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

by Heather McGhee

Fox News host Laura Ingraham told her audience of millions, “In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” and blamed it on immigration.

Tucker Carlson raged, “Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this.

history shows us, once a group is criminalized, they’re outside the circle of human concern.

the racist structures that let the ancestors of many white Americans arrive with no restrictions or requirements save their whiteness, which extended them ladders of opportunity upon arrival that were the exact opposite of the walls and shadows today’s immigrant workers face.

racism makes an immoral view of the world into a moral one.

color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement—that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy, or structure.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of the groundbreaking book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America,

As Bonilla-Silva puts it, if racism is no longer actively limiting the lives of people of color, then their failure to achieve parity with whites in wealth, education, employment, and other areas must mean there is something wrong with them, not with the social systems that somehow always benefit white people the most.

racial resentment, in turn, is a predictor of opposition to policies that would improve the economic security of millions.

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

“reactionary color blindness” has become the weapon of choice for conservatives in the courts and in politics.

Well-funded political groups mount campaigns to forbid the government from collecting racial data because isn’t that what a racist would do?

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

A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps.

color blindness is a key step in “a process of knowing designed to produce not knowing surrounding white privilege, culpability, and structural white supremacy.”

white Americans “are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from

The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others.

many white people both resent affirmative action and imagine that it is vastly more widespread than it really is.

with “Stand Your Ground” laws, in the legal system—when you fear someone, no matter how objectively real the threat, you can be justified in doing them harm.

Black people constituted 28 percent of those killed, more than twice our presence in the population. Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, black people were three times more likely to be killed by police. Indigenous Americans are killed by police at shocking rates as high as or higher than those for African Americans.

Segregation breeds unfamiliarity; strategic disinvestment of many neighborhoods of color makes them economically depressed and appear to many white people like no-go zones.

Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news,

At the start of the summer of mass demonstrations against police violence in 2020, the moral contours of the struggle were crystal clear to the majority of Americans.

The specter of violence in the streets—even, as it was, between unarmed demonstrators and militarized police—managed to turn white public opinion as the summer wore on.

support for the goals of the movement was down among conflicted, or swing, voters by 28 percent from June.

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.

Jonathan Metzl

Dying of Whiteness,

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told a New Republic reporter, “They have to make Americans afraid of one another. They’re exploiting fear in America to sell guns.” All this fear has come in an era of record-low crime rates nationwide.

white men have been increasingly and disproportionately turning the guns on themselves in a tragic increase in gun suicides.

having a gun handy during moments of frustration or despair can turn a passing feeli...

Suicide attempts with a gun have an 85 percent success rate, compared to a 3 percent rate for the most frequently us...

twice as many people die from gun suicides in America each year as from the gun homicides people have been so conditioned to fear.

this dynamic of assigning others your own worst attributes has a name: projection.

White fear can exist only in “a world turned upside down,” writes Abraham Lateiner,

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

People often talk about putting a new racial lens on your work, but I found it was more like taking off blinders to see what we’d been conditioned not to see.

a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how [enslaved people’s] labor was essential to the American economy.”

high school seniors from across the country and found that only 8 percent knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War.

Robert P. Jones,

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,

Chapter 10 THE SOLIDARITY DIVIDEND

Progress for people of color means a loss for white people.

But this equation adds up only if you leave out the decisions by corporate employers to seek cheaper labor, or the trade policies that were the final death knell in the 1990s and 2000s.

The state ranks among the top ten in opioid deaths.

he vetoed Medicaid expansion for the working class five times and delivered large tax cuts for the wealthy.

every group of white-skinned immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Italians to the Poles.

What America offered for the price of assimilation was inclusion in the pool of whites-only benefits that shaped the middle class,

the idea of different cultures not only coexisting but thriving through their differences didn’t come from theory or ideology; it came from lived experience.

The first is that we have reached the productive and moral limit of the zero-sum economic model