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

by Heather McGhee

put racially restrictive covenants (agreements to sell only to white people) in their housing contracts.

redlining and other banking practices,

Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that governments could no longer enforce racial covenants in housing, the government continued to discriminate under the pretext of credit risk.

Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between black and white homeownership

Richard Rothstein,

Color of Law: How the Government Segre...

All segregation is the result of public policy, past and present.

today’s segregation is driven by less obviously racially targeted policies.

in 1917, over a thousand communities rushed to adopt “exclusionary zoning” laws to restrict the types of housing that most black people could afford to buy, especially without access to subsidized mortgages (such as units in apartment buildings or two-family homes).

Exclusionary zoning rules limit the number of units constructed per acre;

In 1977, the Supreme Court failed to recognize that these rules were racial bans recast in class terms, and the impact on integration—not to mention housing affordability for millions of struggling white families—has been devastating.

the majority of people in the one hundred largest U.S. cities are now renters,

the majority of those renters spend more than half their income on rent.

Nationwide, the typical home costs more than 4.2 times the typical household income; in 1970, the same ratio was 1.7.

Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in America, by design.

80 percent of the city of Chicago carried racial covenants banning black people from living in most neighborhoods,

segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all.

For all the ways that segregation is aimed at limiting the choices of people of color, it’s white people who are ultimately isolated.

the majority of white Americans said they regularly came in contact with only “a few” African Americans, and a 2019 poll reported that 21 percent “seldom or never” interacted with any people of color at all.

Diversity has become a commonly accepted “good” despite its elusiveness;

while black and Latinx people actually search for housing in neighborhoods that match their desired levels of diversity, white people search in neighborhoods that are 68 percent white, and they end up living in areas that are 74 percent white.

when white families bring their wealth into black and brown neighborhoods, it more often leads to gentrification and displacement than enduring integration.

Higher black-white segregation is correlated with billions in “lost income, lost lives, and lost potential” in Chicago.

Reducing segregation to the national median would have an impact on Chicago’s notoriously high homicide rate—by an estimated 30 percent—increasing

segregation brings more pollution for white people, too. It turns out that integrated communities are less polluted than segregated ones.

Rachel Morello-Frosch, conducted a major study examining pollutants that are known carcinogens and found that more segregated cities had more of them in the air.

segregated cities have higher cancer-causing pollutants—for white people, too—than more integrated ones.

Although the federal government kicks in a small portion, schools are financed primarily by local and state taxes,

White communities tend to draw their district boundaries narrowly, in order to make ultra-local and racially and socioeconomically homogenous districts, enabling them to hoard the wealth that comes from local property taxes.

The boom in private schools, particularly in the South and West, occurred as a reaction to school integration in the 1950s and ’60s.

The pricing up and privatization of public goods has a cost for us all—most white families included.

In the suburbs of Cincinnati, a house near a highly rated school cost 58 percent more per square foot than a nearby house with the same one-story design and high ceilings, just in a different school district.

homes in zip codes that had at least one elementary school with higher-than-average test scores were 77 percent more expensive than houses in areas without.

someone with average wages could not afford to live in 65 percent of the zip codes with highly rated elementary schools.

These white parents are paying for their fear because they’re assuming that white-dominant schools are worth the cost to their white children; essentially, that segregated schools are best.

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.

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.

research reveals that racially diverse K–12 schools can produce better citizens—white

at the 1954 Supreme Court decision that should have changed everything, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Brown struck down state and local laws that racially segregated public schools and rejected the premise of “separate but equal,” which had been the law of the land since the Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

it was segregation and the message it sent, which reinforced the notion of human hierarchy, that hurt children more than mere out-of-date books and unheated classrooms ever could.

The best research of the day concluded that “confusion, conflict, moral cynicism, and disrespect for authority may arise in [white] children as a consequence of being taught the moral, religious and democratic principles of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”

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

course—it’s easy to walk right into a trap set for us by racism.

Even though we are a mixed Asian family,” she freely acknowledged, “I’ve approached public school as a privileged [half-white] person.

“The 1928 Austin city plan segregated the city, forcing the black residents east.

It slowly dawned on her that many of the behaviors of both students and parents that she found off-putting were expressions of white privilege.

upper-middle-class parents…want [our kids] to be unencumbered in their lives,” including, she feels, by rules. “It’s this entitlement.

“By staying at [that] school, I was supporting a white supremacy institution. That felt so wrong.”

Integrated Schools is a nationwide grassroots effort to empower, educate, and organize parents who are white and/or privileged