NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of today’s most insightful and
influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and
the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism
has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color.
“This is the
book I’ve been waiting for.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times
bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
Heather McGhee’s
specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so
often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising
student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common
root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities
for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is
the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core
dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and
moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there
a way out?
McGhee embarks on a
deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi
to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum
paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the
expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide
in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at
better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is
the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools
to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions
collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this
country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted
universal healthcare.
But in unlikely
places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the
Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across
race, to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own.
The Sum of Us
is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and
self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly
unequal. McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint
an irrefutable story of racism’s costs, but 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 a Black woman 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.