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.
