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

by Heather McGhee

the Tea Party movement used the language of fiscal responsibility but the cultural organizing of white grievance to force a debt ceiling showdown, mandate blunt cuts to public programs during a fragile recovery, and stall the legislative function of the federal government for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

This zero-sum paradigm was the default framework for conservative media—“makers and takers,” “taxpayers and freeloaders,” “handouts,” and “special favors”; “they’re coming after your job, your safety, your way of life.” Without the hostile intent, of course, aren’t we all talking about race relations through a prism of competition, every advantage for one group mirrored by a disadvantage for another?

Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free—when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have.

The characters of the white taxpayer and the freeloading person of color are recurring tropes for people like Norton and Sommers’s survey respondents. But the majority of people receiving government assistance, like the majority of people in poverty, are white; and people of color pay taxes, too. The zero-sum idea that white people are now suffering due to gains among people of color has taken on the features of myth: it lies, but it says so much.

The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

Public Works’ research revealed that people have fuzzy ideas about government, not understanding, for example, that highways, libraries, and public schools are, in fact, government. The project encouraged advocates to talk about government as “public structures” that build economic opportunity, with a goal of activating a mindset of “citizens” as opposed to “consumers” of public services.

Nunn’s research showed that although of course slave counties had higher inequality during the era of slavery (particularly of land), it wasn’t the degree of inequality that was correlated with poverty today; it was the fact of slavery itself, whether on large plantations or small farms. When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too.

Fewer than six thousand black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act and its 1866 southern counterpart. 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, in domestic and agricultural work.

Then the GI Bill of 1944 paid the college tuition of hundreds of thousands of veterans, catapulting a generation of men into professional careers—but few black veterans benefited, as local administrators funneled most black servicemen to segregated vocational schools. The mortgage benefit in the GI Bill pushed the postwar white homeownership rate to three out of four white families—but with federally sanctioned housing discrimination, the black and Latinx rates stayed at around two out of five, despite the attempts of veterans of color to participate.

Social Security gave income to millions of elderly Americans—but again, exclusions of job categories left most black workers out, and southern congressmembers opposed more generous cash aid for the elderly poor. You could even consider the New Deal labor laws that encouraged collective bargaining to be a no-cost government subsidy to create a white middle class, as many unions kept their doors closed to nonwhites until the 1960s.

Between the era of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, these and more government policies worked to ensure a large, secure, and white middle class.

The advantages white people had accumulated were free and usually invisible, and so conferred an elevated status that seemed natural and almost innate. White society had repeatedly denied people of color economic benefits on the premise that they were inferior; those unequal benefits then reified the hierarchy, making whites actually economically superior. What would it mean to white people, both materially and psychologically, if the supposedly inferior people received the same treatment from the government?

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. According to the authoritative American National Elections Studies (ANES) survey, 65 percent of white people in 1956 believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country. White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however—from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent—and has stayed low ever since. (The overwhelming majority of black Americans have remained enthusiastic about this idea over fifty years of survey data.)

as of the latest ANES data in 2016, there was a sixty-point difference in support for increased government spending based on whether you were a white person with high versus low racial resentment.

Reagan, a Californian, was determined to take the Southern Strategy (launched by President Nixon) national. In southern politics, federally mandated school integration had revived for a new generation the Civil War idea of government as a boogeyman, threatening to upend the natural racial order at the cost of white status and property. The Reagan campaign’s insight was that northern white people could be sold the same explicitly antigovernment, implicitly pro-white story, with the protagonists as white taxpayers seeking defense from a government that wanted to give their money to undeserving and lazy people of color in the ghettos.

“Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval:

The welfare trope also did the powerful blame-shifting work of projection: like telling white aristocrats that it was their slaves who were the lazy ones, 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.

even though black and brown people are disproportionately poor, white Americans constitute the majority of low-income people who escape poverty because of government safety net programs.

the idea that black people are the “takers” in society while white people are the hardworking taxpayers—the “makers”—has become a core part of the zero-sum ...

There’s something so morally sanitized about the idea of fiscal restraint, even when the upshot is that tens of millions of people, including one out of six children, struggle needlessly with poverty and hunger.

In railing against welfare and the war on poverty, conservatives like 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.

And it worked: 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. And he did it with the overwhelming support of the white working and middle classes.

Despite the dramatic change in white Americans’ support for government antipoverty efforts, the typical white voter’s economic preferences are still more progressive than those of the Republican politicians for whom they vote.

there are the increasing numbers of white Americans who are aware of the influence of racism and yet do not acknowledge it—further still, they claim that it’s the liberals and the people of color who are the racists. This is the narrative they receive from millionaire right-wing media personalities, and hysteria over Obama’s secret plan for racial vengeance was one of their mainstay narratives during his presidency.

Racism, then, works against non-wealthy white Americans in two ways. First, it lowers their support for government actions that could help them economically, out of a zero-sum fear that it could help the racialized “undeserving” as well.

“Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.” In the social democracies of Northern Europe, families are far more economically secure; middle-class workers there don’t have American families’ worries about their healthcare, retirement, childcare, or college for their kids. But if government tried to secure these essential public benefits for families in the United States, in the political culture of the last two generations, it would signal a threat to the majority of white voters. Government help is for people of color, the story goes.

Students of color comprised just one in six public college students in 1980, but they now make up over four in ten. Over this period of growth among students of color, ensuring college affordability fell out of favor with lawmakers.

Because wealth is largely shaped by how much money your parents and grandparents had, black young adults’ efforts at higher education and higher earnings aren’t putting much of a dent in the racial wealth gap. This generation was born too late for the free ride, and student loan repayment is making it even harder for black graduates’ savings and assets to catch up. In fact, white high school dropouts have higher average household wealth than black people who’ve graduated from college.

student debt is most acute among black families, but it has now reached 63 percent of white public college graduates as well

As part of the antigovernment fervor in the 1980s and ’90s, spending on the welfare of youth fell out of favor, but meanwhile, legislatures were tripling their expenditures on incarceration and policing. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.

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.

racial prejudice is one factor driving opposition to Obama and his policies.”

in 2010, Rush Limbaugh’s line on the ACA was “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it.”

the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, it expanded qualification for Medicaid to 138 percent of the poverty level for all adults (about $30,000 for a family of three in 2020) and equalized eligibility rules across all states. But in 2012, a Supreme Court majority invoked states’ rights to strike down the Medicaid expansion and make it optional. Within the year, the lines were drawn in an all-too-familiar way: almost all the states of the former Confederacy refused to expand Medicaid, while most other states did.

That’s a late-stage benefit of a forty-year campaign to defund and degrade public benefits; 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.

Republicans were pretty good at what they’re always good at, right? Pitting communities against each other and using a lot of dog whistle politics around, like, ‘Medicaid equates to black freeloading people,’ ”

By 2000, half of the refinance loans issued in majority-black neighborhoods were subprime. Between 2004 and 2008, black and Latinx homeowners with good credit scores were three times as likely as whites with similar credit scores to have higher-rate mortgages.

In 2017, the country had four hundred thousand fewer homeowners than in 2006, although the population had grown by some eight million households since then.

Families headed by Millennials, who entered adulthood during the Great Recession, still have 34 percent less wealth than previous generations.

In 2016, the most recent available authoritative data, the typical white family in America had about $171,000 in wealth, mostly from homeownership—that’s about ten times that of black families ($17,600) and eight times that of Latinx families ($20,700). That kind of wealth is self-perpetuating.

land contracts did not allow buyers to build equity; indeed, they owned nothing until the final payment was made. And because the loans were unregulated, peddlers of these early forms of subprime mortgages could charge whatever exorbitant rates they chose.

“The commission and referral system at Wells Fargo was set up in a way that made it more profitable for a loan officer to refer a prime customer for a subprime loan than make the prime loan directly to the customer.” Underwriters also made more money from a subprime than a prime loan.

There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes.

The share of workers in a union has directly tracked the share of the country’s income that goes to the middle class, and as union density has declined, the portion going to the richest Americans has increased in step.

The era of declining support was one in which one of the country’s most visible unions, the United Auto Workers, was staking its reputation on backing civil rights, supporting the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963 and using its political clout to press the Democratic Party for civil rights.

At Nissan in Canton, the antiunion forces won in part by turning the union into a sign of weakness, a refuge for the “lazy.” Messages linked the union with degrading stereotypes about black people, so that white workers wouldn’t want any part of it. Even black workers might think they were too good to “need” a union.

The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of black people at exactly zero.

southern comfort with people working for nothing hasn’t changed much in the past two hundred years. The five U.S. states that have no minimum-wage laws at all are in the South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Georgia has a minimum wage, but it is even lower than the federal one.