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

by Heather McGhee

the language of fiscal responsibility but the cultural organizing of white grievance

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.

laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change.

The authors concluded that “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”

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

It is progressive economic conventional wisdom that racism accelerates inequality for communities of color, but what if racism is actually driving inequality for everyone?

There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don’t know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit.

you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.

2020, 40 percent of adults were not paid enough to reliably meet their needs for housing, food, healthcare, and utilities. Only about two out of three workers had jobs with basic benefits: health insurance, a retirement account (even one they had to fund themselves), or paid time off for illness or caregiving.

the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

“Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,”

(Notwithstanding the black president, 90 percent of state, local, and federal elected officials were white in the mid-2010s.)

if it’s an idea that we’ve chosen to adopt, that means it’s one that we can choose to abandon.

The death toll of South and North American Indigenous people in the century after first contact was so massive—an estimated 56 million lives, or 90 percent of all the lands’ original inhabitants, through either war or disease—that it changed the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

In very stark and quantifiable terms, the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of African and Indigenous American people turned blood into wealth for the white power structure.

It helped me understand our current moment when I learned that the zero sum was never solely material; it was also personal and social, shaping both colonists’ notions of themselves and the young nation’s ideas of citizenship and self-governance.

Edmund S. Morgan, author of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, wrote “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor.”

The founders designed the new U.S. Congress so that slave states gained bonus political power commensurate with three-fifths of their enslaved population, without, of course, acknowledging the voice or even the humanity of those people. It was to this slavocratic body that the Constitution delegated the question of who could be an American citizen and under what terms.

I have to remind myself that it was true only in the sense that it is what happened—it didn’t have to happen that way.

Yes, the zero-sum story of racial hierarchy was born along with the country, but it is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division. It has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

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. Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all.

When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia.

“societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.”

The decision showed the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit and forecast the politics of public services for decades to come: If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.

where grass grows over former sites, there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on. The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.

White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however—from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent—and has stayed low ever since.

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.

While racial barriers were coming down across society, new class hurdles were going up.

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

Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government.

There is such a strong cultural prohibition on being racist (particularly during the color-blind triumphalism in the wake of Obama’s election) that it’s important to look at what voters feel and perceive, not just what they say. Race isn’t a static state; it’s better understood as an action, and one of its chief functions is to distance white people from people who are “raced” differently.

“People may fail to report the influence of race on their judgments, not because such an influence is absent, but because they are unaware of it—and might not acknowledge it even if they were aware of it.”

When you cut government services, as Reagan strategist Lee Atwater said, “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” What’s lost in that formulation is just how much white people get hurt, too.