User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
The Sum of Us tackles the concept of racial zero sum - why so many whites believe that bettering the lives of racial minorities comes at their expense. In truth, it’s a concept usually put forth by the upper echelon “to escape accountability for the redistribution of wealth upward”.
McGee takes us back even before the founding of the country to explain how and why this theory came to be. She walks us through history giving us example after example of whites screwing themselves over rather than helping minorities. For example, rather than integrating public pools, they often closed the pools entirely, depriving everyone of the benefit.
I’ve always wondered why so many poor whites, especially in the south, vote against programs that would inevitably help them more than racial minorities. The Affordable Care Act springs to mind. McGee writes about last place aversion as one reason.
But it was an awakening for myself as well. How often had I used the phrase “fiscal conservative, social liberal”?
While she tackles big economic stories, like the decline in union jobs, the closing of rural hospitals because of the lack of health insurance or the subprime mortgage epidemic, the book is easy to read. She lays out her hypotheses in down to earth terms. She intermixes individual’s stories with research to keep the reader’s interest.
Like Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, this is a necessary read. My first five star book of 2021, I’m betting it will land on many “best of” lists for the year. Having said that, I take exception with one of her arguments that racism is behind the white people’s climate change denial. I felt that argument was a stretch and that the truth is much more down to plain old stupidity and an anti-science/elite liberal bent. Still, that's a minor quibble and my advice is to read this book.
My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.
Aside - I finished reading this book just as the Capitol was breached. I can only hope that McGee’s plan for a Solidarity Dividend can take hold with a new, empathetic administration on January 20th
Rating: really liked it
In the January/February 2009 issue of The Atlantic, the writer Hua Hsu wrote an article titled “The End of White America?”. It was displayed on the cover of the magazine beside a large picture of then-President Barack Obama. I don’t remember much about the article but I do remember it made the argument that America was changing into a majority-minority nation in just a few decades. For many White Americans, that is a fearful prospect. Heather McGhee, former president of the think tank Demos, starts off her new book showing how White Americans, regardless of their political ideology, became more conservative on issues when they were told that in a few years they would be in the minority. They tend to oppose policies that would benefit everyone because it might also benefit people of color. She reveals that this is a zero-sum game, Whites think that if Blacks and other minorities are doing better then White people must be losing out. This is simply not the case. In The Sum of Us, McGhee makes the argument that racism hurts everyone, including Whites. She does this by showing racism’s effect on Americans across a variety of policy areas such as education, health care, housing policy, residential segregation, unions, the environment, and more. She shows that racial resentment causes many Whites to have a negative opinion on policies that would benefit them. In each chapter McGhee uses a good mix of history, social science studies, and conversations with real people (whom she describes with vivid detail) to make her points. I personally loved her use of scholarly studies, she has a way to make them relatable to the reader. One example is in her chapter on residential segregation. In it McGhee presents studies that showed that Whites may say they want to live in an integrated neighborhood, but at the end of the day they tend to live in a segregated neighborhood that is at least 75% White. Other studies show that segregated neighborhoods brings more pollution to White people, more so than in integrated neighborhoods. In other words, racism can be a matter of life or death, even for Whites.
She closes her book by covering her five “discoveries” on how we can all prosper together. The zero-sum game that she opens the book up with does not have to be; all of us can address systemic racism together. I think this book will be especially eye-opening to White people who may not be aware of the disparities that they face because of racism. Racism is not just a minority problem it effects everyone negatively. McGhee persuasively closes her book by saying that demographic changes will not unmake America, instead it will fulfill America. Overall, Heather McGhee has written a powerful must-read book. It definitely belongs on the shelf alongside other popular anti-racist works.
Thanks to NetGalley, One World, and Heather McGhee for a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review. This book will be released on February 16, 2021.Review published on Ballasts for the Mind: https://medium.com/ballasts-for-the-m...
Rating: really liked it
"The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it."It's mind-boggling that many poor white people vote for a party that consistently works against their best interests. A party that works for millionaires and billionaires and corporations, lowering their taxes and paying for it by cutting programs that benefit everyone.
What does it take to get someone to support politicians and policies that harm them? They do it by placing the blame on the people with the least amount of power and wealth, rather than where it belongs: on corporations that exploit workers, refusing to pay them a living wage or benefits. If you can convince people that people in even worse situations than them are responsible for keeping them down, then they fail to see who the real culprits are. And they don't fight for their rights.
In
The Sum of Us, Heather McGee investigates the way that corporations and billionaires do this, and how from the inception of the United States, we've bought into a zero-sum paradigm. One group has to be exploited in order for others to benefit. One group has to be poor in order for others to have enough.
Republican politicians and the wealthy play this game, railing against welfare queens and lazy immigrants who are stealing everything from the hard working white people who
really deserve more. Poor white people could be rich if only the government wasn't taking all their tax dollars to support bums. They would have more if others weren't being given the jobs that should go to white people, preferably white males.
It's almost funny how they paint minorities as hand-out grabbing loafers, getting everything for free.... and also as the ones who are stealing jobs from white people. Where is the logic?
With penetrating insight, author Heather McGee shows how racism keeps alive the zero-sum paradigm, and how it harms not just minorities but also white people. And yet the majority of white people vote for the party that works against their best interests. Time and again, white people show they would rather do without than to allow Black and brown people to share what they have. And if minorities suffer more (and they do), then whites can still feel superior.
From filling in public pools when they were ordered to be desegregated, to opposing universal health care because it means Black and brown people will also benefit, many white people vote to keep the wealth and power and goods in the hands of white people -- even though the wealth and power and goods are in the hands of only a few white people.... and the rest go without.
Ms. McGee analyzes the mentality that allows this to happen and it is disgusting. I cannot at all understand how someone without access to health care would support a politician who opposes giving them health care. Or who doesn't support unions which would work for their rights as workers - better pay and benefits - because unions also help minorities. Why would someone not want affordable college education just because it's affordable to everyone and not just white people?
This mentality is asinine!And yet, even as they swear they're not racist, so many white people prefer to do without rather than allow minorities to share the goods. As Ms. McGhee says,
"The majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee for president ever since the party became the party of civil rights under Lyndon Johnson." The majority.
This has allowed our middle class to shrink and the massive wealth of the US put in the hands of fewer and fewer people. It has allowed us to create the most expensive health care system in the world with many people, including whites, unable to afford to see a doctor or get treatment when they're sick. It means a college education is accessible to fewer and fewer young people. It allows corporations to poison our air and drinking water. It keeps workers down and unable to support their families. It means subprime loans and hundreds of thousands losing their homes. It means everyone suffering the disastrous consequences of climate change.
The sub-zero paradigm hurts us all.Ms. McGhee shows that we have to change this all-or-nothing mentality, this belief that one group has to suffer in order for another to succeed. Hardly anyone succeeds when we think (and vote) this way.
Instead, we need to see how we're all in this together and we need to see that minorities are not to blame for white people's problems. If you're poor, it's because of corporate and billionaire greed, not because immigrants have stolen a better paying job from you or because Black people have eaten up all the government's money.
I don't know how we can convince people to abandon the zero-sum paradigm and yet we must if we are ever to move ahead and to make this country a true democracy and one that works for all instead of just the very wealthy.
The Sum of Us is highly readable and informative. In case you're worried, know that it doesn't bash white people, though it does ask us to look at how we support and benefit from racist ideas and policies. It also shows how those same racist ideas and policies harm us.
White people need to stop fearing that Black and brown people will seize power and treat whites as we've treated them for so long. We need to stop thinking it's either "us" or "them". We need to see that we're all in this together and can all benefit from progressive policies and from ending white supremacy.
My only complaint about this book is that the author paints the Democratic party (to which I belong) as all-good. It's not. There are many racist people among Democrats and there are Democrat politicians who create and support policies that harm minorities. It might be less than Republicans, but Democrats are not perfect and have a long way to go. We need to remember that when we are voting in primaries, and choose the candidates who display the least amount of racism and who at least profess to work for the good of all.
This is a book I recommend to those wanting to learn more about historical and institutional racism in the US or anyone wanting to work on undoing their own racist conditioning.
4.5 stars rounded up.
As Ms. McGhee says,
"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." Terrific advice!
Rating: really liked it
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee is a 2021 One World publication.
This is one of those books I think everyone should read. Sadly, though, it will probably only land in front of those who are the most receptive to hearing this message. That said, even if you have already had an idea, even without reading this book, the toll of racism in our society, I urge you to read this book. It is packed with example after example, with proof and research to back it up, how racism affects everyone.
McGhee began this journey after overhearing a conversation which propelled her to research racism in the world of finance. Her findings expose raw truths, but sadly, I wasn’t surprised by her findings.
The study on hospital closures is one I can personally attest to.
It puts everyone at risk- no matter what your income, social status, or race might be. In fact, the number of hospital closures in my state is at a crisis point and is a real issue in my neck of the woods.
People who allow racism to cloud their thinking tend to back policies that work against their own best interest, apparently unable to see how they are shooting themselves in the foot. We are talking about basic, reasonable things like education, safe work environments, health care, good neighborhoods and home ownership.
But the author doesn’t just expose the problems- she also offers solutions and hope. Instead of what helps you, hurts me- it is more like what helps you, also helps me- we all benefit from the right policies.
Though the task ahead looks and feels overwhelming, and the author doesn’t sugarcoat that in the slightest, the reader is nevertheless inspired to continue fighting the good fight.
Overall, though it may sound redundant, this is a book I wish everyone would read with an open, receptive frame of mind. Although the presentation can occasionally be a wee bit dry- the book is easy to read and digest, is well organized and researched, and is important, informative, and makes a whole lot of sense.
4+ stars
*Note: The text takes up only a little over half of the digital book- with the other half dedicated to notes-so just FYI- the book isn’t as long as it appears.
Rating: really liked it
’The white citizens burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.' The above quote references an election in 1872, but is, perhaps, more relevant today.
I began reading this on January 8th, two days after the attack on the Capitol, made for difficulty concentrating. I am pretty sure it took me as long to read this as it did to read Lonesome Dove, despite it being less than 450 pages - the essays comprise 61% of the book, the remainder including Acknowledgements and Notes - vs. 864 pages. This is an important, and impressive collection, and I wish I’d read it earlier, and not on the heels of the inexplicable destruction, mayhem and craziness that took place.
On the other hand, it made me appreciate this collection even more.
Racism exists, despite so many people not admitting that, and we
all pay for it, one way or another. If we are not the target of racists, we all still pay for it in other ways. The history of racism still permeates virtually everything in the United States, although it is not the only country where it happens, but this covers racism in the U.S., with some focus on the racism targeting those who emigrated from other countries more recently.
This isn’t limited to the kind of racism that relates to day-to-day interactions, as much as the way that it is shown in more insidious ways, as well as tackling the history of racism in such areas as credit card debt, shady subprime mortgages targeting primarily Black, Hispanic families, or
others, which varies from place to place, and personal hatred based on personal racist views. Throw in those Whites who believe that if non-White people have financial increase, it is at their own financial loss.
But the loss doesn’t stop at just a monetary loss.
’Racism actually has a dehumanizing aspect not only for those who experience racism, but [also for] those who perpetuate it… Jewish tradition articulates...that everyone is stamped in the image of God.’ - Rabbi Felicia Sol
Racism destroys every path to that promised land, for all of us. As Wendell Berry writes, “If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.”’ (quote from Berry’s
The Hidden Wound)
Racism has a cost, and it is one for which we all pay.
Published: 16 Feb 2021
Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group - Random House / One World
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook read by the author Heather McGhee
….11 hours and 8 minutes
Packed with thoughts-facts-wisdom-and historical details about how racism is the root problem — the core dysfunction — of our democracy, financial crisis, student debts, the housing crisis, anti-government- and distrust…..
…..that racism is driving ‘all’ inequality for ‘all’ people.
American economy has been Heather’s field of study - her specialty since early adulthood.
The stories she includes - real stories - are eye-opening.
She shared how progressives and conservatives might be able to find common ground.
SHE OFFERS REAL HOPE and POSSIBILITY!!!
I finished listening to this highly qualified brilliant woman (with such sincerity and goodness in her voice), that I feel freshly reinvigorated.
“We’re all living at the bottom of the pool drain”.
“We ‘have’ to refill the pool”
Rating: really liked it
"We are so much more when the "we" in 'We the People' is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us".
This thought-provoking work should be considered the companion book to Isabelle Wilkerson's Caste. Both authors do an excellent job of relating racial problems but from different perspectives. There is little redundancy. Heather McGhee is an economist, an economist who believes racism and white supremacy were "created by public policy and public policy should solve it."
What floats your boat also floats mine and the opposite, what hurts me hurts you too is McGhee's premise. How this idea has been sabotaged to divide us and benefit some at the cost of others is examined using many different examples. When a law required municipal pools to be integrated, many towns and cities drained them. Hurting everyone? No, only those who weren't wealthy enough to join swim clubs. Busing to integrate schools led to a huge increase of private schools, schools available only to the wealthier and whiter. Toxic waste sites and landfills are most often located in poor sections of cities. While the air may be more noxious in these locations, the unhealthy air blows over rich and poor neighborhoods. The benefits of the G.I. Bill did not benefit black veterans due to discriminatory housing restrictions. Redlining, marking maps by race to characterize the risks of lending money and providing insurance, was openly racist. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco, exclusion from training programs and many other examples are cited. But McGhee has hope.
She visited the city of Lewiston, Maine where an influx of Somalis and other African refugees revitalized this formerly flourishing industrial town. The influx resulted in the economic woes being reversed. Positive relationships between the newcomers and natives developed. Pride returned as the Lewiston Blue Devils soccer team, comprised of kids from six African nations, won the state championship three years in a row. (The book One Goal by Amy Bass tells this touching story). The author visited other cities that have had similar economic and interpersonal benefits in spite of politicians' harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The "solidarity dividend" McGhee contends, would help us all, but it is being thwarted by elitist groups, political figures, and the right wing media. By perpetuating fear, the "them and us" myth prevails, the "divide and conquer" rather than "united we stand". Just as workers fought to be unionized, as suffragists fought for the right to vote, we, all of us, need to confront the injustices in our country and make it the"perfect union" it can be.
McGhee's book should be required reading. The message can make the reader uncomfortable (as it did me) at times. Often it was alarming. It is not a book to be skimmed nor read quickly. At the very least, it makes you think. At most, it may move you to become less complacent and heighten your awareness of the hidden compliance of injustice in our society. Four stars only because it is not an easy to digest book, but it is truly amazing. I highly recommend it.
"Yet I realize I pursue my professional calling not only to improve the economy, but also out of a belief in the unseen: a promised land of a caring and just society."
Rating: really liked it
This book is major. The book aims to show that racism (and more specifically white supremacy) are why we can’t have nice things as a country. McGhee breaks down the systemic oppression in things like public education, student loans, environment justice and shows that the system is designed on a zero sum basis which hurts Black and brown people but actually hurts all Americans. It’s a pretty powerful book and the writing is top notch.
Rating: really liked it
When I returned to the States in early 2008 after living in New Zealand, I was keenly aware of the impending financial disaster. The collapsing housing market had already hit the U.K., and by cultural, political, and economic extension, Australia and New Zealand, months before the first unsettling frissons were felt in the States. I became fascinated with the crisis and read every article and listened to every interview and syndicated show my liberal media mainstays like the NY Times and NPR offered. I knew all about subprime mortgages and credit default swaps.
Not once in those two+ years of following the wobble and ultimate collapse of the world economy did I hear talk of the true origins of the financial crisis in the United States: the introduction of subprime mortgages in Black and brown neighborhoods in the 1990s. This predatory lending was first tried out on vulnerable homeowners — those with the least access to fair capital and the least protected by consumer regulations — before the process was perfected and turned out to the wider public in the 2000s.
Why the omission of this vital aspect of our recent, shared, painful history? Whether deliberate or not, I think it points to the central premise of Heather McGhee's brilliant and illuminating book: white people — liberal or conservative — won't or can't conceptualize racism as a problem that affects them until they are shown how heavily they bear its costs.
McGhee uses the literal metaphor of the cemented-in swimming pool to show how far we (whites) have gone to cut off our nose to spite our face: swimming pools across the US were drained and even filled in with cement when municipalities were ordered to integrate in the 1950s. White America showed it was more willing to deny access to a city pool to everyone than to allow a Black body in its waters.
This ingrained racist myopia led to the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, when millions of votes were cast in fear and anger by whites who felt left behind in a country increasingly Black and brown. They defaulted to racist scapegoating of the dreaded "other" for their job losses, income inequality, more expensive healthcare, impossible housing costs instead of placing responsibility where it belongs: on corporate America and tax, health, education, and economic policies that benefit an extremely select few: the wealthiest one percent.
McGhee targets issues that we all embrace as core values and shows how racism has corrupted our systems and harmed each and every one of us, including voting rights, Social Security, health care, education, and housing and advocates for a multi-racial approach to defeat the zero sum game that supporters of systemic racism have long promoted.
Although I believe that racism can be defeated on an individual level by integrating communities, I'm not so naive to believe that's ever going to happen on any meaningful level unless we focus on changing systems: laws, policies, practices. You can expend all the energy you want arguing Critical Race Theory, but until we make it a priority to work in solidarity — McGhee's
Solidarity Dividend — to overhaul our legislation, crush corporate and big money lobbying and eliminate barriers to public goods and services, e.g. health care, housing, education, and the ballot, we'll be stuck in an endless loop of virtue signaling on social media.
Black and brown folk have carried the greatest burdens of the pandemic, with their limited access to quality health care, their predominance in "essential" jobs that make them physically vulnerable, and distrust of a public health system that has used and abused them so often in our history, and now public sentiment is once again "othering" those who are hesitant to be experimented on once again. Tragically, the pandemic has only widened the gap between the rich and poor of all colors - the laptop class that is free to lockdown at home and send their children to private schools vs those who service their needs- and I fear it will ratchet up the zero-sum game chatter to an even greater frenzy come the next election cycle. It's on liberal, white America who has benefitted the most in the weird, twisted turns of the pandemic to make certain this doesn't happen, but I don't hold out much hope that our increasingly-divided nation will find its footing before then.
This is an extraordinary book — engaging, fascinating and vital. It's a workbook, really — opening the possibility that with the macro issues that McGhee presents, we have the opportunity to take it micro- what are the zoning policies in our counties and municipalities? Who has access to transportation, to school busing, to the ballot box. We have it in us to question and change these policies. Will we?
A note: I was interviewed for and am briefly featured in
The Sum of Us. It was honor, albeit humbling, to have shared my awakening to my own racism and continued work to unlearn that which does harm, and to learn and relearn positive action in my journey toward solidarity.
Rating: really liked it
I’ve read lots of books on history and social issues, but I generally felt they were about “other people.” This one was about me. This one clarified the realities I’ve lived but never understood. How come the public swimming pool I played in as a child was closed down, buried, and left as an abandoned lot? How, in a free market, could it happen that almost everybody on my side of town (south Corpus Christi) was White, and the Blacks and Latinos were almost all residing in “their” sides of town? How come the schools I went to were almost all white long after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation, and the schools in east Austin had far less money than the schools in west Austin? Why were all of Houston’s garbage dumps located in Black neighborhoods?
McGhee explores the big story of how a range of invisible walls arose, how those walls continued to shape life even after some of them were removed, and how inequality has been more a function of policies than of personal attitudes. Her investigation explains the social boundaries I grew up in. She also shows how those boundaries have limited the opportunities for almost everybody, regardless of whether their skins are white, black, or brown. Finally, McGhee presents story after story of success in achieving a “solidarity dividend.” When people consider what’s best for the whole, undivided community, employment, investment, innovation, health, education, safety, and the environment can all improve. This book is the most effective refutation of the “zero-sum” story, where some have to lose for others to win, that I’ve seen.
Rating: really liked it
Gosh, I learned so much from this book.
Everyone--no matter your race, creed, religion--loses when we allow prejudice to overtake us.
Thank you, McGhee, for explaining how historical policies and legislation have led to us to a place where we don't even understand what is helping and hurting us anymore.
This book was challenging, difficult at times to read, but oh so important.
I would highly encourage you to give it a read or listen.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars out of 5 stars
"The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America. Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all."--The Sum of Us, pg. 15
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021) features a comprehensive look at how we're all harmed by racism. Largely, anti-racism advocate Heather McGhee points out that, throughout history, those with power have used a "zero-sum narrative" to forestall systemic changes, as in one group's gain is a blow to the power of another group.
The cover of
The Sum of Us features a swimming pool. McGhee uses the example of white communities purposely draining and then paving over their public pools rather than integrate in the Jim Crow era as a larger metaphor for how the larger collective of citizens has severely drained their resource pools--economic, social, and political--when enacting/perpetuating racist policies so that an Other won't benefit at their expense.
While reading this, I couldn't help but think about and draw from the ideas presented in Isabel Wilkerson's
Caste (2020) about the corrosive affects on America that come from maintaining a racialized caste system--the shunting of resources to the top of the pyramid, people seen as more deserving of them, because they must be superior to everyone else if they're there. How else could they be at the top, if not for their hard work?
This conveniently ignores the institutionalized barriers that keep many people of color on the periphery of prosperity, and as McGhee argues, keeps many white working-class people as well from achieving a stable life. In other words, racist policies targeted at black and brown people have claimed collateral damage among the people taught since the founding of the country that they were better than people with darker skin.
Welfare reforms shot down because of a racist trope of "bums" and "welfare queens" taking the tax dollars of hardworking citizens while living the good life. Medicaid expansions nixed in some states because of a view that the government is subsidizing undeserving immigrants rather than those more deserving (read: white people). Electoral "reform" making it more difficult for people of color to vote in elections. (Examples of this cited are DMVs disproportionately closed in communities of color in states that require such photo ID as drivers licenses to vote and straight up purging of the voter rolls without adequate notice, forcing people to register to vote again.)
If McGhee uses the pool metaphor throughout
The Sum of Us, I'm going to add one here just because: How are we to right the American ship, to keep it from capsizing? McGhee cites multiracial coalitions--when people of different backgrounds find common struggles to unite around and then fight to change their circumstances, resulting in a "Solidarity Dividend" that truly lifts the boats of all of us. (Okay, I'll stop with the cliched nautical metaphors now.)
Of course, to reap the benefits of such cooperation, we all first need to understand our history as it actually is, as it highlights the problems that need to be addressed to move forward to an America that really practices its democratic ideals in a more egalitarian fashion. That's a tall order on its own--it's been a difficult, ongoing reckoning on my part--because the narratives we were taught are well-ingrained, but they are the blinders we need to take off to see clearly (oops, another metaphor).
The pandemic has provided a useful backdrop to see visibly the contradictions and inequalities of our society and has made it easier to make bigger changes in how we live. Maybe this will be the first big step we take together?
The Sum of Us is important reading for all of us citizens trying to do good, and I am hoping that this invaluable work can be a book club selection for us next year.
Happy reading!
-Cora
Find this book and other titles within our catalog.
See also: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson
**This book will be discussed by our book club in November. Please visit our website to access a copy of Caste through our catalog, Hoopla, or Libby.**
Rating: really liked it
A good attempt to point out some of the ways the seemingly race-neutral logic of austerity has deeply racialized undertones. Some of the arguments around white folks assuming they are hurting black people but really are hurting themselves as well are compelling, especially the "spillover effects" of environmental racism hurting white communities' health.
The text however is hindered by a lack of cohesion in its analysis and some glaring omissions. While austerity is critiqued, the text blames this solely on GOP race-baiting, ignoring the violent austerity of 3rd way Clinton-ism. Besides a light critique of Bloomberg the text seems to fit neatly within a Blue team good, Red team bad manachian thought system which simply does not map onto the reality of how racialized austerity has functioned at a local level, with Democratic mayors being a critical agent of racialzied austerity. The budding school of Afropessmism has been arguing for nearly 15 years much of what the author seems to have just discovered around the psychic wages of whiteness creating a libidinal anti-blackness that impacts public policy, yet none of those authors are cited. Other scholars who have done work on this issue, such as David Theo Goldberg and Randolph Hohle, are not cited, leading the author to adopt positions that a brief reference to their work would help them realize her arguments at times contradict themselves. she notes that integration was an economic boom for the south ignores Derreck Bells' analysis that this shows that Whites only grant concessions when it is in their economic self-interest and Hohle's analysis that the cost for this integration was the neoliberal austerity and policing the author critiques. The author seems to believe that if we only educated folks politics would change and has no analysis of political power. There is not a critique of finance capital besides noting their role in the mortgage crisis and campaign donations, a fact which leads her to adopt a dangerous YIMBY ("yes in my backyard")argument around rezoning being key to racial equity when it is well known some of the biggest advocates for residential rezoning are large real estate corporations looking to build more dense condos and apartment buildings on residential areas, a move know to create gentrification. The author's championing of multiracial coalitions ignores the logical argument that, if all redistributive policies trigger anti-black resentment, that a logical alternative strategy is to build black political power to protect the community from this pattern of backlash. Black power and Black organizing are not mentioned in the book except to tacitly be critiqued as "triggering the 0 sum response of white people", making the text about anti black resentment a subtle critique of independent black political organizing when it so easily could have been a full throated defense of building independent Black political power. After all, Robbert Bullard's analysis of environmental racism showed it was the lack the political power to fight the power plants and incinerators which led them to be placed in Black communities. This text shows all the reasons why white people won't be convinced by the argument "this is gonna hurt you", but then says "educating them is your only hope" and tried to double down on a tactic the entire book says has not worked. To her credit the author owns up to her emotional commitment to having hope in a multiracial America, basically saying the thought of this not being true is too painful to bear. Painful or not, I believe we must look unflinchingly at the reality of this situation and respond accordingly by building the power we need so that our lives are not subject to whether or not white people realize their humanity is tied up in mine, a realization this text flirts with but ultimately can not come to embrace.
Just because that realization is painful doesn't make it untrue.
Rating: really liked it
An excellent, well-researched and readable book that approaches racism from an economic and political perspective. It is a hopeful book - McGhee discusses how the US could be more than just the sum of its various parts. As GR friend Barbara says, this would be an excellent companion book to Wilkerson's
Caste.
"We must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin and class; we must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy."
Rating: really liked it
A fantastic book.
I have seldom read an author who can put up and examine an utterly upsetting, hurtful and harmful issue in a calm, professional way and then bring realistic solutions the way Heather Mc Ghee does. There are things in this book that left me speechless to learn as a non-American and it's really worrying.
I listened to the audiobook but I'm a fan now and will buy the physical book also, as I think it should be in every home library.
Thank you so much @Whitney for the recommendation, please keep recommending!
