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

by Heather McGhee

Congress took action—and made the problem of rising debt worse. Legislators passed a bankruptcy reform bill supported by the credit industry that made it harder for people ever to escape their debts, no matter how tapped out they were after a job loss, catastrophic medical illness, or divorce.

It was a bad economic policy decision that benefited only lenders and debt collectors, not the public.

when we’re talking about the fiscal picture in 2040 or 2050, we’re also talking about a demographic change tipping point, so where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth…and now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”

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.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.

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.

The authors concluded that “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”

thinking about a more diverse future changed white Americans’ policy preferences about government.

Why would they allow a false sense of group competition to become a self-defeating trap?

aren’t we all talking about race relations through a prism of competition,

Black people and other people of color certainly lost out when we weren’t able to invest more in the aftermath of the Great Recession, or tackle climate change more forcefully under President Obama, or address the household debt crisis before it spiraled out of control—in each case, at least partly because of racist stereotypes and dog whistles used by our opposition. But did white people win? No, for the most part they lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.

It is progressive economic conventional wisdom that racism accelerates inequality for communities of color, but what if racism is actually driving inequality for everyone?

The people of our country are so productive and generate so much wealth, but most of the gains go to a small number, while most families struggle to stay afloat.

I talked to white homeowners who had lost everything in a financial crisis that began with the predatory mortgages that banks first created to strip wealth from black and brown families.

To understand when white America had turned against government, I traveled to one of the many places where the town had drained its public swimming pool rather than integrate it.

The logic that launched the zero-sum paradigm—I will profit at your expense—is no longer sparing millions of white Americans from the degradations of American economic life as people of color have always known it.

The civil rights victories that were so bitterly opposed in the South ended up being a boon for the region, resulting in stronger local economies and more investments in infrastructure and education.

the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a “Solidarity Dividend,”

Chapter 1 AN OLD STORY: THE ZERO-SUM HIERARCHY

the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1.

“Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,”

today’s winner-take-all version of capitalism.

according to the people they’d surveyed, whites were now the subjugated race in America.

What Norton and Sommers found in their research grabbed headlines: the white survey respondents rated anti-white bias as more prevalent in society than anti-black bias.

The story of this country’s rise from a starving colony to a world superpower is one that can’t be told without the central character of race—specifically, the creation of a “racial” hierarchy to justify the theft of Indigenous land and the enslavement of African and Indigenous people.

In the seventeenth century, influential Europeans were starting to create taxonomies of human beings based on skin color, religion, culture, and geography, aiming not just to differentiate but to rank humanity in terms of inherent worth.

European invaders of the New World believed that war was the only sure way to separate Indigenous people from the lands they coveted. Their version of settler colonialism set up a zero-sum competition for land that would shape the American economy to the present day, at an unforgivable cost.

Another stereotype that served the European profit motive was that Indigenous people wasted their land, so it would be better off if cultivated by productive settlers.

The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed.

Colonial slavery set up a zero-sum relationship between master and enslaved as well.

With sexual violence, a white male owner could literally create even more free labor,

the less the slaveholder expended making his bound laborers’ lives sustainable, the more profit he had.

again, by the nineteenth century, owners could purchase life insurance on their slaves (from some of the most reputable insurance companies in the country) and be paid three-quarters of their market value upon their death.

the zero-sum paradigm lingers as more than a story justifying an economic order; it also animates many people’s sense of who is an American, and whether more rights for other people will come at the expense of their own.

as the threat of cross-racial servant uprisings became real in the late 1600s—particularly after the bloody Bacon’s Rebellion, in which a black and white rebel army burned the capital of colonial Virginia to the ground—colonial governments began to separate the servant class based on skin color.

the colonial laws of the 1680s and early 1700s reveals a deliberate effort to legislate a new hierarchy between poor whites and the “basically uncivil, unchristian, and above all, unwhite Native and African laborers.”

laws oppressing workers of color did so to the direct benefit of poor whites, creatin...

the church in each parish sold the slaves’ confiscated property and gave the “profits to the poor of the parish,”

The women could not refuse the sexual advances of their masters, and any children born from these rapes would be slaves

Physical abuse was common, of course, and even murder was legal.

killing one’s slave could not amount to murder, because the law would assume no malice or intent ...

the Church condoned their subjugation and participated in their enslavement.

White women in slaveholding communities considered their slaves “their freedom,” liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing, and even the sexual demands of their husbands.

The colonies would not have been able to afford their War of Independence were it not for the aid provided by the French, who did so in exchange for tobacco grown by enslaved people.

Americans bought their independence with slave labor.”

It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World;

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

The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America.

Chapter 2 RACISM DRAINED THE POOL

The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of wealth, land, and political power.