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

by Heather McGhee

We have no choice but to start aiming for a Solidarity Dividend.

The second is that the quickest way to get there is to refill the pool of pub...

Third,

we must resist the temptation to use universal instruments to attain universal ends.

one size has never...

uprooting the zero sum is so essential,

we’ve got to get on the same page before we can turn it.

When the rules of the game allow a small minority of participants to capture most of the gains,

the entire middle class owns less than the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans),

fewer people can pla...

inequality robs too many people of the means to start businesses, invest in their families, and inven...

inequality itself impedes a country’s economic growth—even more than the factors policy makers have emphasized in the past: liberalizing trade policies, controlling inflation, and reducing national debt.

The plutocrats have always known that solidarity is the answer, that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.

she’d

bought the idea that her own labor would never be worth $15 an hour.

degrading others in your same position that can make you unable to see a be...

the right wing offers—scapegoating immigrants and people of color instead—is that the scapegoats aren’t actually the ones paying you poverty wages.

The crises of climate change, inequality, pandemics, and mass involuntary movements of people are already here, and in the United States, each has exposed the poverty of our public capacity to prevent and react.

we’re all living at the bottom of the drained pool now.

Some restoration of public goods will be relatively straightforward, like rebuilding the fifty-year-old dams that are failing just in time for climate change to send heavier rains, or laying new pipes to replace the ones leaching toxins into our drinking water.

Refilling the pool will require us to believe in government so much that we hold it to the highest standard of excellence and commit our generation’s best and brightest to careers designing public goods instead of photo-sharing apps.

Public pools were part of the “melting pot” project that fostered cross-cultural cohesion among white ethnic immigrants and their children

one hundred billion dollars spent directly hiring people could create 2.6 million public service jobs;

spending the same amount on tax cuts trickles down to just one hundred thousand jobs.

“targeted universalism,” a concept developed by law professor and critical race scholar john a. powell—he doesn’t capitalize his name—who currently directs the Haas Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

and then develop strategies to achieve the goal that take into account the varied situations of the groups involved.

A race-conscious housing effort to close the black-white gap in homeownership could be the centerpiece of a national effort for reparations for the economic harms of slavery, systematic discrimination, wealth suppression, and theft.

From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century,

William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

A study modeling COVID-19 transmission routes in a representative U.S. city found that the majority of the city’s infections came from situations where racism was driving higher exposure.

The country was caught without public health capacity largely because of the drained pool—antigovernment sentiment that has hobbled the public health infrastructure, and decades of cuts to public hospitals in low-income and of-color communities that left half of low-income areas without a single ICU bed when the pandemic hit.

the U.S. needs transformation. The nation was conceived…on this belief in racial hierarchy.”

“One was a community racial history…this historical analysis of policy and place, of race, and the people from Indigenous times to present.

second was this community visioning process…this way of convening [a] multiracial, multifaceted group of people together, to come up with a shared community vision of how do we end this hierarchy of human value?”

Who is an American, and what are we to one another? We have to admit that this question is harder for us than in most other countries, because we are the world’s most radical experiment in democracy, a nation of ancestral strangers that has to work to find connection even as we grow more diverse every day.

Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts.

Decades of Drained Pool Politics in the United States desiccated our welfare system, and the result was one of the highest child poverty rates of any advanced economy. But the tax credit reverses that trend, cutting child poverty in half.

Five people, including a police officer, died, and four officers who were in the battle that day have since committed suicide.

The lie of the stolen election is not just a wild fantasy—it is anchored in our long history of zero-sum racial hierarchy. That’s where you’ll find the Big Lie’s racial common sense: of course the winner of the white vote is the legitimate president, and votes cast by people of color are by definition taking something from rightful white voters.

The elaborate conspiracy theory—what’s needed to say this without actually saying it—seems plausible to 50 million people only because of the long-standing stereotype that people of color are inveterate criminals.

“The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government,” I wrote about a history we were apparently willing to repeat, “rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.”

The federal legislation that would save our democracy is stalled in Congress because of the filibuster, a Jim Crow–era relic that allows the Senate minority to block legislation.

The Republican minority unanimously refused to support the overwhelmingly popular American Rescue Plan as it advanced to the floor. But rather than mounting a defense of that decision on its merits, the right wing turned their wrath on…children’s books.

An activist with the conservative group Moms for Liberty used a similar Tennessee law to object to a lesson about Ruby Bridges integrating Louisiana schools when she was six years old, because it “made white students in the class feel uncomfortable.”

For the first time, the U.S. Transportation Department has officially acknowledged that highway projects systematically used eminent domain to destroy thriving communities of color, and it has proposed an initiative to remove the highways and repair the harm done.

These Solidarity Dividends are not guaranteed. They could still be defeated by the one-two punch of political racism and greed, with Republicans using culture war racism to cloak their opposition, and lobbyist-beholden Democrats claiming fiscal conservatism despite the enormous economic costs of inaction.