The Sum of Us (2021)
Heather McGhee (1980)
415 pages
“The elite adds in the urgency of the zero-sum story – they are taking what you have; they are a threat to you – and it’s enough to keep a polity focused on scapegoats while no progress is made on the actual economic issues in most Americans’ lives.” (227, italics added)
The destructive consequences for nearly all Americans of this deceptive vision of our political, economic, and social existence lies at the heart of Heather McGhee’s trenchant and compelling book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.
Through analysis of the long-term consequences over the past century of a variety of public policies resulting from this zero-sum belief, McGhee makes the striking observation that although many have disproportionately affected Black Americans and people of color, in raw numbers, white Americans have actually borne the larger impact. And, as she makes clear, the impacts for poor and middle-class white Americans – convinced of a zero-sum narrative promoted by an elite pursuing their own self-interest – have been a kind of self-inflicted wound, an intentional decision that we don’t want them to have this benefit, so we’ll do without it too. Only by acknowledging the costs that have resulted for all Americans, she argues, can we begin to work toward policies that benefit everyone together.
McGhee argues that this zero-sum mindset was, in fact, already evident in early settlers’ treatment of Indigenous Americans and slaves. She finds its current-day incarnation, however, to have arisen during the Reconstruction period, when poor whites, seeking redress for the severe inequality of the time, began making common cause with the recently freed slaves. Wealthy Southern elites, threatened by the rise of this cross-racial class consciousness, countered by giving poor whites access to benefits that they simultaneously withheld from Black Americans. This successfully shifted the class conflict into a racial one, as, over time, poor and middle-class white Americans came to internalize the idea that making common cause with Black Americans only put their newly acquired benefits at risk.
This same narrative has continued to be resurrected by those who have a vested interest in the social, economic, and political status quo. And it has, McGhee argues, come to condition white Americans to view the preferential treatment in government policy that they receive relative to people of color as a natural right – that they are, in fact, more deserving – a feeling reinforced during the middle of the 20th century, as she documents, through a series of explicitly racist government initiatives aimed at promoting “a large, secure, and white middle class.” (22)
When, however, the Civil Rights era led to successful legal challenges to the preferential treatment for whites over other groups, particularly in government policy, white Americans, convinced of their natural right to advantages and preferential treatment, balked at the expansion of public benefits to Black Americans and other people of color:
Once desegregation lowered barriers, people with power (politicians and executives, but also individual white homeowners, business owners, shop stewards, and community leaders) faced the possibility of sharing those benefits. The advantages white people had accumulated were free and usually invisible, and so conferred an elevated status that seemed natural and almost innate. White society had repeatedly denied people of color economic benefits on the premise that they were inferior; those unequal benefits then reified the hierarchy, making whites actually economically superior. What would it mean to white people, both materially and psychologically, if the supposedly inferior people received the same treatment from the government? The period since integration has tested many whites’ commitment to the public, in ways big and small. (22)
As desegregation expanded, the elite turned yet again to the narrative of white superiority – but now, increasingly unable to explicitly tailor the benefits through racist government policies, used it to convince poor and middle-class Americans that giving up on particular benefits altogether was preferable to sharing them with Black Americans. The elite then parleyed this into a distrust of government that allowed them to cut back on government services, thereby dramatically reduce their own tax rates, and so significantly increase their own wealth.
Demonstrating the success the elite have had in instilling this belief, McGhee cites studies that have shown a correlation among white Americans between high levels of resentment against black people, and opposition to government spending. The result, she argues, is that
When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good. (30)
In a telling example that McGhee returns to metaphorically throughout the book, she describes how progressive policies in the first half of the 20th century, aimed at breaking down barriers to integration for poor white immigrants from Southern Europe, led to the installation in towns and cities across America of public pools – the public being considered whites. When, in the 1950’s, Black Americans successfully petitioned the courts to overturn the practice of segregated public services, communities were ordered to integrate their public pools. And, as McGhee documents, many communities drained their pools or transformed them into private clubs, rather than integrate them. This resulted in “a once-public resource becoming a luxury amenity” (28) – withdrawn to deprive Black Americans, but also no longer accessible to many poor and middle-class whites.
More generally, over the course of some half-dozen chapters, McGhee explores a variety of broader government and business policies arising from zero-sum thinking, and their impact on both the explicitly excluded – Black Americans and other people of color – as well as on white Americans. From college education to health care, homeownership, voting rights, and the environment, she describes key policies and practices, and their consequences. Time and again, as desegregation advanced, programs and that had largely or wholly supported white Americans were reduced or eliminated with the support and complicity of the very white Americans who had benefited from them. And the consistent consequence has been a kind of blowback, as the majority of those affected have come to be white Americans themselves. (In a post-script below, I touch on her arguments regarding various of these policy areas.)
Perhaps the most pernicious psychological underpinning of the zero-sum mentality, one that prevents so many universally beneficial policies from being realized, is the belief that the US is a meritocracy. McGhee argues that what has been created is, in fact,
an unfair “meritocracy” that denies its oppressions and pathologizes the oppressed. … The belief that the Unites States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others. Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system. Recent research … finds that “Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed towards racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.” Wealthy white Americans, they find, have the most unrealistic assessment of how much progress the United States has made in terms of economic equality (and thus how fair the competition has been that they seem to have won). (232)
French economist Thomas Piketty makes a similar argument about the societal dangers of the illusion of meritocracy in his powerful treatise on economic inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
The conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes …. has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. (107, Piketty)
Piketty claims that this belief in meritocracy becomes a self-fulfilling one, leading to support for policy decisions that dramatically reinforce and magnify economic inequality. (My review of Piketty’s book linked to at right.)
While this idea of the US as a pure and unbiased meritocracy infects those who are successful with a feeling that little or nothing in society needs fixed because others who didn’t make it have only themselves to blame, it also leads the ones who don’t make it to become convinced that their failure is due to their own personal shortcomings. And, as long as they believe that they can be successful if they just try hard enough – and that there are those who are worse off than themselves – then they are unwilling to agitate for the social improvements that could lead to a more equitable economy.
McGhee closes her book with an examination of communities and activities in the US that are attempting to change the zero-sum thinking and associated destructive social and economic policies. The goal, she argues, needs to be to get the country, as a whole, to recognize the possibility of a Solidarity Dividend – to discover how by coming together to address issues from social policy to environmental policy, all Americans can benefit, together. The challenge, she notes, is that
“he plutocrats have always known that solidarity is the answer, that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us. That’s why the forces seeking to keep the economic rules exactly as they are aim to cut off any sense of empathy white people who are struggling might develop for also-struggling people of color. … There’s something about the mentality of degrading others in your same position that can make you unable to see a better life for yourself, either. When you believe the dominant story that you’re on your own, responsible for all your own successes and failures, and yet you’re still being paid $7.25 an hour, what does that say about your own worth? The problem with the easy out that the right wing offers – scapegoating immigrants and people of color instead – is that the scapegoats aren’t actually the ones paying you poverty wages. (272-273)
Throughout the book, McGhee mixes statistics and data – copiously referenced, with anecdotal evidence from interviews with a diverse cross-section of people across the country, to persuasively undergird her arguments. The personal stories of those she with whom she spoke add faces and lived experience to the dry data, providing convincing evidence for the broad impact on so many Americans of the racist policies she examines. And she converts the concrete evidence of the where these destructive policies have led us into a powerful vision for a better future.
I began to think of all that a newfound solidarity could yield for our country, so young, so full of promise and power. Starting with healthcare and public college, I began to see the Solidarity Dividends waiting to be unlocked if more people would stop buying the old zero-sum story that elites use to keep us from investing in one another. (63)
Post-script
Below, I provide a bit more detail on several of the policy areas McGhee explores.
Education
We learn that the extensive programs for investment in college education put in place in the mid-20th century dried up in the wake of the civil rights era, with the “period of growth among students of color [since 1980], ensuring college affordability fell out of favor with lawmakers.” (42) Meanwhile, over that same period, “legislatures were tripling their expenditures on incarceration and policing [so that] by 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.” (45)
Health Care
On health care she notes that Truman’s attempt at universal health care failed when he could not get the support of “the segregationist caucus of southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats in his party … [who] saw the civil rights potential in his health care plans … as too great a cost to bear for the benefits of bringing health care to their region.” (51) McGhee notes that “the beneficiaries of Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white,” (51) and that instead the US is left with a system that is more costly, and yet has worse medical outcomes, than our “industrialized peers.”
Homeownership
At the heart of McGhee’s book is an extended dive into the issues surrounding homeownership; as becomes clear, the history of homeownership in the 20th century both illustrates the manner in which the zero-sum mentality guided destructive policy decisions, and lays bare their on-going, destructive consequences.
McGhee recounts how the New Deal era of the early 1930’s saw a tremendous expansion in government programs to provide financial security through homeownership, but also actively excluded Black Americans form these programs by instituting practices such as red-lining. She notes that: “To a very large degree, this was the genesis of the incredible racial wealth gap we have today.” (80) Then, in the late 1990’s extensive government deregulation left financial companies “unregulated and unaccountable to anything but the bottom line.” (83)
The complexity of the housing saga is stunning. Black Americans barred from building wealth in the mid-20th century, were susceptible in the early 2000’s to aggressive and unethical tactics of mortgage lenders. And the unregulated financial industry led to a wild housing bubble that, when it fully collapsed, becoming the Great Recession, destroyed home values for a broad swath of people – including working class white Americans – leading to a dramatic rise in foreclosures over the past decade.
Unions
Exploring the continued decline in union membership since it’s mid-20th century heyday, McGhee notes that, in particular in the American South, business leaders have been able to effectively play on racial and segregationist tendencies to keep their Black and white workers from coming together for the union cause. This has been accomplished by giving the white workers slightly better and higher paying jobs, so that they have something to lose relative to their Black co-workers – again reinforcing the zero-sum mentality.
Voting rights
McGhee’s chapter on the dark reality behind the romanticized American belief in the US founding fathers having created a full-standing democracy, and the continuous attempts to impose voting restrictions on significant segments of the population, serves as a timely primer on the true goals of so many current-day Republican-led state legislatures pursuing laws to restrict voting access.
Environment
On environmental policy, McGhee notes the connection between the willingness of US social and cultural norms to accept and expect that those seen as less deserving, as failing to have elevated themselves into the upper middle class or higher, are deserving of the worse living conditions and environment they live in. And this translates into support by the elite for political actions that, for example, locate landfills or polluting factories into poor or working-class neighborhoods.
The popular narrative is that Republicans tend to be against action on climate change for fiscal reasons, but McGhee describes the results of a study that revealed: “When one controlled for partisanship, racial resentment (“a general orientation toward Blacks characterized by a feeling that Blacks do not try hard enough and receive too many favors”) was highly correlated with climate change denialism.
Asking respondents if they agree that climate change is largely due to human activity, we see … a 57% probability that a white Republican disagrees that climate change is anthropogenic [caused by humans] at the lowest level of racial resentment, increasing to 84% at the highest level of racial resentment.” So, it’s not just a symptom of increased partisan polarization; even within the Republican Party, racism increases the likelihood of opposing climate action. (200)
It becomes again a zero-sum game, where the social norm is that someone must lose for the other side to win. And, she argues, the answer is not that the landfills should be located in well-to-do neighborhoods; it’s that they should at a minimum be evenly distributed, and better yet, the well-to-do should be willing to pay for the expense to not have them located near populated areas, or to support other means of disposing of waste.
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