The sum of us What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together

Review by Choice Review

Ed. Note: Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study. Accordingly, Choice is highlighting select racial justice titles through the creation of long-form reviews such as the one featured here. Though the scope of these reviews will be broader than those applied to our standard 190-word reviews, many of the guidelines regarding what to focus on will remain the same, with additional consideration for how the text under review sheds light on racist systems and racial inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. Our intent is to feature important works on racial justice that will be of use to undergraduates and faculty researching racism and racial inequalities from new perspectives. This timely study essentially concerns the state of racialized relations in the US and the economic harm it does not only to designated people of color but to most white people too. McGhee is an expert in economics as well as a journalist and political commentator for MSNBC. Her book is profound but not overly unique as she tackles a fundamentally age-old problem: white fear and flight in the face of a growing perceived threat to white people's social status. This remains an important topic to address as there is a persistent, deep-seated anxiety among many white Americans that African Americans and Latinx, in all their complexity, will become a collective majority population by the early 2040s. This theme has been the foundation for the culture wars that have engendered the far-right politics of yesterday and today. Donald Trump's presidency (2017--21) may have brought forth the vituperative viciousness of white enmity, but it has manifested in the body politic since the inception of the republic. What is both refreshing and pertinent about McGhee's analysis is that she points out the fallacy of institutional racism because of its harm to white America. The idea of lost status is merely a tool in the divide-and-rule armor of those hell-bent on creating division among working-class Americans, whose common economic interests clearly outweigh their differences (i.e., race). This perpetually racialized "zero-sum paradigm" with a winner-take-all outcome only benefits the very wealthy in society. The persistent notion that a gain for people of color is a loss for white people has undergirded the American body politic for quite some time, and one could argue that this sentiment has currently reached an all-time high in society. The far right have bamboozled millions of white Americans into believing their health care and economic well-being are under threat from Black and brown people. McGhee investigates the reasons why this notion is so prevalent and insuperable in terms of its essence. She ponders, for example, "why white people would view the presence of more people of color as a threat to their status, as if racial groups were in a direct competition, where progress for one group was an automatic threat to another" (p. xviii). By maintaining this position, white people resist any social policies that could benefit them largely because supporting them would also benefit people of color. For McGhee this "self-defeating trap" is a conundrum that needs to be encountered with urgency and vitality by those who genuinely care for the welfare of all Americans. She acknowledges the power of conservative media as a massive assault on the way forward for a truly multiracial democracy. That is, a democratic society that embraces the real America as bound up in an inescapable human interdependency, even if certain hate groups and right-wing media fail to accept this. McGhee subtly unpacks this hypocrisy, not wanting to alienate potential white readers. Indeed, her study has an auto-ethnographic, participant-observer approach, whereby she embarks on a personal trek across the nation from Maine to Mississippi to California, endeavoring to comprehend what is lost by this continuous "them and us" backwardness that harms everyone. Again, there is nothing profoundly new here; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out the essence of what McGhee ponders decades ago. He was prescient in his outlook and espoused the need for the nation to rise above its pettiness, vindictiveness, and downright unfairness in order to pursue the universal needs for health care for all, fair wages, and an end to poverty. It is the latter that hurts all Americans, but white people tend to hang on doggedly to the age-worn delusion that "I may be poor, but at least I'm white," which stifles the possibility that they may comprehend their chance to create a better America that moves beyond racialized thought and practice. McGhee is a keen observer of this error among white Americans--she deserves credit for bringing the discussion to the forefront in a manner that tries to embrace all sides. However, like any sensible thinker, McGhee notes that among the main victims of white supremacy are the majority of white Americans. Is this finding going to be embraced by those who profit from the status quo? No. Indeed, right-wing politicians in Georgia, Texas, and other states are currently setting up ways to suppress the votes of people of color in future elections, simply because they fear losing their power over those very people. This for McGhee is a myopic assault on the fundamentals of democracy that will only do great harm to all Americans in the long-term. What is needed is not further division and a move backward into the crude age of white supremacy. Instead, Americans are much better off embracing an open society that allows for diversity of opinions and people. Stifling those who would want to vote does not bode well for a nation that prides itself on being "free and democratic," even if it does fall short in its practice of such. Moreover, issues such as student debt, healthcare, workers' rights, imbalanced taxation that favors the wealthy, and money and lobbying in politics, to name a few, are universal matters that impact almost all Americans. Yes, racism can be involved in these areas too, but the fact remains that most people in the US are not wealthy, nor do they benefit from the policies that favor the rich. So why does so much ignorance exist? McGhee's book offers an incisive analysis for anyone interested in comprehending the negative cost of racism, which does little to improve the lives of the vast majority of white Americans. Racism, in other words, fails to offer anything of substance to those who rally behind its evil. McGhee is concerned that this continued path of racialized animosity in society will only lead to a "dog-eat-dog race war" as demographic changes inevitably create a minority white America (p. xxi). Crucially, there needs to be a wake-up call among those who continue to ply dubious racial theories that have no veracity or worth other than to continue to divide those who should unite. In being upfront with her main audience, as it could be contended that McGhee is ultimately endeavoring to appeal to white people, she states: "For white people to free themselves from the debt of responsibility for racism past and present would be liberating. But there isn't an established route for redemption; America hasn't had a truth-and-reconciliation process like other wounded societies" (p. 223). The main thrust of McGhee's treatise is to explain that there is no benefit to white America any longer playing a "zero-sum-game" when it comes to racialized hierarchy. That method did not succeed in the past, and it will not succeed in the future. What is required is a continued effort to come to terms with a racist past and present, while offering a multiracial coalition that is grounded in what is best for all to thrive in the richest nation on earth. There should not be, echoing the civil and human rights leaders of the past, poverty in a vast ocean of material wealth. There is plenty of opportunity for all to prosper if only the best of humanity is accentuated and encouraged in all the people. McGhee covers a lot of ground in her poignant, personal interaction with this sensitive subject matter. Her outlook is arguably a tad too sanguine, yet hopeful for the future if indeed the multiracial coalition that voted a racist out of office can build beyond its seven million voter majority. She is, however, concerned about growing social inequality, which could lead to a catastrophe if not addressed. McGhee believes the US is currently in a crisis with a number of related salient tentacles. Without engaging positively with the immense diversity of the nation and its innate power, this current social malaise will continue to produce negative outcomes for solidarity. Essentially, wealthy conservative white men continue, with the aid of lobbyists, right-wing media, and unscrupulous politicians, to peddle nefarious ways of dividing and conquering the vast majority of Americans. Unfortunately, without a rise in critical consciousness that is cognizant of the ways of political manipulation and misinformation, Americans cannot expect significant change in the social order. One could argue that McGhee is ultimately assessing about 40 percent of the voting population who are die-hard in their misplaced beliefs in whiteness. Indeed, over Trump's four years in office, this majority-white cohort was an immovable obstacle that directly or indirectly ingrained racism more deeply into the body politic. Moreover, they could not see the strength in letting go of such a fundamental attachment to a false ideology that created only enmity rather than social solidarity. Yes, the US is in crisis in the 2020s, and McGhee offers a study that is compassionate without losing sight of the ultimate goal embedded in the American credo: uniting the "We" in "We the People." Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. --Mark Christian, Lehman College, CUNY

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

---

Review by Booklist Review

Why can't a wealthy, developed country like the U.S. achieve adequate healthcare, infrastructure, school funding, and wages above poverty? For her first book, McGhee, Trustee Emeritus on the Demos Board, traveled all over the country and had hundreds of conversations, revealing the answer: "zero sum" logic. This logic claims if one person or group advances, another loses; five dollars in my pocket equals five dollars out of yours. Poisonously pervasive in U.S policy, zero sum compels white citizens to relinquish benefits rather than see Black and Brown Americans gain. In one startling example of many, public pools, once considered community crown jewels, were closed rather than integrate. McGhee offers a mountain range of evidence that zero sum is a falsehood. While Black Americans are disproportionately affected, the majority of benefit receivers are white, meaning the majority of people losing denied benefits, like expanded Medicaid, are white. In actuality, the "solidarity dividend" proves that everyone's lives are improved when anyone advances. McGhee's book is required reading, a true work of courage and intellectual rigor. Readers have likely asked: Why is this so hard for a country that has so much? By unearthing and exposing the faulty why, McGhee illuminates the path to actual change.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Political commentator McGhee argues in her astute and persuasive debut that income inequality and the decline of the middle and working classes in America are a direct result of the country's long history of racial injustice. Many white Americans, McGhee claims, center their political beliefs and actions--often to their own detriment--on the false premise that social and economic gains for one race result in losses for another. She traces the history of race relations in America from slavery through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the dawn of neoliberalism, documenting instances in which racism against Black Americans has diminished everyone's quality of life and forestalled social progress, including the mass closure of public swimming pools in the 1950s and '60s to avoid integration, and the American Medical Association's "racist red-baiting campaign" to undermine President Truman's efforts to pass universal health-care legislation. McGhee holds up a recent economic turnaround in Lewiston, Maine, as an example of how communities can thrive thanks to immigrants and people of color, driving home the point that racial inclusivity benefits all Americans. McGhee marshals a wealth of information into a cohesive narrative that ends on a hopeful note. This sharp, thorough, and engrossing report casts America's racial divide in a new light. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

McGhee posits that U.S. disinvestment in civic infrastructure stems from a zero-sum mindset among white people--that if Black people benefit, white people lose. She travels the country to investigate the impact on public hospitals, parks, and schools.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A head-on consideration of the costs of American racism. Former Demos president McGhee undertook her first project for the organization by studying credit card debt--which, by the early 2000s, was far more likely to affect Black and Latinx families than White ones. When the subprime mortgage bubble burst, that problem became ever more urgent. However, as the author notes, Congress made it worse when it caved to the demands of the credit industry, after which "many of my fellow advocates walked away convinced that big money in politics was the reason we couldn't have nice things." One senator she overheard in the halls of the Capitol railed that the cause was the irresponsibility of minorities themselves, which set her on a diligent investigation of coded racism in the financial sector, which hinges on the zero-sum assumption that any gain for Blacks, say, would mean a concomitant loss for Whites. Not so. To this day, throughout the old Confederacy, the counties most dependent on slavery are the poorest today. "When slavery was abolished," writes McGhee, "Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people." Compassionate but also candid about the tremendous challenges we face, the author clearly shows how Southern racism extends throughout the country today. Those most opposed to unions, public education, and integration are mostly those at the top of the financial ladder; those lower down, of whatever ethnicity, wind up paying richly. In Chicago, McGhee estimates the cost of segregation is $4.4 billion in income and $8 billion in GDP. Restoring public goods is only a start in addressing those costs; the larger task, she writes provocatively, is getting Americans of all ethnicities to believe that "we need each other." An eye-opening, powerful argument for working ever harder for racial equity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Introduction "Why can't we have nice things?" Perhaps there's been a time when you've pondered exactly this question. And by nice things, you weren't thinking about hovercraft or laundry that does itself. You were thinking about more basic as-pects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics. The "we" who can't seem to have nice things is Americans, all Americans. This includes the white Americans who are the largest group of the uninsured and the impoverished as well as the Americans of color who are dispropor-tionately so. "We" is all of us who have watched generations of Amer-ican leadership struggle to solve big problems and reliably improve the quality of life for most people. We know what we need--why can't we have it?" Why can't we have nice things?" was a question that struck me pretty early on in life--growing up as I did in an era of rising in-equality, seeing the wealthy neighborhoods boom while the schools and parks where most of us lived fell into disrepair. When I was twenty-two years old, I applied for an entry-level job at Demos, aresearch and advocacy organization working on public policy solutions to inequality. There, I learned the tools of the policy advocacy trade: statistical research and white papers, congressional testimony, litigation, bill drafting, media outreach, and public campaigns. It was exhilarating. I couldn't believe that I could use a spread-sheet to convince journalists to write about the ideas and lives of the people I cared most about: the ones living from paycheck to paycheck who needed a better deal from businesses and our government. And it actually worked: our research influenced members of Congress to introduce laws that helped real people and led to businesses changing their practices. I went off to get a law degree and came right back to Demos to continue the work. I fell in love with the idea that information, in the right hands, was power. I geeked out on the intricacies of the credit markets and a gracefully designed regulatory regime. My specialty was economic policy, and as indicators of economic inequality became starker year after year, I was convinced that I was fighting the good fight, for my people and everyone who struggled. And that is how I saw it: part of my sense of urgency about the work was that my people, Black people, are disproportionately ill served by bad economic policy decisions. I was going to help make better ones. I came to view the relationship between race and inequality as most people in my field do--linearly: structural racism accelerates inequality for communities of color. When our govern-ment made bad economic decisions for everyone, the results were even worse for people already saddled with discrimination and disadvantage. Take the rise of household debt in working-and middle-class families, the first issue I worked on at Demos. The volume of credit card debt Americans owed had tripled over the course of the 1990s, and among cardholders, Black and Latinx families were more likely to be in debt. In the early 2000s, when I began working on the issue, bankruptcies and foreclosures were rising and homeowners, particularly Black and brown homeowners, were starting to take equity out of their houses through strange new mortgage loans--but the problem of burdensome debt and abusive lending wasn't registering on the radar of enough decision makers. Few politicians in Washington knew what it was like to have bill collectors incessantly ringing their phones about balances that kept growing every month. So, in 2003, Demos launched a project to get their attention: the first-ever comprehensive research report on the topic, with big, shocking numbers about the increase in debt. The report included policy recommenda-tions about how to free families from debt and avoid a financial melt-down. Our data resulted in newspaper editorials, meetings with banks, congressional hearings, and legislation to limit credit card rates and fees. Two years later, Congress took action--and made the problem of rising debt worse. Legislators passed a bankruptcy reform bill sup-ported by the credit industry that made it harder for people ever to escape their debts, no matter how tapped out they were after a job loss, catastrophic medical illness, or divorce. The law wasn't good for consumers, did nothing to address the real problems in family finances, and actually made the problem worse. It was a bad economic policy decision that benefited only lenders and debt collectors, not the public. This was a classic example of the government not doing the simple thing that aligned with what most Americans wanted or what the data showed was necessary to solve a big problem. Instead, it did the opposite. Why? Well, for one thing, our inability to stop bankruptcy reform made me realize the limits of research. The financial industry and other corporations had spent millions on lobbying and campaign donations to gin up a majority in Congress, and many of my fellow advocates walked away convinced that big money in politics was the reason we couldn't have nice things. And I couldn't disagree--of course money had influenced the outcome. But I'll never forget something that happened on the last day I spent at the Capitol presenting Demos's debt research to members of Congress. I was walking down the marble hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building in my new "professional" shoes--I was twenty-five years old--when I stopped to adjust them because they kept slipping off. When I bent down, I was near the door of a Senate office; I honestly can't remember if it belonged to a Republican or a Democrat. I heard the bombastic voice of a man going on about the deadbeats who had babies with multiple women and then declared bankruptcy to dodge the child support, using the government to avoid personal responsibility. There was something in the senator's invective that made my heart rate speed up. I stood and kept moving, my mind racing. Had we advocates entirely missed something about the fight we were in? We had been thinking of it as a class issue (with racial disparities, of course), but was it possible that, at least for some of the folks on the other side of the issue, coded racial stereotypes were a more central player in the drama than we knew? I left Capitol Hill, watching the rush hour crush of mostly white people in suits and sneakers heading home after a day's work in the halls of power, and felt stupid. Of course, it's not as if the credit card companies had made racial stereotypes an explicit part of their communications strategy on bankruptcy reform. But I'd had my political coming-of-age in the mid-1990s, when the drama of the day was "ending welfare as we know it," words that helped Bill Clinton hold on to the (white) political center by scapegoating (Black) single mothers for not taking "personal responsibility" to escape poverty. There was nothing explicit or conclusive about what I'd overheard, but perhaps the bankruptcy reform fight--also, like welfare, about the de-servingness and character of people with little money--was playing out in that same racialized theater, for at least one decision maker and likely more. I felt frustrated with myself for being caught flat-footed (literally, shoe in hand!) and missing a potential strategic vulnerability of the campaign. I'd learned about research and advocacy and lobbying in the predominantly white world of nonprofit think tanks, but how could I have forgotten the first lessons I'd ever learned as a Black person in America, about what they see when they see us? About how quick so many white people could be to assume the worst of us . . . to believe that we wanted to cheat at a game they were winning fair and square? I hadn't even thought to ask the question about this seemingly nonracial financial issue, but had racism helped defeat us? Excerpted from The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---