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

by Heather McGhee

When the movement first emerged, there were press reports and social media stories about usually white workers earning around $15 feeling that their work would be degraded if “burger flippers” earned just as much. Fast-food work, after all, is one of the lowest-status jobs in the economy.

The majority of workers in American fast food come from the same white, working-class pool of voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump, a man whose campaign was dominated by promises to fight for the (white) working class and punish immigrants.

Democracy is a secular religion in America; faith in it unites us.

Possibly the most consequential of the founding racist distortions in our democracy was the creation of the Electoral College in lieu of direct election of the president. James Madison believed that direct election would be the most democratic, but to secure slave states’ ratification of the Constitution, he devised the Electoral College as a compromise to give those states an advantage. As a result, the U.S. apportions presidential electoral votes to states based on their number of House and Senate members.

The Electoral College still overrepresents white people, but in an interesting parallel to the free/slave tilt from the original Constitution, not all white people benefit. The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states; white people who live in larger states that look more like America are the ones underrepresented today.

Colfax, Louisiana, for example, when a pro-Reconstruction candidate supported by black voters won a fiercely contested gubernatorial race in 1872, the following spring, a mob of armed white men attacked the courthouse where the certification of the election had been held, killing about one hundred black people who were trying to defend the building, and setting the courthouse on fire. The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.

Today, the burdensome and confusing registration process is particularly onerous on people who move frequently (young people, people of color, and low-income people) or who may not know about lower-profile, off-cycle election dates before the registration deadlines, which are as much as thirty days before the election in some states. One of the top barriers to voting, the registration requirement kept nearly 20 percent of eligible voters from the polls in 2016.

“They think that most felons are monsters. They don’t see the depth of a personal story, which is why I think that stories are so important.” Race played a role, too—and that’s why Coral always chose to canvass alongside an African American “brother or sister,” as she put it. “It was important that we were united together. When we encountered any type of stereotype, what could break the stereotype was what was standing in front of them.”

What does it mean when the officials who set policy in our name are elected by so few of us?

To see what U.S. democracy would be like without the distorting factor of racism, we can look to the states that make it easiest to vote, which are some of the whitest. Oregon, for example, was judged the easiest state in which to vote by a comprehensive study. In Oregon, everyone votes by mailing in a ballot, and Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR), which means rather than making voters figure out how, when, and where to register, Oregon uses information the state already has, for instance from the DMV, to add eligible voters to the rolls.

Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of black citizens, is dead last of the fifty states in terms of ease of voting.

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.

many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all

Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors.

didn’t think I was required to vote in every election!” Larry said, incredulity in his voice.

know, I pay my taxes every year, and I pay my property taxes, and I register my car.’ So, the state had to know I’m still a voter. Why should we fight for the country if they’re gonna be taking away my rights? I mean, I’m a veteran, my father’s a veteran, my grandfather’s a veteran. Now they aren’t giving me my right to vote, the most fundamental right I have?”

among the most potent opposition messages is that it’s taxpayer money for politicians. Senator Winfield has a response to that: “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.”

white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Why? Of course, white students at racially diverse schools develop more cultural competency—the ability to collaborate and feel at ease with people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds—than students who attend segregated schools.

But their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.

once the argument was divorced from the context of legal segregation, it also subtly reaffirmed the logic of white supremacy. Today, it’s that logic that endures—that white segregated schools are better and that everyone, even white children, should endeavor to be in them.

“No one is born hating a person because of the color of their skin or his background or his religion.”

children do learn to categorize, and rank, people by race while they are still toddlers. By age three or four, white children and children of color have absorbed the message that white is better, and both are likely to select white playmates if given a choice.

“It’s also more community-focused, which is antithetical to the white, privileged culture”

we have one of the strongest and most politically powerful factions opposed to taking action to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Only in the United States does our conservative party, with very few exceptions, flat-out deny that there’s a problem. The opposition of the American conservative political movement is the primary reason the United States has not taken stronger legislative action to reduce greenhouse gases; our inaction is one of the main reasons the world has continued to warm. In short, the loss of human and animal life and habitats that we are already experiencing is in no small part due to the American conservative political faction. And that political faction is almost entirely white.

the “Dismissive” were more likely to be white, male, and have higher incomes.

Are powerful interests using race to sell climate denialism to white people?

we do also have class inequality in Sweden. But people who are poor, they are guaranteed to have their own apartments.

you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it’s okay for people to suffer, then it’s okay for people to suffer. And if your wealth has protected you from that suffering, then your wealth can probably protect you from another kind of suffering.”

many white people now believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated.

480 days of parental leave in Sweden—are almost unimaginable in today’s America, because the dominant American political culture would say that people lacking those privileges are responsible for their situations.

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.

What’s often forgotten, however, is that the bad guys on-screen believed that what they were doing was morally right.

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.

“they were the one group I found that never questioned my anger or my aggression or my violence.

when I was growing up in the 1980s, we were taught that the way to be a good person was to swear that race didn’t matter, at least not anymore. We had all learned the lessons of the civil rights movement: everybody is equal, and according to the morals of the sitcoms we watched after school (Diff’rent Strokes, Webster, Saved by the Bell), what was racist was pretending that people were any different from one another.

For two generations now, well-meaning white people have subscribed to color blindness in an optimistic attempt to wish away the existence of structural racism.

blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.

“Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.”

White people, on the other hand, were more likely to blame problems such as the lack of good role models and family instability—group pathologies, in other words, that ultimately lay blame at the feet of black people themselves.

Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, black people were three times more likely to be killed by police.

Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white.

The perception was that violence was as common as ordinary protest, but the most complete record of the summer 2020 racial justice protests shows that 93 percent of the events were peaceful, with no conflict, violence, or property destruction.

Who were the innocent bystanders? Not the black victims of police violence. Not the football players whose silent protest fell squarely in the democratic tradition. No, the innocents in Ken’s mind were white people like him, people who may not approve of police officers killing the black citizens they were sworn to protect but who did not think it was fair to be reminded of those killings during a football game.

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

“It’s actually liberating and transformative to start from the premise that of course I’m thoroughly conditioned into [racism]. And then I can stop defending, denying, explaining, minimizing and get to work actually applying what I profess to believe with the practice of my life.”

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

She thought some people approached the discussion with the sense that “ ‘I feel everything I say and ask is just loaded with ignorance, and I’m going to come out of this feeling attacked or feeling stupid. I just don’t even know what’s safe to talk about anymore.’

am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being…. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

In Storm Lake, Iowa, the elementary school is 90 percent children of color.