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

by Heather McGhee

a governing class will tax themselves to invest in amenities that serve the public (schools, libraries, roads and utilities, support for local businesses) because they need to. The wealthy need these assets in a community to make it livable for them,

Owners didn’t need more than a handful of white workers per plantation. They didn’t need an educated populace, whether black or white; such a thing was in fact counter to their financial interest.

the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system.

Helper argued that owners should actually have to compensate the rest of the white citizens of the South, because slavery had impoverished the region.

counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.

“societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.”

functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.

even privatization advocates still want the government, not corporations, to shoulder the investment cost for massive infrastructure needs.

For most of our history, the beneficiaries of America’s free public investments were whites only.

Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries.

The New Deal transformed the lives of workers with minimum wage and overtime laws—but compromises with southern Democrats excluded the job categories most black people held,

The federal government created suburbs by investing in the federal highway system and subsidizing private housing developers—but demanded racial covenants

The advantages white people had accumulated were free and usually invisible, and so conferred an elevated status that seemed natural and almost innate.

In Baltimore, instead of sharing the pool, white children stopped going to the pools that black children could easily access, and white adults informally policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in white neighborhoods.

white public officials took the public assets private, creating new private corporations to run the pools.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm.

“Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.”

If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953.

there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on.

in the 1950s, the majority of white Americans believed in an activist government role in people’s economic lives—a more activist role, even, than contemplated by today’s average liberal.

White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however—from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent—and

When I saw that white support for these ideas crumbled in 1964, I guessed it might have been because black people were pushing to expand the circle of beneficiaries across the color line.

“today, we say, prejudice is preoccupied less with inborn ability and more with effort and initiative.”

They found that “although whites’ support for the principles of racial equality and integration have increased majestically over the last four decades, their backing for policies designed to bring equality and integration about has scarcely increased at all.

white people with high levels of resentment against black people have become far more likely to oppose government spending generically:

Government, it turned out, had become a highly racialized character in the white story of our country.

When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

the Inequality Era was born.

That era began in the 1970s, but the policies cohered into an agenda guided by antigovernment conservatism under the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.”

resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval:

Lee Atwater, admitted to the plan:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

In the 1980s, Republicans deployed this strategy by harping on the issue of welfare and tying it to the racialized image of “the in...

the black welfare stereotype was a total inversion of the way the U.S. government had actually given “free stuff” to one race over all others.

white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.

President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored black and brown people over them—but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power.

they needed the white majority to turn against society’s two strongest vessels for collective action: the government and labor unions.

Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy but raised them on the poor, waged war on the unions that were the backbone of the white middle class, and slashed domestic spending.

the typical white voter’s economic preferences are still more progressive than those of the Republican politicians for whom they vote.

There is such a strong cultural prohibition on being racist (particularly during the color-blind triumphalism in the wake of Obama’s election) that it’s important to look at what voters feel and perceive, not just what they say.

When race is introduced in this fashion to white voters, it activates seemingly race-neutral reactions such as demonization, distrust, zero-sum thinking, resistance to change, and resource hoarding.

When you cut government services, as Reagan strategist Lee Atwater said, “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” What’s lost in that formulation is just how much white people get hurt, too.

Chapter 3 GOING WITHOUT

The novel idea of flourishing public colleges—at least one in every state—took shape in the 1860s,

U.S. government offered the states over ten million acres of land taken from Indigenous people to build on or to sell for institutions of higher education for their citizens.

(Racist program administration and educational segregation left black veterans in the South largely excluded

In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.