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

by Heather McGhee

Many of the country’s biggest and most respected public colleges were tuition-free, from the City University of New York to the University of California system.

When the public meant “white,” public colleges thrived.

Students of color comprised just one in six public college students in 1980, but they now make up over four in ten.

ensuring college affordability fell out of favor...

By 2017, the majority of state colleges were relying on student tuition dollars for the majority of their expenses.

college tuition has nearly tripled since 1991,

the causes of rising tuition and linked them squarely to the withering government commitment to public funding.

slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans,

impacted black students most acutely,

Eight out of ten black graduates have to borrow, and at higher levels than any other group.

student debt is most acute among black families, but it has now reached 63 percent of white public college graduates as well and is having ripple effects across our entire economy.

student debt payments are stopping us from buying our first home,

by age thirty, young adults with debt have half the retirement savings of those who are debt-free.

how is it smart to price a degree out of reach for the working class just as that degree became the price of entry into the middle class?

third of developed countries offer free tuition, and another third keep tuition lower than $2,600.

recent policy proposals to restore free college are generally popular, though race shapes public opinion.

The country’s first ambitious free college system, in California, was created in 1868 on a guarantee of no tuition and universal access;

But the state’s politics shifted radically in the 1970s, spurred by a backlash to the civil rights policy gains of the 1960s

The older, wealthier, and whiter political majority began voting for ballot initiatives opposing civil rights, fair housing, immigration, and taxes.

Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase,

California went from a national leader in school funding to forty-first in the country.

The resulting squeeze accelerated the end of the free college era in California.

A decade later, voters in Colorado, another state with a growing Latinx immigrant population, passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes.

the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.

The rise in student diversity shifted the politics of state education spending across the country.

By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.

The loss of good factory jobs in the mid-1970s hit the cities first, and with cities, their segregated black residents.

more than four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as for selling drugs, often in amounts so tiny they can only be intended for personal use.

White and black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate black people for a drug crime.

more widely used by African Americans than whites, are about eighteen times harsher

before policy changes in 2010, this sentencing disparity was about one hundred to one.

Over the last twenty years, however, a striking change has taken place. Getting locked up over drugs and related property crimes has become more and more common among white people and less so among black folks.

While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities” in largely white locales.

By 2018, an estimated 130 people were dying every day from opioid overdoses,

As racialized as the politics of government spending has become, the victims of this new higher education austerity include the majority of white students.

Josh Frost is thirty-nine and works full time at a news station and part time at a gas station. He pays three-quarters of his salary toward his student debt while living with his parents. Though he did everything society told him to do, he’s nearing forty but feels like adulthood is passing him by: “I’m watching everyone I know start families and buy homes,” he said.

One thing that all of the states with the highest hospital closures have in common is that their legislatures have all refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.

Texas leads the country in rural hospital closures,

if you make as little as four thousand dollars a year, you’re considered too rich to qualify for Medicaid in Texas,

As a result of this and some federal policies, including budget cuts in the government sequestration that the Tea Party forced during Obama’s second term, rural healthcare is rapidly disappearing.

it didn’t matter whether a state’s communities of color supported the expansion if the white community, with its greater political power and representation, did not.

one out of every five nonelderly Texans lacks health insurance, the highest percentage in the country.

the state has the highest uninsured rate for families earning less than $50,000 a year (who would be eligible for expanded Medicaid),

The uninsured are disproportionately Latino,

the language of infestation, is usually deployed against immigrants

In Texas, Latinx people are the largest group of uninsured.

in the end, they’re so stigmatized that people whose lives would be transformed by them don’t even want them for fear of sharing the stigma.

hitting some of the underlying tension that already exists between African American and Latino communities.

Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story;

Chapter 4 IGNORING THE CANARY