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

by Heather McGhee

thinking about a more diverse future changed white Americans’ policy preferences about government.

But did white people win? No, for the most part they lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.

But in the following decades, rapid changes to tax, labor, and trade laws meant that an economy that used to look like a football, fatter in the middle, was shaped like a bow tie by my own eighteenth birthday, with a narrow middle class and bulging ends of high- and low-income households. This is the Inequality Era.

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

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.

“Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”

I looked at the two economic issues that have been top priority for Republicans in Washington since 2008, healthcare and taxes. Republican politicians have thoroughly communicated their positions on these issues to their base through campaign ads, speeches, and the conservative media echo chamber, so one would think that their voters would get the message. That message is: cut taxes whenever possible and oppose government involvement in healthcare. But 46 percent of Republicans polled in the summer of 2020 actually supported a total government takeover of health insurance, Medicare for All—even after a Democratic primary where the idea was championed by a Democratic Socialist, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Zero Republican politicians support this policy, and almost all voted in 2017 to repeal the relatively modest government role in healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. On taxes, nearly half of Republican voters support raising taxes on millionaires by 4 percent to pay for schools and roads, but the Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy. 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.

if you make as little as four thousand dollars a year, you’re considered too rich to qualify for Medicaid in Texas, and even that has exclusions, as McBeath explained. “I hear this all the time: even some of my friends will go, ‘Oh, those lazy bums. They need to get off that Medicaid and go to work.’ And I go, ‘Excuse me? Who do you think’s on Medicaid?’ First of all, there’s no men on Medicaid, period, in Texas. No adult men, unless they have a disability and they’re poor. And there’s no non-pregnant women, I don’t care how poor they are.” Failing to insure so many people leaves a lot of unpaid medical bills in the state, and that drains the Texas hospital system. The conservative majority in the Texas legislature has been so opposed to the idea of Medicaid that they shortchange the state’s hospitals in compensating for the few (mostly pregnant women) Medicaid patients they see. Then, by rejecting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, they lose out on federal money

that would insure about 1.5 million Texas citizens. 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. Texas politicians’ government-bashing is both ideological and strategic; they benefit politically by stopping government from having a beneficial presence in people’s lives—as white constituents’ needs mount, the claim that government is busy serving some racialized other instead of them becomes more convincing. McBeath sighed. “The thing that we’ve seen in this state is, our politicians have so demonized the term ‘Medicaid expansion,’ that they’ll never reverse course on that as long as they’re in control. And we can prove to them all day long that [it] may be the way to go. But…we quit barking up that tree, because we’re not gonna get anywhere.” What the mostly white and male conservatives in the Texas legislature are doing to sabotage the state’s healthcare system doesn’t hurt them personally—the state provides their health insurance—but it’s costing

In Arkansas, the first southern state to accept expanded Medicaid, a health clinic in one of the poorest towns in the country has constructed a new building, created jobs, and served more patients, creating measurable improvements in the community’s health. Terrence Aikens, an outreach employee at the clinic, told a reporter in 2020, “What we’ve experienced in the last few years has been nothing short of amazing.”

“People are dying because they would choose…a political victory over an actual victory that serves millions of people.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!

“If we didn’t have these sharp divisions based on race, we could make enormous progress in terms of making sure that people are not hurting as badly as they are, [or] deprived of what clearly are the necessities of life. And I would like to think it was possible if we had a sense of social solidarity.”

If you sell someone a prime-rate, 5 percent annual percentage rate (APR) thirty-year mortgage in the amount of $200,000, they’ll pay you back an additional $186,512—93 percent of what they borrowed—for the privilege of spreading payments out over thirty years. If you can manage to sell that same person a subprime loan with a 9 percent interest rate, you can collect $379,328 on top of the $200,000 repayment, nearly twice over what they borrowed. The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out. The refinance loans stripped homeowners of equity they had built up over years of mortgage payments. That’s why these diseased loans were tested first on the segment of Americans least respected by the financial sector and least protected by lawmakers: black and brown families.

recession. One study identified home foreclosures as the likely cause of a sharp rise in suicides during 2005–2010, while another found that the Great Recession triggered “declining fertility and self-rated health, and increasing morbidity, psychological distress, and suicide” in the United States.