Politics in the U.S. can be seen from a macro viewpoint as a binary choice: Republicans and Democrats. For another vast oversimplification of U.S. politics, one could view the choices as a party of growth mentality versus the party that possesses a scarcity view. As much as Americans like to think they’re making rational choices, it just isn’t true. Sadly, many political decisions form around politician’s exploiting constituent fears. (Both parties stoke the fears of voters; this is not a one sided tactic.) Politicians are excellent at exploiting the zero sum fallacy. Voters, particularly, white voters fear that advances made by people of color must come at white people’s expense. This racial resentment has a home in one party in the U.S., but even the far left, class warriors often fail to see how this holds them back. The country’s original sin of slavery continues to haunt us today, and politicians have used that sin to wedge a divide between the population. In The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee shows how this wedge has been used to great effect, even when that effect harms white people.
Disclaimer: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions in this review are mine and mine alone.
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TL;DR
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee is required reading for anyone building an anti-racism reading list. McGhee, not only points out the problems and their roots, she gives us examples of people working to improve the nation towards its goal of freedom and equality for all. Highly Recommended.
From the Publisher
Review: The Sum of Us
Heather McGhee left her job as president of Demos to travel around the country to learn how the U.S. economy was bent to the already wealthy and powerful. She found that white people in the U.S. viewed the world through a zero-sum mindset whereas black people did not. Her lessons came from visiting diverse areas and studying U.S. history to see what policies, what movements, and what trends happened to get the nation to the state it’s in. To support her research, she quotes a wide variety of sources, and a good solid reading list can be made from her references. One of the most effective images in the book comes from McGhee’s look at the history of community pools, which she then shows a link from there to today’s unwillingness to fund infrastructure projects. McGhee analyses the current student debt problems, and the backlash against funding education through a history of racial terms. For example, she shows how a free college system in California, established in 1868, went to a system where tuition and fees increased eight-fold between 1978 and 2019. McGhee posits that the backlash against public funding in the 1970s was a result of the civil rights gains of the ’60s. The book also covers healthcare, voting, the labor movement, and environmental degradation. McGhee ends the book discussing the solidarity dividend, a phrase that shows how working together pays off. She does this by looking at Lewiston, Maine and the influx of immigrants there. She highlights the economic boost immigrants have brought the town even while politicians seek to prey upon the zero-sum mindset.
The Sum of Us has a broad target audience, and it shows how racism holds all of us back in many ways. I think it’s a brilliant book, and I’ll need to read it again. Her arguments are solid with historical references and researched studies. McGhee’s ability to start with a present problem and trace it back to historical changes that coincide with the expansion of civil rights is compelling. While it’s stacked with references, statistics, and case studies, The Sum of Us reads more like a memoir than a position paper. Though the focus of the book wasn’t McGhee’s life, she did slip in some autobiographical paragraphs. These paragraphs help convey how personal this journey was for McGhee. In the end, I think it was a hopeful one for her. I know it gave me hope that, with a lot of work, we can change things.
While reading this book I couldn’t help but think of Dying of Whiteness. Where Jonathan Metzl’s focus was that racism hurts white people (though he notes not as much as it hurts people of color), McGhee’s thesis is similar but expanded to encompass and document racism’s damage to everyone. In addition, she applies it to more than just the three areas that Metzl covered. The fact that this subject has been covered in such stark terms by both a white and a black author shows the solidarity in the research, and it shows the realization that racism is hurting everyone, though it hurts people of color much, much more. Each time a book like The Sum of Us finds larger and larger audiences, as movements like Black Lives Matter gain more awareness, this nation takes another step towards confronting the original sin of slavery.
Community Pools
The metaphor of the community pool appears throughout this book, and it’s an excellent way to describe how a community benefit died out due to racism. This metaphor works just as strongly when applied to public investment in shared resources. McGhee’s search in the South for pools that were shut down rather than be integrated is heartbreaking. It stands in for the larger trend in America of moving away from funding public infrastructure. McGhee notes that after World War II many government programs and policies existed that helped build the middle class. This aid, however, was exclusively available to white people. As the civil rights movement gained victories, a backlash formed that targeted the same policies whites had used to climb the social ladder. Instead of seeing opportunities for shared growth, white people sought to pull the ladder up behind them by defunding public works. That this movement to stop funding infrastructure happened to occur at the same time as the Republican party started implementing the Southern Strategy is surely not a coincidence. This backlash against public investments hurts us all. But too many people are willing to harm themselves if it means harming others more.
The Sub-Prime Lending Debacle
McGhee devotes a chapter to predatory home lending. In it, she theorizes that if people had paid more attention to predatory lending practices to Black homeowners, the 2008 crisis might have been avoided or, at the least, lessened. In this chapter, she looks at the practice of redlining and changes to housing laws brought about by civil rights activists. Often, the media’s focus after the crisis was the borrower. Were the borrowers too risky? McGhee looks at whether the borrower mattered. Would the loans have failed regardless of credit worthiness? To answer this question, the author looked at the federal fair lending lawsuit against Wells Fargo to see what their practices were. Witness testimony said that the goal was to try to refinance individuals into the more expensive subprime loans. This means that customers, who were considered credit worthy enough to have a loan, were pushed into higher risk categories by the loans sold to them. McGhee claims that refinances were at the root of the problem, not new home purchases. Though there are no numbers to back up this assertion, I found the argument to be interesting and worthy of a deeper look. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the most damning evidence comes in the form of testimony from Wells Fargo employees noting that company policy was to sell higher risk products even when the customer qualified for better loans.
Why does this matter? Because politicians and the media tied the risky loans to the borrowers and to people of color. This protected the large banks from being seen as the culprits. It was minorities and government that caused the problem, not predatory sales practices. One of Ann Coulter’s headlines was: THEY GAVE YOUR MORTGAGE TO A LESS QUALIFIED MINORITY. The zero sum mindset is encapsulated by that headline. You lost out because of a less qualified minority. Their gain was your loss. And it’s specified that your loss was minorities, not a less qualified borrower, a less qualified minority. Now, to be fair, headlines can be written by editors. Well, here’s what Ann had to say in her article:
‘Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named “Caylee.”
In this article, Ann supports none of this with testimony from lawsuits, corporate policy documents, or anything other than the neurons firing in her brain. Notice how she lets the banks off the hook. They were ‘encouraged’ because we all know that banks do whatever anyone encourages them to do. The point being that even though the predatory tactics that were tested on people of color spilled over onto white people, the banks were made out to be the victims. That is unless you read the court transcripts and looked at corporate lending policies. People, like Ann Coulter, further drove a wedge into racial relations with articles above because they pushed the zero sum mindset. Others, like Heather McGhee work hard to undo the damage this divide causes.
Class versus Racism
In the The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee does the best job that I’ve seen of joining the fight against racism to the labor movement. Too often, I read thoughtful essays about the class conflicts in America, and the essay is very often bewildered that the lower classes don’t band together to improve their lot. These essays turn a blind eye to racism because that’s identity politics, not class politics. But the big mystery isn’t all that mysterious if they were to incorporate the wages of whiteness into their class calculations. The “public and psychological wage,” to quote W.E.B. DuBois, paid to white workers separates the working class. Until white workers recognize that these wages are illusory and not beneficial, the labor movement stays divided. McGhee uses a union drive inside the Canton, Mississippi Nissan plant to show how the company sought to exploit the racial divide in order to squelch the organizing drive. This chapter is the best that I’ve read about merging anti-racism activism with the labor movement.
McGhee further supports this with poignant stories from the Fight for $15 movement. Each one is powerful and effective. They show that the labor movement can benefit from anti-racist activism if it rightly includes racism as a common enemy. Now, I’m sure many in the labor movement would say, of course, it’s a common enemy. But McGhee shows that assumption has cost black labor in the past. That for it to be a part of the movement, it must be explicit, not understood. Fight for $15 made inclusion a priority and didn’t let management divide the workers. This chapter should be studied by labor organizers to aid their efforts. I know I’ll need to study to figure out how I can be more inclusive with my coworkers will maintaining an explicit stance that racism is unacceptable.
Conclusion
Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us blew me out of the water. Using historical analysis, McGhee unearthed racist policies and positions that led to today’s problems. But she doesn’t stop with pointing out the problems. Her book shows organizers on the ground working to make a difference. We can take the lessons from here and apply them to our own lives. And maybe we can shift ourselves out of a zero-sum mindset. Maybe we can shift into a community mindset helping others is seen as helping ourselves.
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee is available from One World on February 16th, 2021.