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

by Heather McGhee

Most white voters will deny that racism has anything to do with their feelings about government.

triumphalism

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.

the 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.

student debt payments are stopping us from buying our first home, the irreplaceable wealth-building asset. It’s even contributing to delays in marriage and family formation. And by age thirty, young adults with debt have half the retirement savings of those who are debt-free.

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?

There is neither fairness nor wisdom in this system, only self-sabotage.

In the United States, recent policy proposals to restore free college are generally popular, though race shapes public opinion. There’s a 30-percentage-point gap in support for free college between white people on the one hand (53 percent) and black and Latinx Americans on the other (86 and 82 percent).

In the story of how America drained the pool of our public college system, racism is the uncredited actor.

why homeowners should pay for “other people’s children.”

By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.

Instead of responding to the economic problem with economic development, jobs programs, and stronger safety nets, the federal government cut back massively on urban social spending in the 1980s. In its place, it waged a drug war.

members strong, the Student Debt Crisis—run by Natalia Abrams, a white Millennial grad of the University of California, Los Angeles—speaks for an indebted generation, lifting up the stories it collects in an online story bank. “We recently polled the activists on our list, and about seventy percent identify as white,” Abrams told me.

the “madness” doesn’t really end.

“I wish I had never gone to college.”

Why can’t we fix this?

One Nation, Uninsured, Claude Pepper

Claude Pepper’s cause of universal healthcare would ultimately get him lumped in with “the communist-inspired doctrine of racial integration and amalgamation.”

“If national health insurance succeeded, it would be without the support of the South.”

To be clear, the beneficiaries of Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white, as white people at the time made up 90 percent of the U.S. population.

The pool of national health insurance would have been mainly for white Americans, but the threat of sharing it with even a small number of black and brown Americans helped to doom the entire plan from the start.

Numerous social science studies have shown that racial resentment among white people spiked with the election of Barack Obama. When the figurehead of American government became a black man in 2009, the correlation between views on race and views on government and policy went into overdrive.

One thing that all of the states with the highest hospital closures have in common is that their legislatures have all refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

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.

politicians have so demonized the term ‘Medicaid expansion,’ that they’ll never reverse course

Without Medicaid expansion, people of color in those states struggle more—they are the ones most likely to be denied health benefits on the job—but white people are still the largest share of the 4.4 million working Americans who would have Medicaid if the law had been left intact.

“State adoption decisions are positively related to white opinion and do not respond to nonwhite support levels,”

This particular racist trope, the language of infestation,

Republicans were pretty good at what they’re always good at, right? Pitting communities against each other and using a lot of dog whistle politics

‘We work. Why can’t we have healthcare?’

“Abbott, who’s the governor now, was the attorney general then. And he would just say, ‘I get up in the morning. I go to the office. I sue President Obama, and I come home.’ It was just so apparent that it was like, ‘We can’t have Obama having any success, even if it makes perfect sense, economic sense and healthcare sense, for the state.

the Republicans’ megaphone’s just always bigger than ours.”)

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

there have been quite a few people I have met—too numerous to count—who paid the ultimate price for their inability to get health coverage.”

“I grew up in the period when, in the 1960s, there was this tiny glimmer of hope that we were going to do something serious about poverty in America.”

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.”

we suffer because our society was raised deficient in social solidarity—struck

Starting with healthcare and public college, I began to see the Solidarity Dividends waiting to be unlocked if more people would stop buying the old zero-sum story that elites use to keep us from investing in one another.

in 2007 showed that the majority of subprime loans were going to people who could have qualified for less expensive prime loans.

Between 2004 and 2008, black and Latinx homeowners with good credit scores were three times as likely as whites with similar credit scores to have higher-rate mortgages.

black and Latinx homeowners were 103 percent and 78 percent, respectively, more likely to receive high-cost mortgages.

“I wasn’t taught to doubt people who presented themselves as God-fearing people. So, I didn’t doubt.”

Families headed by Millennials, who entered adulthood during the Great Recession, still have 34 percent less wealth than previous generations. They will likely never catch up.

One study identified home foreclosures as the likely cause of a sharp rise in suicides during 2005–2010,

There’s so much shame involved in being in debt.

“We think of the New Deal and all the great things that came out of it—and there were many—but what we don’t talk about nearly as often is the extent to which those great things were structured in ways that made sure people of color didn’t have access to them,”

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.”

The government agencies most responsible for the vast increase in home ownership—from about 40 percent of Americans in 1920 to about 62 percent in 1960—were also responsible for the exclusion of people of color from this life-changing economic opportunity.

Of all the African Americans in the United States during the decades between 1930 and 1960, fewer than 2 percent were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority.

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.