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

by Heather McGhee

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest.

I started my journey when I was pregnant with a child whose grandparents would be black, white, and South Asian. I’m sure some part of me doesn’t want to believe that oppression of people of color really is an unalloyed good for white people, making us truly separate and intrinsically at odds—because then the multiracial America that made my son possible is doomed.

The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t.

(We could eliminate all poverty in the United States by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.)

In the Inequality Era brought to us by racist dog-whistle politics, white voters are less hostile to government policies that promote economic equality than the party they most often vote into power. But vote for them they do. Racial allegiance trumps.

Compared to students at predominantly white schools, 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. Why? Of course, white students at racially diverse schools develop more cultural competency—the ability to collaborate and feel at ease with people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds—than students who attend segregated schools. But 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.

“I’ve approached public school as a privileged [half-white] person. Depending on the situation, I am white-passing, although it’s always hard to know how people perceive me.”

New mothers know the upside-down hours, between roughly midnight and dawn, when the physical needs of your newborn push you upright, pry open your eyes, and set your mind into motion at a pace unmatched by the dormant world around you.

In high school, Angela sought a place to fit in. She eventually chose a group that displayed swastikas and Confederate flags. “And honestly, I wasn’t attracted to them because of the beliefs,” she said. But “they were the one group I found that never questioned my anger or my aggression or my violence. They just accepted it. I never had to explain it or account for it. And that began my life in the violent far right.”

She recalls with overwhelming fondness her years teaching at Sacramento High, the public charter school whose students were all from working-class backgrounds and mostly African American, with a small percentage of Hmong and Latinx kids. “These were the best students of my career,” she said. “If I gave the students something to read, they read it in three days. I would sometimes plan a lesson [unit] to go on for four or five weeks, and they were done in two weeks and wanted to write the paper because they were excited.” Yet the most frequent question Maureen received from her white friends about the school and its students was “Are you scared?” Her response: “Scared of what? Don’t be scared of black kids. Be scared for them.”

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, while black people are dramatically overrepresented.

It dawned on me as a teenager that many white people must fear, at some deep level, that given half a chance, people of color would do to them what they have long been doing to us.

The profound love for America’s ideals should unite all who call it home, of every color—and yet America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.

What we did is we threw away Imago Dei. We threw it away to justify what we’re doing…. white supremacy was America’s original sin…. At the heart of the sin was a lie,”

white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to hold racially resentful and otherwise racist views than religiously unaffiliated white people, according to a new analysis by Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.

Social isolation has been found to lower life expectancy by a degree comparable to smoking almost a pack of cigarettes a day.