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

by Heather McGhee

For most of our history, the beneficiaries of America’s free public investments were whites only. The list of free stuff? It’s long. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants) if they could reach the land and build on it. A free grant of property! Fewer than six thousand black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act and its 1866 southern counterpart. Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries. During the Great Depression, the American government told banks it would insure mortgages on real estate if they made them longer-term and more affordable (offering tax deductions on interest along the way)—but the government drew red “Do Not Lend” lines around almost all the black neighborhoods in the country with a never-substantiated assumption that they would be bad credit risks. The New Deal transformed the lives of workers with minimum wage and overtime laws—but compromises with southern Democrats excluded the job categories most black people held, in domestic and agricultural work. Then the GI Bill of 1944 paid the college tuition of hundreds of thousands of veterans, catapulting a generation of men into professional careers—but few black veterans benefited, as local administrators fun...