The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born.” p. 276I find i am highlighting passages on every page! The metaphor on p. 31 of “the room where it happens” is powerful: three white men, power brokers in government, business and labor, agreeing to a New Deal social contract that invested in our social infrastructure for three decades... until women and people of color started clambering at the door for a seat at the table, and instead of making room, they ripped up the contract and left the room, leaving workers to fend for themselves and bringing on a new era of widening inequality.Also powerful is a metaphor she runs through the book about communities across the nation building and filling swimming pools as public (social and physical) infrastructure and then literally draining and dismantling them once they became open to non whites. Uses that as a metaphor too to how we used to invest in public college and might have gone the way of universal healthcare but drained the pool in the face of civil rights inclusion and racism against demographic changes. Ruin it for everyone rather than share in benefits for all.Overall, an easy to read an novel account of how this country’s history has been perpetually shaped by racial divisions strategically sown by those in power, weaving together familiar and new facts and studies about state sponsored segregation and private action into a compelling argument that the great lengths that white communities have gone to to keep schools, jobs and other amenities separate is truly costing all of us in terms of learning, performance, progress and prosperity (on top of racism/segregation’s other costs in terms of loss of life, loss of social and cultural richness, and moral repugnance).

This is a truly great, breakthrough book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Author Heather McGhee takes on American racism in a whole new way (for me), crisscrossing the country and relentlessly bringing the reader face to face with the universal damage and waste caused by racial discrimination and injustice. But somehow, she suffuses it all with love."The Sum of Us" is not an easy read for us white Americans, not at all. It can be excruciating. McGhee goes into every corner of our social, political, industrial and economic systems unsparingly, with history- and data-driven facts, and it’s never been made clearer to me just how pervasive racism is, how it was deliberately mapped out and built in—what that word “systemic” really means.But I never, ever felt stigmatized or belittled. I never got that “Now YOU are the despised ‘other’” message I sometimes get from antiracist polemicists.McGhee is profoundly merciful and even startlingly empathetic to us white folks, telling us how the upper echelon has bamboozled us into our untenable position, how much racism hurts us as well, its blowback hitting us too (as in toxic environments we mistakenly think we're safe from 'cause we're across "the tracks"), sometimes in even greater numbers than it does people of color, since there are more of us.Her most vivid, urgent message is how much we can help ourselves by letting go of the lie of the “Zero-Sum Economic Model” that keeps us in constant fear and resentment by telling us that if those "others" gain anything, we will lose something— when in truth, an economic boom for Black Americans would expand both our public and private economies exponentially, and bring more prosperity to us all.It’s the concept of the “solidarity dividend”—that whites could improve our lot (for we are struggling too, all over) by finding common cause with Black Americans, how it has already been proven that this happens when we make the effort and overcome our irrational fear.Black America is a treasure we’ve buried at the behest of not just the hateful, vengeful former Confederacy and its Northern industrial and banking partners, but of the political ruling class, who want us to trust them more than each other. Remember that “trickle-down” mantra, about how we white folks on the floor would catch the best crumbs from the plutocrats’ table? It’s a baldly false promise.Politicians helped raise up a prosperous white middle class with racially exclusionary government programs like the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, proving that government could do great things-- for us. Then, once so many of us were thriving, they convinced us that such government programs were downright evil-- and the beneficiaries lazy freeloaders-- when they benefited nonwhites. So now, there are no such bold, broad programs for anybody, of any race, but whites are brainwashed to console ourselves with the illusion that at least we’re not at the very bottom of the boat.McGhee’s inspired, perfect recurring analogy is government-subsidized public pools, built for us in a midcentury surge, but that we shut down rather than comply with court orders to admit Black swimmers. The result? No one had a pool except rich people. And many of the remnants of that spite are still there in the shells of these public pools, still empty or half-buried like fossils, visions of a resource we decided we’d rather waste than share.McGhee really reads our beads here. I promise you will twist and cringe if you’re white (though I hope Black readers scarf this book up too, so they’re armed with both its merciful vision and its irrefutable arguments). But you’ll see a path to redemption—our own.Throughout this book, and leavening the pain, McGhee’s love for this country shines through, She ultimately endorses the idea of a true American Exceptionalism, reminding us that our work is so difficult-- so scarred with false starts, failures, conflicts and backlash-- because we’re still a new country, relatively, and because no one has ever tried anything like this before.“Who is an American, and what are we to one another?” she writes. “We have to admit that this question is harder for us than in most other countries, because we are the world’s most radical experiment in democracy: a nation of ancestral strangers that has to work to find connection even as we grow more diverse every day.” After the rough ride we've taken in "The Sum of Us," it’s indescribably wonderful to hear our country affirmed-- and by a Black American woman, no less-- as young, radical, unprecedented and still brimming with potential.

A must read for anyone trying to understand the cost of racism and how it affects us all. Well reasoned and well written

Very empirical and historically informed. Loved all the interviews with ground-level people making awesome changes in their communities! Deep insights

Tells the true history. A must read for anyone that cares about this world going forward. An amazing book that you must read.

This book should be read by every American. Then maybe...

An informative look at the interaction between economics and racism.