful pandemic’s effect in every single one of its manifestations—a clarity born of being maximally vulnerable.

It’s become fashionable to say “trust black women” and to root for the leadership of women of color. And maybe it’s because I am a woman of color and wasn’t comfortable with how self-serving this advice seemed, or because it seemed to suggest a biological basis for some traits, I rejected this shorthand. But the truth isn’t that there’s some innate magic within us; it’s that the social and economic and cultural conditions that have been imposed on people at the base of the social hierarchy have given us the clearest view of the whole system.

“Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another; that they will understand one another’s perspectives and beliefs; that they will be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.”

We have not touched the root because the laws we make are expressions of a root belief, and it is time to face our most deep-seated one: the great lie at the root of our nation’s founding was a belief in the hierarchy of human value. And we are still there.

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.