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

by Heather McGhee

in 1978, a pioneering lawyer named Linda McKeever Bullard was preparing to file what would be the first lawsuit to use civil rights law to challenge the placement of pollutants in the Black communities of Houston. She t...

The theory behind the lawsuit, he said, was “that the city of Houston was practicing a form of discrimination in placing landfills in…Black communities. Even though everybody in Houston produced garbage, everybody didn’t have to live near the garbage, the landfills, incinerators, and the waste facilities.” While the lawsuit failed to stop the incinerator from being built in a Black community, the damning data and the effective research protocols helped build a foundation for the environmental justice movement.

The birth of the “EJ” movement in the public consciousness was in 1982, when the state of North Carolina’s decision to dump contaminated soil in the small Black town of Warren was met with civil disobedience that resulted in five hundred arrests.

groundbreaking “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States” report found that race was the most important predictor of proximity to hazardous waste facilities in America and that three out of five Black and Latinx Americans lived in communities with toxic sites. Forty years later, government data still show that Black people are 1.5 times more likely to breathe polluted air and drink unsafe water than the overall population.

any story about sacrifice zones must start with an explanation of the decisions that created clusters of people of color to target in the first place. “These places are government creations to begin with, that are created by racist policy….And

The Chevron plant spews over a thousand pounds of chemicals into the air on a good day. Then there are the bad days. “On August sixth, 2012, when the siren came on…,” Torm told me, “I know that’s not testing,

“You cannot go out. Get in your house, and close the door and window and put a towel in your door right away, right now!” And then they said, “What?” I said, “It’s a Chevron fire. It’s chemical. Go in your house!” The 2012 Chevron fire was caused by a leak from a degraded pipe that Chevron knew for years was at risk of corrosion.

Called “Is Environmental Justice Good for White Folks? Industrial Air Toxics and Exposure in Urban America,” the study compared pollution levels by neighborhood in cities and found that the sacrifice zones had more spillover than one might expect.

If a set of decision makers believes that an environmental burden can be shouldered by someone else to whom they don’t feel connected or accountable, they won’t think it’s worthwhile to minimize the burden by, for example, forcing industry to put controls on pollution. But that results in a system that creates more pollution than would exist if decision makers cared about everyone equally—and we’re talking about air, water, and soil, where it’s pretty hard to cordon off toxins completely to the so-called sacrifice zone. It’s elites’ blindness to the costs they pay that keeps pollution higher for everyone.

“The non-tradeoffs are what is shocking here. I mean, we are just—for chump change, we are exposing people to these terrible toxins….It just wouldn’t be that expensive to give everybody a clean and healthy environment.”

But then we launched the campaign to tell people that unless we change the city council decision making, we cannot fight. We can be screaming and yelling [in community meetings] until four in the morning, and the city council still votes the way Chevron wants them to.”

The coalition’s most remarkable achievement was the election of Green Party mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a white woman, who became a thorn in Chevron’s side. Permits and programs that for decades sailed through approval suddenly met with more inquiry, investigations, hearings, and even lawsuits.

Just Transition is a concept first formulated by unions to protect jobs in industries facing environmental regulations in the late 1990s, but environmental justice advocates have adopted it as a way to express the idea that the shift away from a fossil fuel economy doesn’t have to mean massive job losses. In fact, a Just Transition must create good jobs and build community wealth for the low-income communities and people of color who have disproportionately suffered under the current polluting economy.

she listed the ways that power had shifted in Richmond. “The local government even supported a fund that helped us start local-owned cooperatives.” She described a community complex in development that would be a “climate resiliency hub,” with solar power and a microgrid whose profits from electricity generation local youth would direct to investments in the community.

Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and build power for Indigenous-led environmental protection. Environmental justice groups led by people of color forced conversations with the Big Greens and their funders about who gets the resources and sets the strategy for the movement. Young people staged record-breaking strikes and protests for climate action across the world.

multi racial environment coalitions

during the Trump administration, the leaders who are the most committed to saving the planet finally got together to hash out their differences and discover places of mutual interest: labor unions and conservationists, Big Greens and grassroots environmental justice groups, and Native-led groups and youth activists. This delicate emerging consensus received a jolt of energy when the Green New Deal framework was launched into the political stratosphere.

It’s just human nature: we all like to see ourselves as on the side of the heroes in a story. But for white Americans today who are awake to the reality of American racism, that’s nearly impossible. That’s a moral cost of racism that millions of white people bear and that those of us who’ve borne every other cost of racism simply don’t. It can cause contradictions and justifications, feelings of guilt, shame, projection, resentment, and denial. Ultimately, though, we are all paying for the moral conflict of white Americans.

how white people understand what’s right and wrong about our diverse nation, who belongs and who deserves, is determining our collective course. This is the crux of it: Can we swim together in the same pool or not? It’s a political question, yes, and one with economic ramifications. But at its core, it’s a moral question. Ultimately, an economy—the rules we abide by and set for what’s fair and who merits what—is an expression of our moral understanding. So, if our country’s moral compass is broken, is it any wonder that our economy is adrift?

America hasn’t had a truth-and-reconciliation process like other wounded societies have. Instead, it’s up to individuals to decide what they need to do in order to be good people in a white supremacist society—and it’s not easy.

For every call to become an activist for racial justice, there’s a well-rehearsed message that says that activists are pushing too hard. For every chance to speak up against the casual racism white people so often hear from other white folks, there is a countervailing pressure not to rock the boat. If you want to believe that white people are the real victims in race relations, and that the stereotypes of people of color as criminal and lazy are common sense rather than white supremacist tropes, there is a glide path to take you there. And when your life trajectory has taught you that the system works pretty okay if you do the right things, then it’s easy to wonder why whole groups of people can’t seem to do better for themselves. Whichever story you choose to believe, nobody wants to be the villain, so there’s an available set of justifications for why your view is morally right.

“The school bully ripped my shirt open in front of the entire class, and here I was,” Angela recalled, “this pudgy little girl in her training bra. And it did something to me. It provoked this rage that I really didn’t know I had inside. So, I fought that bully back, and unfortunately that day, I became the bully.”

She eventually chose a group that displayed swastikas and Confederate flags. “And honestly, I wasn’t attracted to them because of the beliefs,” she said. But “they were the one group I found that never questioned my anger or my aggression or my violence. They just accepted it. I never had to explain it or account for it. And that began my life in the violent far right.” She was fifteen years old.

Angela, who was covered in racist tattoos, thought, “Oh, she’s gonna start something.” But instead, the woman invited her to play cards. “And from that point on, we started a friendship,” Angela said. “We didn’t really talk about why we were there for a long time…about the fact that I came in there as a skinhead for a hate crime….Even knowing that, this group of women treated me as a human being. I had no idea how to react to that. I couldn’t find justification in the usual aggression and violence that I used.

Similar to Derek Black story. Courageous kindness across ideological difference.

The baseline moral teaching about immigration is somewhere along the lines of the Bible’s “Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” or the more secular version (emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty), “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’

This moral story of law-abiding citizens and criminal immigrants hinges on people having, as Angela said, “no clue” about the racist structures that let the ancestors of many white Americans arrive with no restrictions or requirements save their whiteness, which extended them ladders of opportunity upon arrival that were the exact opposite of the walls and shadows today’s immigrant workers face. This story blames some of the least powerful people on the planet for a problem created and sustained by the most powerful—corporations profiting from sweatshop labor and policy makers unwilling to update our immigration laws. Nonetheless, as it has for centuries, racism makes an immoral view of the world into a moral one. The elite adds in the urgency of the zero-sum story—they are taking what you have; they are a threat to you—and it’s enough to keep a polity focused on scapegoats while no progress is made on the actual economic issues in most Americans’ lives.

We now know that color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement—that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy, or structure. The moral logic and social appeal of color blindness is clear, and many well-meaning people have embraced it. But when it is put into practice in a still-racist world, the result is more racism.

once we stop seeing racism as a factor and treat equality as a reality rather than an aspiration, our minds naturally seek other explanations for the disparities all around us.

In a way, color blindness makes the civil rights movement a victim of its own success: legal segregation is over, so now it must be up to people of color to finish the work themselves.

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.

A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots. When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality—an offended co-worker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype—she’s caught flat-footed. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.

The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others. Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system.

Hence, Trump.

many white people both resent affirmative action and imagine that it is vastly more widespread than it really is. The share of Black and brown students at selective colleges has actually declined over thirty-five years despite stated affirmative action policies, and the overwhelmingly white categories of children of alumni, faculty, donors, or athletes made up 43 percent, for example, of students admitted to Harvard from 2010 to 2015. Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study by Harvard Business School professor Katherine DeCelles, Black job applicants who removed any indications of their race from their résumés were significantly more likely to advance to an interview.

Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, Black people were three times more likely to be killed by police. Indigenous Americans are killed by police at shocking rates as high as or higher than those for African Americans.

But we may actually have reached the moral limit. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds, people around the world watched a white police officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, until he died. In his dying moments, Floyd called out for his “Mama,” who had already died two years before. White Americans had seen and explained away videos of police killings before, but this was too much. After months in isolation and fear from a callously mismanaged pandemic that disproportionately sickened and killed people of color, it was too much. On the heels of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, chased by white men in a pickup truck while jogging and then gunned down, it was too much. After the police killed Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician in Louisville, Kentucky, who had been asleep in her own bed before a botched raid, it was too much. An estimated 15 to 26 million people demonstrated to protest police brutality in the summer of 2020, a tidal wave of recognition about the reality of systemic anti-Blackness that prompted dozens of laws reforming police practices.

the most frequent question Maureen received from her white friends about the school and its students was “Are you scared?” Her response: “Scared of what? Don’t be scared of Black kids. Be scared for them.”

Yes.

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. Crime victimization is as prevalent in poor white communities as poor Black communities; it’s similar in rural poor areas and urban poor ones. In addition, less policing in middle-income and wealthy neighborhoods means that their violent crimes often go unreported.

White fear isn’t just determinative of one-on-one interactions; it’s a social force that can be manipulated through the media and politics to change voting and economic behavior.

white fear is also creating a death risk for the very people who feel it most. As he pointed out in his book Dying of Whiteness, white gun ownership skyrocketed during the Obama presidency and the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement. America’s unhealthy obsession with guns—four in ten adults live in a household with a gun—has always been intertwined with our history of racial violence, but in recent years, right-wing media and an increasingly radical National Rifle Association have aggressively marketed to white fear: of terrorists, of home invaders, of criminal immigrants, and of “inner-city thugs.”

All this fear has come in an era of record-low crime rates nationwide. The fantasy of marauding hordes is unlikely to materialize, but in the real world, white men have been increasingly and disproportionately turning the guns on themselves in a tragic increase in gun suicides.

MY MOTHER, WHO was born in 1950, grew up with a healthy fear of white people. A white person would have been able to roll up beside her in a truck and kidnap her, and probably nothing would have happened to him. A white person could have denied her a house—and did—and nothing happened to them. For the life of her, she could not understand why white people always professed to be so afraid of people of color. “It’s so strange,” my mother used to tell me, “because we’re the ones who live in terror of what white people can do with impunity.”

White fear can exist only in “a world turned upside down,” writes Abraham Lateiner, a white man born into wealth who has become an activist for equality. “Because white people stole two continents and two hundred years of the backbreaking labor of millions, race reassures us that Blackness is related to thievery,” he wrote. “Because white men have raped Black and Brown women with impunity for centuries, race comforts us with the lie that it’s Black masculinity that is defined by hypersexual predation. Because white people penned Black people in the ‘ghetto’ via redlining, race tells us that this ‘ghetto’ is an indictment of Black pathology.

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.

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.

So, somewhat naively, I decided that we could give every staff member—from the economists and lawyers to the accountants and office managers—what our country hadn’t: the unvarnished truth about our collective inheritance and the skills to work together across race without papering things over. To do this, we designed an original curriculum of books, articles, speeches, and videos and identified core competencies the staff should have to function well in a diverse environment (self-awareness, the ability to make authentic relationships across difference, direct communication skills, and a strong racial equity analysis). We overhauled our hiring process and employee handbook to minimize implicit bias in recruitment, retention, and promotions. We thought anew about all the work we did and asked critical questions about how racial equity intersected with our issues.

proving that it was possible for white people to become moral and strategic partners in the fight for a racially just America.

Fox is not just news; it’s a propaganda outlet owned by a right-wing billionaire, and it uses anti-immigrant and racist stereotypes to undermine white support not just for progressive policies but for basic societal norms, from democracy to social distancing during the pandemic. The right-wing message machine has also overtaken social media, particularly Facebook, where content from conservative meme factories predominates—so much so that, in June 2020, seven out of the ten most-shared Facebook posts about the biggest social movement in the country were anti-BLM, many of them containing disinformation.

Our classrooms don’t do much better: a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how [enslaved people’s] labor was essential to the American economy.” 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.