‘The Sum of Us’ calculates the cost of racism

Author Heather McGhee explains data behind new book

Anthony W. Neal

Anthony W. Neal is a graduate of Brown University and University of Texas School of Law and has written for the Bay State Banner since 2012.

Heather McGhee confesses that she didn’t set out to write a book, but to answer a big question about inequality in the country. She recently shared a few of the lessons she learned researching and writing her 2021 New York Times bestseller, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” with a large audience of educators at Brookline High School.

A public policy wonk who worked two decades at a think tank using research and statistical analysis to identify problems in the American economy, McGhee crafted evidence-based policy solutions in the hope of getting policymakers and decisionmakers in business to make better economic decisions.

“I’m not saying it was totally futile, but way too often we have all the data, all the white papers and all the statistics, all the evidence, all the bleeding heart stories that inequality is growing — that 1% of the population owns more wealth than the entire middle class, while nearly half of working adults can’t make ends meet for things like housing and food,” McGhee said.

Heather McGhee’s 2021 New York Times bestseller “The Sum of Us.” COURTESY PHOTO

Her data show how a rise in inequality in the United States is bad for economic growth.

“If you don’t have enough players on the field scoring points, your team is not going to win. We can’t be competitive if so many of our families are mired with debt or held back by disadvantage or discrimination,” she said. 

McGhee explained how the U.S. economy had gone from one “shaped like a football, with a fat middle class in the middle and narrow ends of high- and low-income households on either side, to being shaped like a bowtie, with a squeezed middle class and bulging ends of high- and low-income households.”

How it happened, she already knew: changes in U.S. tax, trade and labor policies, and declining union membership. But she didn’t know why.

“Why would a country which had figured out a formula we call ‘the American Dream’ be willing to turn its back on that formula?” she asked.

Talking to hundreds of people all over the country, McGhee learned three core insights.

The zero-sum myth

“The first is that our collective economic progress is being held back by a lie — the idea of a zero-sum — that there is a fixed pie of well-being, and if one group gets a bigger slice of the pie, the other group has to get a smaller slice,” she said.

McGhee explained that the zero-sum story is a racialized one in the United States because, according to the research, white Americans are far more likely to view the world through a zero-sum prism and to have been taught that Black progress comes at white people’s expense. 

“It’s not like there’s some correlation between the melanin content in their skin and the tendency to view the world through a zero-sum prism. It’s not natural. Everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told,” she said. 

“One of our big problems in society is that we have been woefully miseducated about our history. We don’t know where we’re standing today because we refuse to look at the steps that we took to get here. There’s been a campaign throughout our history to win the memory war of how we got here,” McGhee said.

So she wanted to include a fair amount of history in looking at where the zero-sum story came from. Ultimately, it was created from some of the worst elements in our founding society: the enslavers and the Colonial plantation elite, who sold a racial bargain to many white, or soon to be considered white, Europeans. Landless and in various levels of indenture, she said, “they were told, ‘Side with your color instead of your class.’ And it’s that racial bargain we’ve seen the self-interested elite employ time and time again throughout our history.”

Racism hurts the public good

McGhee’s thoughts about the zero-sum and what it costs us led her to the second big insight: Racism destroys the public good. It’s exemplified by the story of what happened to many of the country’s nearly 2,000 lavishly funded grand resort-style public swimming pools.

“They were part of a building boom of public goods in the 1930s and ’40s. It was part of the New Deal era of public goods, part of the physical public goods,” she said.

Civil rights laws of the 1960s permitted African Americans to successfully sue to desegregate public accommodations, and desegregation orders were issued all around the country to segregate swimming pools. But instead of complying with the orders, white townspeople decided to drain and close their public pools and to stop investing in public goods, McGhee said. And this happened all over the country.

There were also economic public goods, including Social Security for the elderly, massive federal investment in housing to keep up with the demand of the workforce, and mass homeownership for which down payments weren’t required.

“It was a radical idea that created a foundation for intergenerational wealth, reflecting that deeper public-good ethos of the era,” McGhee said, “an ethos that said the government has a right and a responsibility to ensure a decent standard of living.”

Additionally, the public-good ethos was reflected in the G.I. Bill, which put a generation through college for free. Lastly, labor laws and collective bargaining laws of the New Deal era “helped to swell the ranks of organized labor,” which, “in turn, helped to create the greatest middle class ever seen — the highest standard of living in the world in the 1950s,” McGhee said.

Exclusionary public policies

But virtually all the public benefits she described were — explicitly or implicitly — racially exclusionary. The Social Security system excluded domestic work and agricultural work, which most African Americans performed, and this required them to work in poverty until they died, she said.

Massive government investments in housing were predicated upon the unsubstantiated claim that Black people would be too much of a credit risk, she said. Thus, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government created racial covenants as a condition of subsidy to private developers — clauses in contracts mandating that new affordable homes be given to members of the Caucasian race only.

“This wasn’t just in the Jim Crow South; it was all over the country,” McGhee explained. “We saw the creation by the federal government of the maps, the ‘redlining’ maps as they are now known, which surveyed all the greatest metro areas of the country down to the block level for their racial and ethnic character,” she said. The maps designated those areas with high Black concentrations too hazardous for lending and barred private lenders from loaning there.

McGhee pointed out that we’re all at the bottom of a drained pool when it comes to college education, and she advocated a return to public college that doesn’t leave students mired in debt.

“We need to return to debt-free public college. Destroying public goods has hurt us all — all but the very wealthy and self-interested elite,” she said.

Racism in our politics and in government policymaking has created roadblocks to progress by contributing to our unchecked challenge of climate change, to the financial crisis of which we are still seeing the impact today, to our broken democracy and to our segregated neighborhoods, she said.

A positive look ahead

Nonetheless, McGhee remains optimistic about the future. Oddly enough, the more she saw racism as the obstacle to progress, the more she began to feel optimistic, not pessimistic. She discussed what she called “the solidarity dividend.”

“If we can just pull on that thread of racism, progress on each of these issues would be close at hand. It takes a well-supported public good … through collective action; and in a multiracial society like ours, with its history of racism being a wedge to block us from collective action, it’s going to take multiracial collective action, intentional multiracial coalition-building. Then, we will be able to unlock these dividends: real gains, higher wages, better-funded schools and cleaner air,” she said.

In McGhee’s view, cross-racial solidarity pays dividends.

“We’ve got to tell our fellow Americans the story of how we win in the shadow of the multigenerational lie of white supremacy, the stain of slavery and genocide, and the belief in the hierarchy of human value,” she said.

“We do not have the same background, but ultimately, we all want the same thing for ourselves and our families. And so, I’m going to say your fight is my fight, and no one should fight alone. That’s an old labor motto and I think it’s a great one — the idea that no one should fight alone — because, ultimately, our fates are linked. That’s what solidarity means. And it’s time for us to reinvigorate this idea of cross-racial solidarity, which is in some ways some of the hardest solidarity you can seek to build,” she said.

It must be about community, trust and “truth about our history, about how our neighborhoods came to look the way they do, with the inequalities we see every day — and you have to be willing to deeply listen, empathize, organize and create a vision that unites people across different backgrounds.” 

As one example of cross-racial solidarity, she cited the successful campaign to pass the Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment — also known as the “millionaire tax” — a change to the state constitution, passed by voters in 2022, that will generate about $2 billion yearly supporting transportation and public education. The revenue is to be raised by taxing households with the highest incomes.

At the June 7 event, McGhee tried to instill in the audience “a vision of a world in which we truly invert this tacit pyramid that we have had of who really matters in our society — where we say the people whose main source of income is opening an envelope to see their stock returns are at the top, and are worth more because they have more; and near the bottom we have the people who care — the home health aides, the paraprofessionals, the bus drivers, the nurses, the janitors, the public servants — who somehow end up being on the bottom of this hierarchy of human value when they do so much more for so many more,” she said.

In closing, McGhee advised her listeners to stand together.

“Let’s fight for one another. Let’s invert that pyramid and say everyone deserves a living wage, and nobody deserves to feel the sting of indignity and poverty.” 

The author’s talk at Brookline High was cosponsored by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and hosted by the Brookline Educators Union.