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

by Heather McGhee

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.” For

Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as Black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a Black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government.

even though Black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs. Nonetheless, the idea that Black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hardworking taxpayers—the “makers”—has become a core part of the zero-sum story preached by wealthy political elites. Whether it’s the more subtle “47 percent” version from millionaire Mitt Romney or the more racially explicit Fox News version sponsored by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, it works. In 2016, the majority of white moderates (53 percent) and white conservatives (69 percent) said that Black Americans take more than we give to society. We take more than we give.

As Professor Haney López points out, priming white voters with racist dog whistles was the means; the end was an economic agenda that was harmful to working- and middle-class voters of all races, including white people. In railing against welfare and the war on poverty, conservatives like President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored Black and brown people over them—but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power.

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.

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 Republican Party’s adoption of policies that voters perceived as anti-Black (opposition to affirmative action and welfare, harsh policing and sentencing) won them millions more white voters than their unpopular economic agenda would have attracted. The result was a revolution in American economic policy: from high marginal tax rates and generous public investments in the middle class such as the GI Bill to a low-tax, low-investment regime that resulted in less than 1 percent annual income growth for 90 percent of American families for thirty years. According to Roemer and Lee, the culprit was racism. “We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18 percentage points.” They conclude, “Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.”

Fundamentally, we have to ask ourselves, how is it fair and how is it smart to price a degree out of reach for the working class just as that degree became the price of entry into the middle class? And how is it fair or smart to create a new source of debt for a generation when that debt makes it harder for us to achieve the hallmarks of middle-class security: a house, marriage, and retirement savings? There is neither fairness nor wisdom in this system, only self-sabotage.

Texas politicians’ government-bashing is both ideological and strategic; they benefit politically by stopping government from having a beneficial presence in people’s lives—as white constituents’ needs mount, the claim that government is busy serving some racialized other instead of them becomes more convincing.

“People are dying because they would choose…a political victory over an actual victory that serves millions of people.”

shared with me the vision for America that has guided him through five decades of advocacy. 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.” To realize this vision, he said, “I wish there was a greater consciousness about how we’re all in this together. 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.

the FHA would not make or guarantee mortgages for borrowers of color,” she said. “It would guarantee mortgages for developers who were building subdivisions, but only on the condition that they include deed restrictions preventing any of those homes from being sold to people of color. Here we have this structure that facilitated…white homeownership, and therefore the creation of white wealth at a heretofore unprecedented scale—and [that] explicitly prevented people of color from having those same benefits. To a very large degree, this was the genesis of the incredible racial wealth gap we have today.”

1978 also saw an ominous sign of a coming wave of deregulation when a Supreme Court decision interpreted the National Bank Act to mean if a lender was in one of the few states without any limits on interest rates, it could lend without limits nationwide, effectively invalidating thirty-seven states’ consumer protections—and Congress declined to amend the law. That’s why, today, most of your credit card statements come from South Dakota and Delaware, states with lax lending laws.

A common misperception then and now is that subprime loans were being sought out by financially irresponsible borrowers with bad credit, so the lenders were simply appropriately pricing the loans higher to offset the risk of default. And in fact, subprime loans were more likely to end up in default. If a Black homeowner finally answered Mario Taylor’s dozenth call and ended it possessing a mortgage that would turn out to be twice as expensive as the prime one he started with, is it any wonder that it would quickly become unaffordable? This is where the age-old stereotypes equating Black people with risk—an association explicitly drawn in red ink around America’s Black neighborhoods for most of the twentieth century—obscured the plain and simple truth: what was risky wasn’t the borrower; it was the loan.