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

by Heather McGhee

Wealth wrung from black hands launched the fortunes of northeastern port cities in Rhode Island; filled the Massachusetts textile mills with cotton; and capitalized the future Wall Street banks through loans that accepted enslaved people as collateral. In 1860, the four million human beings in the domestic slave trade had a market value of $3 billion. In fact, by the time war loomed, New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy—40 percent of the city’s exporting businesses through warehousing, shipping insurance, and sales were Southern cotton exports—that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the South.

when I watched the CNN ticker tape announce the fall of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, I was struck by an even deeper truth: ultimately, it’s impossible to sever the tie completely. Wall Street had recruited the brightest technological minds—those who a generation ago would have been putting a man on the moon or inventing vaccines—to engineer a way to completely insulate wealthy people

In a free fall that began on a weekend in mid-September, Lehman Brothers would go on to lose 93 percent of its stock value. A company born out of a system that treated black people as property died from self-inflicted wounds in the course of destroying the property of black people.

In the two-hundred-year history of American industrial work, there’s been no greater tool against collective bargaining than employers’ ability to divide workers by gender, race, or origin, stoking suspicion and competition across groups.

It’s simple: if your boss can hire someone else for cheaper, or threaten to, you have less leverage for bargaining. In the nineteenth century, employers’ ability to pay black workers a fraction of white wages made whites see free black people as threats to their livelihood. In the early twentieth century, new immigrants were added to this competitive dynamic, and the result was a zero sum: the boss made more profit; one group had new, worse work, and the other had none.

In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status.

Even though raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum “and thus those most likely to ‘drop’ into last place” alongside the workers at the bottom expressed less support.

“Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,” the study authors wrote. That superior feeling, however, doesn’t fill your stomach,

Birmingham wasn’t wrong to say that making people work for so little that they can’t meet their needs is redolent of the Jim Crow economic order: the twenty-one states that have kept their minimum wages at the lowest possible level ($7.25) have some of the largest African American populations in the country. Most people of color are operating in a poverty-wage economy; nationwide, the majority of African Americans and Latinos earn less than $15 an hour. But white people are still suffering from that same economy, and in great numbers.

Texas introduced a voter ID law that essentially let the state design its own electorate, requiring photo IDs that over half a million eligible voters lacked and specifying what kinds of IDs would be permitted (gun permits, 80 percent of which are owned by white Texans) and denied (college IDs, in a state where more than 50 percent of students are people of color).

Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous black counties. Between the 2013 Shelby decision and the 2018 election, twenty-three states raised new barriers to voting. Although about 11 percent of the U.S. population (disproportionately low-income people, seniors, and people of color) do not have access to photo IDs, by 2020, six states still demanded them in order for people to vote,

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

Perhaps it makes sense, if you’ve spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of a zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal; that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the players’ skill and merit. You might also learn that if there are problems, you and yours are likely to be spared the costs. The thing is, that’s just not the case with the environment and climate change. We live under the same sky. Scorching triple-digit days, devastating wildfires, and drought restrictions on drinking water have become the new normal for California’s working-class barrios and gated communities alike.

what we found was one hundred percent of all the city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods…. Six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators were in black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the private-owned landfills were in black neighborhoods. From the thirties up ’til 1978, eighty-two percent of all the garbage, waste, was dumped in predominantly black neighborhoods, even though blacks only made up twenty-five percent of the population.” During the same period, he pointed out, “all of the city council members were white.”

The church’s 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.

Richmond residents “live within a ring of five major oil refineries, three chemical companies, eight Superfund sites, dozens of other toxic waste sites, highways, two rail yards, ports and marine terminals where tankers dock”—some 350 toxic sites in all. The polluter that’s most synonymous with Richmond, however, is the one-hundred-plus-year-old Chevron refinery, also the dominant player in Richmond politics. Today, North Richmond is 97 percent black, Latino, or Asian and, amazingly, still unincorporated.

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.

It’s the moral upside down of racism that simultaneously extolls American virtues in principle and rejects them in practice.

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.

Jones goes on to explain that “perhaps the most powerful role white Christianity has played in the gruesome drama of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and massive resistance to racial equality is to maintain an unassailable sense of religious purity that protects white racial innocence. Through every chapter, white Christianity has been at the ready to ensure that white Christians are alternatively—and sometimes simultaneously—the noble protagonists and the blameless victims.”

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. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear someone say that even if it cost them everything, they knew better.

The plutocrats have always known that solidarity is the answer, that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.

That’s why the forces seeking to keep the economic rules exactly as they are aim to cut off any sense of empathy white people who are struggling might develop for also-struggling people of color. Their “punching down” political attacks are how we know that empathy is a strength.

The problem with the easy out that the right wing offers—scapegoating immigrants and people of color instead—is that the scapegoats aren’t actually the ones paying you poverty wages. As my friend George Goehl, head of People’s Action, a grassroots network that organizes in rural America, says, “We’ve found the enemy, and it’s not each other.”

The crises of climate change, inequality, pandemics, and mass involuntary movements of people are already here, and in the United States, each has exposed the poverty of our public capacity to prevent and react. Save for the ultra-wealthy, we’re all living at the bottom of the drained pool now. The refusal to share across race has created a society with nothing left for itself. With falling support for government over the past fifty years has come falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century.

Refilling the pool will require us to believe in government so much that we hold it to the highest standard of excellence and commit our generation’s best and brightest to careers designing public goods instead of photo-sharing apps.

The crisis of youth un- and underemployment offers the opportunity to create millions of public-service jobs across the country to do the work that desperately needs doing. Every community in America could use the kind of renewable energy project that has engaged the youth in Richmond, from weatherizing buildings to installing solar arrays. The country needs new parks and community centers; childcare and camps to support working parents; literacy programs and home visits to the elderly. We need more internet service in rural and inner-city areas, oral histories of gentrifying urban communities and depopulating rural towns, and yes, even new public pools.

Berkeley. With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal and then develop strategies to achieve the goal that take into account the varied situations of the groups involved.