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

by Heather McGhee

how could I have forgotten the first lessons I’d ever learned as a black person in America, about what they see when they see us? About how quick so many white people could be to assume the worst of us…to believe that we wanted to cheat at a game they were winning fair and square?

the United States had deliberately created a white middle class through racially restricted government investments in homeownership and infrastructure and retirement security, and that it had only recently decided that keeping up those investments would be unaffordable and unwise.

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.

white Americans, who have thirteen times the median household wealth of black Americans,

Ten out of the eleven passages in the U.S. Constitution that referred to slavery were pro-slavery.

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free—when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have.

The new “debt-for-diploma system,” as my former Demos colleague Tamara Draut called it, has impacted black students most acutely, as generations of racist policies have left our families with less wealth to draw on to pay for college. Eight out of ten black graduates have to borrow, and at higher levels than any other group.

This particular racist trope, the language of infestation, is usually deployed against immigrants and, in the current immigration debates, those from Latin America.

In 2016, the most recent available authoritative data, the typical white family in America had about $171,000 in wealth, mostly from homeownership—that’s about ten times that of black families ($17,600) and eight times that of Latinx families ($20,700). That kind of wealth is self-perpetuating.

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.

But its reign lasted only a decade as the 1890s saw the birth of Jim Crow, the end of black-white fusion politics under Reconstruction, and the promotion of white supremacy as a cultural and political force to unite whites across class.

Countries less boastful of their democracies do much better.

In 2016, three-quarters of white people reported that their social network was entirely white.

public goods are seen as worthy of investment only so long as the public is seen as good.

Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.

And people always want to say, ‘People of color, they’re poor, and so therefore they live in the less desirable places.’ Well, you know…those less desirable places were the only places that they could legally own homes…. They’re not accidental…. Those are intentional.”

Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics…[W]hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.”

Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.

The diverse juries deliberated longer and performed better, in part because the white people upped their game in mixed company. White people in the diverse teams “cited more case facts, made fewer errors, and were more amenable to discussion of racism when in diverse versus all-White groups.”