The Sum of Us: Racism Costs Everyone

Heather McGhee (Amazon); Ashley Wells, Crystal Quintero, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

 

One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of equity.

This is the lesson that generations of us have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone — not just for people of color or whites.

Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy and the mystery of why it so often fails Americans.

From the financial crisis, to rising student debt, to collapsing public works and roads, she found a common root problem: racism.

• “This is the book I’ve been waiting for” — Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be An Antiracist.

It's not just the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for whites, too.

It is the lowest common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy. It constitutes the spiritual-moral crisis that grips us all.

How did it happen? Is there a way out? McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across America from Maine to Mississippi to California.

She tallies what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm — the idea that progress for some must come at the expense of others of us.

How to Be An Antiracist

Along the way, she meets whites who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their chance at better jobs to the toxic mix of U.S. racism and greed.

This is a story of how public goods in this country — from parks to pools to functioning schools — have become private luxuries,

• how unions collapsed,
• wages stagnated, and
• inequality increased,

and how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

What about interracial love and sex?

Yet in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the "Solidarity Dividend." These are the gains that result when we come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided, self-destructive, materially rich yet spiritually starved and very unequal.

McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint an irrefutable story of racism’s costs.

At the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy’s collateral victims: white people themselves.

With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from Black woman Heather McGhee to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game. More