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

by Heather McGhee

the Irish, Germans, Poles, Slavs, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans who came to the United States underwent a process of attaining whiteness, an identity created in contrast to the blackness of unfree and degraded labor.

“Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,” the study authors wrote.

the twenty-one states that have kept their minimum wages at the lowest possible level ($7.25) have some of the largest African American populations in the country.

While only a third of white workers earn less than $15 an hour, they are still the majority of under-$15 workers, and thus will be the largest group to benefit from the organizing spearheaded by workers of color.

the U.S. apportions presidential electoral votes to states based on their number of House and Senate members. With the South’s House delegations stacked by the three-fifths bonus, the region had thirteen extra electors in the country’s first elections and Virginia was able to boost its sons to win eight of the first nine presidential contests.

The Electoral College still overrepresents white people, but in an interesting parallel to the free/slave tilt from the original Constitution, not all white people benefit. The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states; white people who live in larger states that look more like America are the ones underrepresented today.

The requirement that we register to vote at all before Election Day did not become common until after the Civil War, when black people had their first chance at the franchise.

Today, the burdensome and confusing registration process is particularly onerous on people who move frequently (young people, people of color, and low-income people) or who may not know about lower-profile, off-cycle election dates before the registration deadlines, which are as much as thirty days before the election in some states. One of the top barriers to voting, the registration requirement kept nearly 20 percent of eligible voters from the polls in 2016.

Over six million Americans are prohibited from voting as a by-product of the racist system of mass incarceration. (The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote even while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.)

Many felony disenfranchisement laws were enacted after the Civil War alongside new Black Codes to criminalize freedmen and women. “Some crimes were specifically defined as felonies with t...

North Dakota, another largely white state, boasts of being the only state without any requirement of voter registration. Until a 2018 voter ID law aimed at Indigenous North Dakotans, you could simply have a poll worker vouch for you at the polling place. Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of black citizens, is dead last of the fifty states in terms of ease of voting.

Decided by a 5–4 majority at the beginning of President Obama’s second term, Shelby County v. Holder lifted the federal government’s protection from citizens in states and counties with long records of discriminatory voting procedures. Immediately across the country, Republican legislatures felt free to restrict voting rights.

Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous black counties. Between the 2013 Shelby decision and the 2018 election, twenty-three states raised new barriers to voting.

states purged almost 16 million voters between 2014 and 2016. Some 7 percent of Americans report that they or a member of their household went to their polling place only to be told that their name was not on the voter roll, even though they knew they were registered.

an influential movement of radical right-wing libertarians opposed to the very idea of democracy. Through five decades of money and organizing, this movement has permeated conservative media and the Republican Party with its fringe, self-serving vision of an undemocratic society. Its goal is a country with concentrated wealth and little citizen power to levy taxes, regulate corporate behavior, fund public goods, or protect civil rights.

Many of today’s right-wing political actors take their libertarian economic philosophy from people like Buchanan and their funding from the Koch brothers network. The success of their policy agenda hinges on an unrepresentative electorate, because their vision can’t garner majority support. Their unpopular ideas include lowering taxes on the wealthy (64 percent of Americans want higher wealth taxes), slashing government spending and eliminating public transit (70 percent want a big infrastructure plan paid for by a wealth tax), and drastically minimizing the government’s role in health insurance (56 percent support a fully public single-payer system).

the combination of the first black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.

the current big-money campaign finance system is a linchpin of structural racism, and the stealth movement to create it has been driven by people who often also work against government action to advance civil rights and equality.

The typical white person lives in a neighborhood that is at least 75 percent white.

In today’s increasingly multiracial society, where white people value diversity but rarely live it,

Congress passed a broad Civil Rights Act in 1875, banning discrimination in public accommodations. During Reconstruction, many southern cities had “salt-and-pepper” integration, in which black and white people lived in the same neighborhoods and even dined in the same restaurants.

No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.)

the federal government supported housing segregation through redlining and other banking practices, the result of which was that the two investments that created the housing market that has been a cornerstone of building wealth in American families, the thirty-year mortgage and the federal government’s willingness to guarantee banks’ issuance of those loans, were made on a whites-only basis and under conditions of segregation.

Professor Maria Krysan and her colleagues from the University of Illinois looked into how people of all races think about diversity in their neighborhood housing choices. In their study, white people could even specify how much diversity they wanted: a neighborhood with about 47 percent white people. Black and Latinx people who participated in Krysan’s study also knew what level of diversity they sought: areas that are 37 percent black and 32 percent Latinx, respectively. I find it fascinating that all three groups say that, ideally, they want to live in communities in which they do not constitute a majority. Yet researchers found that while black and Latinx people actually search for housing in neighborhoods that match their desired levels of diversity, white people search in neighborhoods that are 68 percent white, and they end up living in areas that are 74 percent white. They say they want to be outnumbered by people of color; instead, they end up choosing places where they outnumber others three to one.

Somewhere in between their stated desires and their actions is where the story of white racial hierarchy slips in—sometimes couched in the neutral-sounding terms of “good schools” or “appealing neighborhoods” or other codes for a racialized preference for homogeneity—and turns them back from their vision of an integrated life, with all its attendant benefits.

White people are surely losing something when they end up choosing a path closer to their grandparents’ racially restricted lives than the lives they profess to want for their children.

Because of our deliberately constructed racial wealth gap, most black and brown families can’t afford to rent or buy in the places where white families are, and when white families bring their wealth into black and brown neighborhoods, it more often leads to gentrification and displacement than enduring integration.