The Sum of Us

“Most Euro-Americans were not, and would likely never be, the wealthy aristocrat who had every social and economic privilege in Europe. Eternal slavery provided a new caste that even the poorest white-skinned person could hover above and define himself against. Just imagine the psychic benefit of being elevated from the bottom of a rigid class hierarchy to a higher place in a new “racial” hierarchy by dint of something as immutable as your skin color.” 

Early in the book, McGhee identifies the deep roots of America’s racial hierarchy, which date back to the country’s founding and the institution of chattel slavery. The existence of slavery was critical to the white people’s sense of liberation and equality, as it offered a stark contrast to define these qualities against. It also created white American identity in a more direct way, as the War of Independence was funded by tobacco grown by enslaved people. In drawing this link, McGhee underscores how deeply racial hierarchies are embedded in US society and offers support for her position that America’s problems cannot be addressed without an honest reckoning with the country’s history.

“Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southerners. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations on wealth, land, and political power. ‘Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live,’ Helper wrote. And without a voice in policy making, common white southerners were unable to win much for themselves.” 

This quote highlights how racism causes people to act against their own interests by drawing on an example from the 19th century. In 1857 an author named Hinton Rowan Helper published a book in which he outlined how slavery causes problems for white people, which included lower investments in public infrastructure and a decreased role in policymaking. Because plantations didn’t need white workers and sold their cotton to the global marketplace, slaveowners had little reason to invest in broader communities or care about the concerns of poor white Southerners. As McGhee notes, this structure has had lingering effects, with the vast majority of the poorest states, and the states with the lowest educational attainment, being former slave states. This quote shows the difficulty of challenging racial hierarchies—and their usefulness to elites—by demonstrating that the problems with hierarchies were identified even 150 years ago, at the apex of slavery, and by noting that these hierarchies still persist today.

“Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A one 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.” 

The draining of public pools is both a metaphor for the impacts of racism and an example of how racism has undermined public benefits to everyone’s detriment. Following court cases on segregated pools and a subsequent push to integrate these facilities, many cities instead chose to shut down the pools entirely, and in some cases fill them in. As McGhee notes, this meant a formerly public resource—where “public” meant white people—was restricted to an even smaller share of the population: those who had money to pay for private swim clubs or backyard pools. This loss also showed the limitations of American democracy, insofar as an institution that was supposed to have a democratizing and levelling influence—public pools were open to everyone, regardless of class or ethnic background—were shown to be vulnerable to the effects of racial hierarchy.

“The new ‘debt-for-diploma system,’ as my former Demos colleague Tamara Draut called it, has impacted Black students most acutely, as generations of racist policies have left our families with less wealth to draw on to pay for college. Eight out of ten Black graduates have to borrow, and at higher levels than any other group.” 

As McGhee notes in Chapter 3, the rising cost of college tuition, which puts postsecondary education out of reach for many Americans or is otherwise priced at a level that could cause lifelong debt, can be traced back to the decline in government funding, as nonrepayable grants for tuition were replaced with federal loans and federal funding to universities declined. This shift happened just as more Black students began to attend college, and that decline—combined with other public policies that limited Black families’ ability to accrue wealth—means that Black graduates are disproportionately affected by student debt. But as McGhee goes on to explain, white students make up the majority of those impacted, and the consequences ripple out to society as a whole, as they cause people to delay buying homes, getting married, and starting families.

“To be clear, the beneficiaries of Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white, as white people at the time made up 90 percent of the U.S. population. Few Americans, Black or white, had private insurance plans, and the recent notion that employers would provide it had yet to solidify into a nationwide expectation. The pool of national health insurance would have been mainly for white Americans, but the threat of sharing it with even a small number of Black and brown Americans helped to doom the entire plan from the start.” 

While national health insurance enjoys broad popularity as a policy, white Americans have consistently voted against measures that would bring it closer to reality. With this quote, McGhee traces this resistance back to the 1950s, when a Florida senator named Claude Pepper attempted to introduce national health insurance and was branded a socialist. A coalition of wealthy interests also used racism—alleging that Pepper was paying Black voters—to turn public opinion against Pepper, causing him to lose the election. Subsequently, President Harry Truman could not convince Southern Democrats to accept universal health care, if doing so meant providing health insurance to Black citizens. By drawing on this historic example, McGhee offers context for America’s contemporary fight over health care and shows how contemporary tactics used to oppose public benefits, such as racist, dog-whistle politics, have a long history.

1.        “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.

Ron Pollack’s diagnosis of the United States—that we suffer because our society was raised deficient in social solidarity—struck me as profoundly true, and, true to my optimistic nature, I supposed, I found the insight galvanizing. I began to think of all that a newfound solidarity could yield for our country, so young, so full of promise and power.” 

This quote demonstrates a narrative device used throughout the book: McGhee frequently draws on the stories and voices of people affected by policies or who are fighting to improve them. In this case, Ron Pollack is a white man who was born in 1944 and benefitted from many of the policies aimed at growing the middle class and ending poverty; this led him to advocate for other such policies, including initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and access to health care. In highlighting Pollack’s response to her question on the impact of racism, McGhee both identifies an issue—that unlike Pollack, many white moderates shy away from accepting the impact of racism—and a possible solution to the problems caused by racism: namely, increasing social solidarity.

“Every part of Amy’s story was one that I knew well from my research and advocacy at Demos, from the jacked-up credit card rate, to the insufficient foreclosure prevention programs (I lobbied staff at the U.S. Treasury Department to improve them), to the job discrimination against people with weak credit (we wrote a bill banning the practice). Not a single part of her story surprised me, but it moved me still.” 

This quote draws on the experience of Amy Rogers, a white woman who had her home foreclosed during the 2008 financial crisis. Black people have been disproportionately affected by foreclosures (themselves a result of predatory loans), but the majority of those impacted are white. This situation arose, in part, because the experience of Black homeowners was ignored by regulators and legislators, but it was known to people like McGhee, who tried to encourage regulators to act against the financial industry. With this quote, McGhee also underscores her authority when writing about the phenomenon, by explaining how she encountered the issue while working at Demos and how she was emotionally affected upon seeing people victimized by predatory lenders, particularly Black homeowners who’d fought against discrimination to purchase their homes in the first place.

“A common misperception then and now is that subprime loans were being sought out by financially irresponsible borrowers with bad credit, so the lenders were simply appropriately pricing the loans higher to offset the risk of default. And in fact, subprime loans were more likely to end up in default. If a Black homeowner finally answered Mario Taylor’s dozenth call and ended it possessing a mortgage that would turn out to be twice as expensive as the prime one he started with, is it any wonder that it would quickly become unaffordable?” 

McGhee shows how racist stereotypes caused regulators to overlook a growing threat—the risks posed by subprime mortgages—and weakened legislators’ resolve to take action against the financial industry following the 2008 financial crisis. Specifically, assumptions that Black borrowers were taking on larger mortgages than they could afford, or were otherwise a bad credit risk, deflected attention away from the real risk: institutions that relentlessly pursued Black homeowners not for mortgages to purchase new homes but for loans to refinance their existing mortgage. This ultimately had consequences for everyone, as the same practices were later applied to white borrowers, ultimately led to the financial crisis, and dictated the nature of the recovery from that crisis.

“Once the financial industry and regulators were able to let racist stereotypes and indifference justify massive profits from demonstrably unfair and risky practices, the brakes were off for good. The rest of the mortgage market, with its far more numerous white borrowers, was there for the taking. Having learned how profitable variable rates and payments could be by testing them out on borrowers of color in the 1990s, lenders created a new version for the broader market. These were adjustable-rate mortgages called ‘option ARMs.’” 

Option ARMs, or adjustable-rate mortgages, are a type of mortgage that allows borrowers to choose the terms of their monthly payment, allowing them to quickly pay down the loan, or only pay the interest. This made them appealing to wealthy white borrowers who took on large mortgages (in 2006, 80% of option ARM borrowers were only making the minimum payment). Ultimately, the payments would increase, and because the mortgage had been negatively amortizing—meaning the debt was growing rather than shrinking as borrowers paid down debt—some mortgages exceeded what the houses they had paid for were worth. This helped fuel the market collapse in the 2008 financial crisis. With this quote McGhee shows how a formula first tested on Black people (predatory mortgages) was adjusted and then deployed on white communities, with devastating results for the whole country.

“Economists have calculated that if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher; for noncollege-educated men, 8 percent higher. If that bump sounds small, compare that to the fact that, since 1979, wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.” 

Despite the broad benefits conferred by membership in a union (which also extend to those who are not unionized), unions declined in popularity in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. McGhee attributes this to growing representation of people of color in unions and the subsequent rejection of unions among white workers, who didn’t want Black colleagues to have access to the benefits that unions would confer. As McGhee explores in this chapter, white identity has historically depended on being higher on the racial hierarchy than Black people. With this quote, however, McGhee demonstrates how that calculation only benefits the richest, who’ve seen their incomes rise even as salaries of average Americans have stagnated. If unions had not been undermined by racial hierarchies, this growing inequality could have been avoided.

“On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution on white labor.”

This quote is a passage from W. E. B. Dubois’s 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, which McGhee cites to white workers’ resistance to unionization at a Nissan plant in Mississippi. Reflecting on this passage, McGhee realizes that the racial hierarchy at the plant—which meant that white workers got a better deal than their Black colleagues, even if it meant everyone got a worse deal than they would if they were in a union—was a strong disincentive to unionization for white people. In other words, the status conferred by whiteness was more important than increased material rewards. The quote also illustrates McGhee’s practice of drawing on a long tradition of writing on race in America and serves as an example of her situating herself on a continuum with other Black writers.

“Purges and other kinds of voter suppression are forms of racial oppression that vitiate the goal of democracy, and white voters like Larry Harmon end up being collateral damage in a trap not set for them. Across the country, 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.”

Even though voting is considered a fundamental right in the United States, franchise has always been restricted in the country, according to McGhee. Initially, this took the form of the right to vote being restricted to white, property-owning males; more recently, voting rights have been attacked by legislation requiring voter ID rules or purging voter rolls—practices often justified with racist dog-whistle appeals to limit voter fraud. McGhee notes that purges, like the one in Ohio that struck thousands of people from voter rolls, mostly affect white voters. But as McGhee notes elsewhere in the chapter, tolerance for tighter voting regulations was first inculcated by limitations on Black Americans’ right to vote. In this way, this passage points to an important theme in the book: the role of myths in perpetuating racism. Here, the myth is the robustness and fairness of American democracy.

“Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures.” 

McGhee highlights a core theme in the book: money’s distorting influence on politics. In this case, it’s the influence of the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers, who have advocated for limitations on democracy and unregulated capitalism. Robust elections and voting rights are an impediment to the vision of the Koch brothers and others like them, because this vision involves policies that are unpopular, such as reduced taxes for the wealthy, the elimination of public transit, and a reduced government role in health care. To achieve their goals, the Koch movement promotes policies and push lawsuits that weaken the electorate, which they accomplish by peddling racist tropes, since transparent attempts to limit democracy would be too unpopular. For example, they use Black and brown people in ads that raise the alarm about voter fraud, which is in reality a nonissue.

“But when I left home in middle school for an almost entirely all-white boarding school in rural Massachusetts, I learned two things about where I came from. The first was that the thickness of my Black community—close-knit, represented in civic institutions, and economically dynamic—was rare. In Boston, Black meant poor in a way I simply had never realized. The everyday sight of Black doctors and managers (particularly native-born) was a rarity that old-money city where Black political power had never gained a hold and where negative stereotypes of Blackness filled the space. Second, I learned that although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them—they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen—segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all.” 

McGhee challenges a myth about segregation: that it separates white and Black communities in ways that disadvantage the latter and benefit the former. As McGhee explores, this segregation only truly exists for white Americans, whereas many people of color have no choice but to learn to navigate white spaces. This means that white people are also disadvantaged by segregation, as they miss out on the problem-solving and conflict-resolution abilities that are acquired by learning to operate in diverse settings. This passage also provides more information about McGhee’s background, revealing that she grew up in a majority Black community in Chicago, and that she had to learn to exist in spaces where she was one of the few, if not the only, Black person. This experience underscores her authority when writing about race, as she’s not subject to the same blind spots experienced by those living in more segregated environments.

“It all seemed to come back to the zero-sum story: climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action. The claims are racially innocent—we won’t risk the economy for this dubious idea—but those using them are willing to take immense risks that might fall on precisely the historically exploited: people of color and the land, air, animals, and water.” 

This quote sets up an explanation for the United States’ lack of action on climate change that goes beyond the usual rationale of greed and corruption. Instead, McGhee writes that racism has a role to play. She also asserts that a theory of social dominance—a worldview that hierarchies are natural and inevitable—primes some citizens to accept that climate change will cause other people to suffer while believing that they themselves will be insulated from the worst effects. Because of the racial hierarchies embedded in US society, this means white people, specifically white males, accept that racialized people will be most affected by climate change and consequently resist any action on climate change, as it would protect racialized people and potentially undermine the white group’s dominate status. As McGhee suggests in this quote, this framing isn’t an alternative to the greed and corruption explanation for climate change inaction; rather, it explains how elites use racial hierarchies to advance their own financial, social, and political interests at the expense of vulnerable people and the planet.

“It made sense. If a set of decision makers believes than an environmental burden can be shouldered by someone else to whom they don’t feel connected or accountable, they won’t think it’s worthwhile to minimize the burden by, for example, forcing industry to put controls on pollution. But that results in a system that creates more pollution than would exist if decision makers cared about everyone equally—and we’re talking about air, water, and soil, where it’s pretty hard to cordon off toxins completely to the so-called sacrifice zone.” 

McGhee explains how the zero-sum paradigm is particularly nonsensical when applied to pollution and environmental degradation. Environmental racism—or the ways environmental harms disproportionately affect communities of color—also affects white people because it divides communities and prevents people from acting collectively to reduce pollution. While white communities might feel insulated from the effects of environmental damage—thanks to a social dominance worldview, through which they see themselves insulated from many other societal ills—research suggests they are more vulnerable to environmental harms, in contexts where people of color bear the brunt of the damage, than they would be if everyone was protected from pollution. In this way, the impact of a single source of pollution—like the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California—is also an analogy for the climate crisis, in which all people, including those most privileged, are likely to feel some of the effects.

“In the absence of moral leadership, there are just too many competing stories. For every call to become an activist for racial justice, there’s a well-rehearsed message that says that activists are pushing too hard. For every chance to speak up against the casual racism white people so often hear from other white folks, there is a countervailing pressure not to rock the boat. If you want to believe that white people are the real victims in race relations, and that the stereotypes of people of color as criminal and lazy are common sense rather than white supremacist tropes, there is a glide path to take you there.” 

McGhee notes that white people seeking ways to atone for America’s racist history, and their role in it, have few role models or established routes to do so. Part of this comes from the myths that perpetuate racism, which is a core theme of the book. In this case, there are the myths that from racial resentment: that white people are victimized by measures like affirmative action, that Black Americans are lazy and have been given too many government handouts, and that white supremacy does not play a foundational role in US society. Against this barrage of myths, McGhee suggests the need for a different kind of narrative, one built out of the lived experience of Americans of different backgrounds.

“Wendell Berry calls this suffering ‘the hidden wound.’ He counsels that when ‘you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.’ Of this wound—this psychic and emotional damage that racism does to white people—he writes, ‘I have born it all my life…always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it.’” 

This quote draws on a passage from The Hidden Wound (1968) by white poet and farmer Wendell Berry, which McGhee was given while visiting with a multiracial coalition of citizens in Kentucky. After reading the book, McGhee reflects on the psychic harm done to white people, who are simultaneously invested in believing in the myth of US meritocracy yet often unable to deny the unfairness inherent in US society. To do so, many white people are invested in their self-image of having earned their advantages; therefore, reckoning with racism means acknowledging that one’s white privilege is unearned, and that having this privilege perpetuates the oppression of people of color. As this quote suggests, addressing this inequity requires vulnerability and a willingness to accept the discomfort that comes from honest conversations about race.

“At the spiritual level, Yavilah believes, racism interrupts the human connection with the divine. When Yavilah was a child learning the prayer book, a phrase in Hebrew was posted high on the wall at the front of the classroom. In English, it translates to ‘Know before whom you stand.’ She recalled, ‘The teacher would say, “Before you start to pray, you have to acknowledge that you’re in the presence of something bigger than yourself.”’ […] How could we act out white supremacy, or any other realm of oppression, if I feel like what I’m standing before is something that is essential, something that is sacred, something that is human?” 

Religion is a lens through which to understand the moral consequences of racism, according to McGhee; it is also a tool to address racial hierarchies. In this quote McGhee references a Black Jewish activist and spiritual leader named Yavilah McCoy—one of the roughly 15% of American Jews who are people of color—who believes that white supremacy prevents Jews from appreciating their history and spiritual tradition. Later in the chapter, McGhee notes that racism prevents all people from moving toward what is promised by all the world’s major religions: a caring, just, and united community. This conclusion underscores McGhee’s central thesis about the harm that racism inflicts on all people in society and ultimately offers a hopeful vision for how moral systems, like religions, can help people move toward a society that is not characterized by racial hierarchy.

“Low-paid farm and food processing work is what draws foreign-born people to these small towns at first, for sure. But once there, immigrants have, as European immigrants did a century ago, started businesses, gained education, and participated in civic life (though the Europeans’ transition to whiteness offered a glide path to the middle class unavailable to immigrants of color today) Even in the face of anti-immigrant policies and the absence of vehicles for mobility such as unions and housing subsidies, today’s immigrants of color are revitalizing rural America.” 

McGhee explains how the zero-sum paradigm has not applied to rural America, where immigrants of color have brought jobs, services, and a revitalized sense of community to towns that were hollowed out by deindustrialization. As a result, the white population in many of these communities have chosen to not feel threatened by this immigration, despite anti-immigrant rhetoric from some politicians. In discussing immigration’s role in reversing some of America’s rural decline—and emphasizing the active ways communities have embraced this transition—McGhee highlights a path forward for communities looking to become stronger by embracing their diversity. By noting that immigrants in these communities have thrived despite not having access to the same support that European immigrants once enjoyed, McGhee also emphasizes the resilience of this new cohort of immigrants and draws attention to the consequences of letting racism divide communities, such as fewer public benefits available to everyone.

“Public pools were part of the ‘melting pot’ projects that fostered cross-cultural cohesion among white ethnic immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, and it’s absurd to think that something as shallow as skin color is an insurmountable obstacle to doing it again. The big and small public works our country needs now should be designed explicitly to foster contact across cultural divides, sending urban youth to rural areas and vice versa, and explicitly building teams that reflect the youth generation’s astonishing diversity.” 

This quote uses the metaphor of the public pool to advance a vision for how the United States can restore public benefits to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As McGhee notes here, broadly available public goods were once possible, at least for a subset of the population. Through collective action, a similar investment in public goods can once again be possible, through increased investment in government, specifically in government programs that build on the potential inherent in America’s diverse population.

“It’s become fashionable to say, ‘trust Black women’ and to root for the leadership of women of color. And maybe it’s because I am a woman of color and wasn’t comfortable with how self-serving this advice seemed, or because it seemed to suggest a biological basis for some traits, I rejected this shorthand. But the truth isn’t that there’s some innate magic within us; it’s that the social and economic and cultural conditions that have been imposed on people at the base of the social hierarchy have given us the clearest view of the whole system.” 

In Chapter 10 McGhee notes that those who are most vulnerable also have the most comprehensive understanding of society’s shortcomings—as they do not have the luxury of ignoring these shortcomings. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black communities had greater exposure to the virus on multiple fronts—and therefore a better sense of the pandemic’s full impact than better-insulated white communities. But this vulnerability is also a source of strength, as McGhee notes: It gives women of color insight into the system, with all its weaknesses, which makes it particularly important to have women of color in leadership positions. In writing this, McGhee also emphasizes her own authority in writing on this topic, as someone with both an understanding of policy and lived experience as a Black woman.

“‘It’s a powerful, liberating frame to realize that the fallacy of racial hierarchy is a belief system that we don’t have to have. We can replace it with another way of looking at each other as human beings. Then, once you get that opening, you invite people to see a new way forward. You ask questions like “What kind of narrative will your great grandchildren learn about this country?” “What is it that will have happened?” Truthfully, we’ve never done that as a country. We’ve been dealing with the old model, patching it over here, sticking bubble gun over there.’ She laughed.” 

McGhee brings her self-professed optimism to the fore by depicting a conversation with her mother, Dr. Gail Christopher, who is quoted in this passage. McGhee and her mother discuss the need for a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation effort, in which people from diverse backgrounds gather to talk about race and racism, and to identify ways to challenge racial hierarchies. As is suggested in this quote, these efforts are meant to be practical but also radical—not a series of patchwork measures but a comprehensive challenge the central narratives at work in US society. McGhee envisions a just society founded on the acknowledgement of historical myths and the creation of new narratives that offer an alternative story of American history.