Review of The Sum of Us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together

Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together, published this year by One World (a Random House imprint) is a book to be reckoned with. An American Studies and Economics scholar and also a J.D., McGhee headed the progressive think tank Demos and worked there for the better part of two decades. While at Demos, she saw how “the fear of what white people would think held back the ambitions of some of the best policy thinkers in the business. Our politics have operated in the shadow of white disapproval all my life,” she says (279). The book is a well-documented account of how the U.S. ruling elite “divided both to conquer each,” in the words of Frederick Douglass. 

McGhee explains for a mainstream audience why racism is the most important factor explaining “why we can’t have nice things” in this country. Only a small and shrinking minority of Americans have access to “nice things” like good wages, good healthcare, and quality public education. But for “good things,” like clean air and water and good infrastructure, arguably no one has them anymore. She makes a convincing case that racism has played the leading role in justifying the theft of such public goods from everyone. 

The metaphor that runs through the book to explain this concept is the history of public swimming pools and integration in the United States. (This one hit home with me, as a person whose sanity since I was a fairly typical white child has been closely tied to how many laps I have been able to swim at public pools or beaches throughout my life.) In many cities, though, “racism drained the pools.” When Tommy Cummings, a Black teenager, drowned in Patapsco River in 1953 in Baltimore the NAACP sued for equal access to public pools, and they won in 1956. But white children simply stopped going to pools that Black children could access, and white people kept Black children out of certain pools through vigilante violence. In some towns, pools were privatized and only accessible to residents with enough money to join the club. In Montgomery Alabama, the city that was the beating heart of the  intra-U.S. slave trade after the transatlantice trade was abolished, the Oak Park pool (which had also contained a zoo, a community center, and public parks), was cemented over in 1959. Rather than integrating, nobody got nice stuff like a pool in Montgomery and many other cities. 

McGhee’s comments on unionization, poverty, and the fates of workers of all racial backgrounds are extremely useful. She has paid close attention to these questions her whole life, growing up in a Black working class neighborhood in Chicago, and having an uncle who was a unionized auto-worker in Detroit. Observing her uncle and his friends, she saw examples of cross-racial solidarity and the kind of “solidarity dividend” it can provide for people. When “no one fights alone,” she argues, all workers are able to push back against the dehumanizing conditions of the modern workplace, from factories to service jobs, and to benefit from increasing control over the conditions of their work and better wages, as well as justice for oppressed groups. She makes a convincing case about the reason for the successes to date of the Fight for $15 campaign in the fast food industry in recent years. “[I]t became clear to me,” she says, “that [union organizers] had thought through their racial analysis. In their protest signs, speeches, and demands, they weren’t just talking about class issues while tacking on comments about racial pay disparities, they were explicitly saying that overcoming racism was crucial to their class-based goal.” Organizing workers at McDonald’s, Subway, KFC, and other fast food chains, they coordinated their actions with major civil rights anniversaries and connected with the Black Lives Matter movement. But they also explicitly invited white workers into the fight for racial justice, and helped those white workers to understand why they had to be part of a beloved community fighting for equality for all. 

She contrasts their organizing strategy and its gains to the less successful United Auto Workers (UAW) campaign at a Nissan plant in Jackson, Mississippi in 2017. McGhee visited the workers’ center in Jackson, and talked to worker-organizers, the majority of them Black, about the racial disparities at the plant. Around 40% of the workers at the plant, the majority of them Black, are considered non-permanent at the plant and given the most gruelling and dangerous jobs. Women who were eight months pregnant were forced to work on the assembly line and not given light duty. These temporary workers were not allowed to cast ballots in the union election. The victory of the organizing campaign would have therefore rested on convincing white workers who had become permanent and moved up to less dangerous jobs that they would benefit by throwing in their lot with their less well-off coworkers than they would be staying loyal to the company. The organizing drive lost. McGhee concludes that the more senior workers, disproportionately white, voted against the union because they perceived that the union would benefit Black workers, and cost them some of their relative privileges with regard to working conditions. As one of the Black workers, Earl, said, “‘Even the white guys on the line, they felt that they would lose some power if we had a union. The view is, white people are in charge, I’m in charge’” (120). Unlike the Fight for 15 organizing drive, the one at the Nissan plant had not built multiracial solidarity by winning majority support for the idea that racial justice and workers’ rights are intertwined. 

Reading McGhee’s book, I couldn’t help but think how deeply in conversation it may have been with WEB DuBois’ 1935 Black Reconstruction in America. But the section on the Nissan workers is one of the few places where she cites DuBois and his theory of a “psychological wage,” DuBois’ word for some of the material and non-material benefits white workers got from a white supremacist system. It is worth quoting DuBois at length (as McGhee does): 

“It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect on the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown to them. White school houses were the best in the community, and, conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered poor white and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. 

On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negros always being threatened by the subsitution of white labor.” 

In fact, McGhee brings DuBois’ argument up to date with 21st century statistics, showing that wages for all workers have been the worst in the South, where the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow have kept workers most divided, to the detriment of all workers, not just Black workers. 

I’ll return to DuBois, but McGhee’s description of what happened at the Nissan plant in 2017 made me wonder if the same dynamics were at work at the Bessemer union organizing drive at the Amazon plant there, where the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was defeated recently after a massive anti-union campaign by the world’s wealthiest man. In this insightful article by labor organizer Jane McLeavy in The Nation, however, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/bessemer-alabama-amazon-union/

She makes a convincing case that the union organizing drive did not even have the support of the majority of the Black community, and lays most of the blame at the feet of union strategists, who were not from Bessemer (and no small part of the blame at the feet of the national media.) 

“Zero-Sum,” White Privilege, and Don’t Skip Chapter One! 

As an organized socialist and rank-and-file teacher union organizer with United Teachers Los Angeles, I have spent a lot of time engaging with DuBois’ idea that racism hurts the working class in the U.S. as a whole, so I was glad to see McGhee bring it so eloquently up to date with 21st century material, as well as a lot of new perspectives on this idea. But one thing that never sat right with me is the question: so are white people (at least the 75 million who voted for Trump, or the people who vote against a union at their workplace in Bessemer or Jackson) just fooled then?  The Marxist way of explaining this is that they have “false consciousness” put into their heads by the trickery of the ruling class.  But are people really just dumb? 

Sometimes in the past socialists have rather ham-handedly made the argument that there’s no such thing as “white privilege” because of the argument (laid out in McGhee’s book) that racism works against all our interests. Here’s an example: http://socialistworker.org/2002-1/399/399_09_Oppression.php 

The groups that I was involved in did a lot of work to fight racism- protesting police brutality, organizing against mass incarceration, taking on anti-immigrant right-wingers, fighting for legalization for everyone, and a lot more. But I think that some of us were a little too eager in our polemicizing against the idea of “white privilege” (and I say “we” because I did it too).  After all, as a white person, didn’t that kind of let me off the hook, at least psychologically?  Because even if racism hurts all working and lower class people in an ultimate sense, people who say that, therefore there is no white privilege, sound like they don’t understand racism- the everyday levels of violence faced by people of color in the U.S., the criminalization of Blackness, the discrimination at every level of public and private life from housing to homeownership to the workplace to medical treatment. 

That’s why it’s refreshing that McGhee shifts the debate away from this term entirely, and talks about the concept of a “Zero Sum” game. I think she does this because the debate about white privilege is old and tired, and it seems to trigger a lot of white people who feel exploited and oppressed in the late neoliberal capitalist system that we are all living in and through. She cautions that we cannot fall into the trap that says that for people of color to gain in this society, white people have to lose, as though the interests between the two groups are diametrically opposed. She argues instead for organizing around the concept of a “solidarity dividend,” that we will all benefit in terms of healthcare, a Green New Deal, union representation and therefore better wages, swimming pools, etc, if we organize together instead of seeing our interests as opposed.  If we can stand up against racism together, McGhee hopes, we can organize movements and campaigns for these greater goods. 

But there are and were ways that economic and social life in the United States are a zero sum game, starting with the theft of land from Indigenous peoples and its appropriation by white families. McGhee spends Chapter One exploring ways in which things have been zero sum. On page 7 she explains that “European invaders of the New World believed that war was the only sure way to separate Indigenous people from the lands they coveted. Their version of settler colonialism set up a zero-sum competition for land that would shape the American economy to the present day, at an unforgivable cost. The death toll of South and North American Indigenous people in the century after first contact was so massive – an estimated 56 million lives, or 90 percent of all the lands’ original inhabitants, through either war or disease- that it changed the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.” On page 8 she talks about colonial slavery, and she develops a sharp description of the way that white women in particular benefitted from the enslavement of Africans. Further, she says on page 10, “Many of the laws oppressing workers of color did so to the direct benefit of poor whites, creating a zero-sum relationship between these two parts of the colonial underclass. In 1705, a new Virginia law granted title and protection to the little property that any white servant might have accumulated- and simultaneously confiscated the personal property of all the enslaved people of the colony.” And, like DuBois, McGhee talks about the “psychic benefit” of belonging to the master class.  

The evidence that she provides in Chapter One helps to support a thesis that historian David Roediger developed in his 1991 The Wages of Whiteness.  By looking largely at newspapers and the speeches of labor leaders, he showed that white supremacy is not something that was created by the ruling class to trick the working classes as some Marxists had argued, but was deeply co-created by elite and working class whites alike. And this makes sense, if there were actual material, as well as psychological benefits to white people of all classes of a white supremacist system. The whole research premise for Roediger’s book was deeply inspired by DuBois. And if Roediger is correct, than it is much too simple to say that poor white people who vote for Republicans are just dupes. 

My point in citing the page numbers above was to say that Chapter One is by far the shortest in McGhee’s book, and one of my concerns about the book is that some people, like those ham-handed white socialists a little too eager in arguing against the concept of white privilege, could conveniently skim over this short chapter and not deeply engage with the problematic of — what about those benefits?  If there used to be zero-sum material benefits to white settlers from the theft of Indigenous land and labor of enslaved Africans, have they ended? At what point in history did that happen? 

 In a sense, I think the way that McGhee deals with this question is very interesting, and refreshing. She says, “But I have to remind myself, that it was true [zero-sum competition] only in the sense that it is what happened— it didn’t have to happen that way. It would have been better for the sum of us if we’d had a different model. Yes, the zero-sum story of racial hierarchy was born along with the country, but it is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division” (14). Yes, an alternative history would have probably benefited everyone except the ruling elite. Perhaps there could have been a successful slave revolution in the U.S. before or after the one in Haiti or at least a mass abandonment of the plantation. Perhaps communities of marooned slaves could have joined with Indigsnous peoples who dished out to the entire U.S. Army what they dished out to Custer. Perhaps poor white people with the humility to do so could have been invited to join the cooperations between these groups, instead of returning to Europe, or later, instead of joining the ranks of urban workers whose bodies and spirits were ground up in the factories. But I am a bit unsatisfied with her answer, because I want to know if there is, in fact, an alternative history possible within the context of this 250-year long project called the United States of America. 

Is this a Project Worth Saving? A Question of Land 

 DuBois originally wrote his 1935 masterpiece under the title “Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America,” and its central thesis was that the demands of emancipated slaves in the South during Reconstruction, such as free and universal education, free and universal suffrage, and equal rights for all had the potential to save American democracy for everyone. In addition to these public goods, Radical Reconstructionists were also deeply committed to redistribution of property and reparations for slavery, such as the “40 acres and a mule” proposition that land should be returned to the tillers. DuBois had ideas about how we might have gotten to this radical redistribution; in his chapter “Mass Strike,” he argues that the Civil War and the lead-up to it were the largest mass strike in U.S. history. Black labor, slaves, stopped working or slowed to a crawl. They showed that the capitalist system could not continue to function without their work, and they withheld it. In order for slaves to be emancipated, it took the largest war in U.S. history along with a mass strike of Black labor. Nothing less could have overcome this basic threat to property rights- as slave owners saw the issue of emancipation. With the recent Senate victories of Georgia Democrats, many of us could harken back to DuBois and say, “See, Black people are saving the U.S. from itself yet again.” Many think that the Black liberation struggle has a special role to play in delivering the ideals of American democracy and saving the system from itself.  But we have to ask ourselves what we are trying to save. 

This aspiration inspires the optimistic note that McGhee ends on, which is the possibility of liberating all of us, if we do what the Fight For 15 campaign did, which is to put racial justice at the center of class demands, and show white people that their participation in such struggle is welcome. And I agree with her that a multiracial movement for liberation is possible. 

But on the other hand, something must be continuing to fuel white supremacy in the white working classes besides just stupidity or “false consciousness,” and I think that it’s the issue of land and property. 98% of rural land is owned by white people, and this is land that has been stolen from Indigenous people not very many generations ago. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/06/black-farmers-soul-fire-farm-reparations-african-legacy-agriculture/

In addition to land theft from Indigensous peoples, government policies intentionally moved Black sharecroppers farmers off the land and shifted that land into the hands of rural whites, so that Black farmers have lost 90% of the land that they once farmed in 1920. This is the absolute inverse of the kind of redistributive reparations that Reconstruction called for. In fact, one white person, Bill Gates, owns more farmland than some of the largest Indigenous nations in North America that once stewarded the land. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland

Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland. But he is not the only white settler on stolen land.  As the example of Bill Gates shows, rural land is in fact concentrated in the hands of relatively few white people. But still, to solve this problematic, white non-property owners would have to give up their familial and psychological association with white people who do own large tracts of land. McGhee deals in the book with the way that white people’s generational wealth depends on homeownership in a way that Black people have been excluded from by redlining and other policies. 30% of the gap in wealth between white families and Black families is explained by homeownership.  But this doesn’t really address the control of productive land. 

As McGhee describes white psychology, she has a lot of great insights. She describes deep-rooted paranoia that some white people have that if the tables are turned, people of color will retaliate with the same brutality with which they have been treated. This fear that has absolutely no basis in the reality of the spirit with which people of color organize for their equality. The psychological term for this is “projection” that she explains is a useful way for understanding this white paranoia. She also describes the guilt of being white perhaps most eloquently expressed by Wendell Berry in his 1968 The Hidden Wound. And she describes with empathy and real understanding what the white workers at the Nissan plant in Jackson must have been thinking to vote against the union. 

But isn’t it also true that private, white ownership of productive land will have to end if we are to have any measure of equality in this country, and stop ourselves from entirely trashing our natural resources?  Returning land to Indigsnous stewardship, likely our best bet for organizing food production around sustainable and drought-resistant principles and stopping earth-destroying carbon extraction, will require that some people have to give up their property. And maybe some of the fuel for white supremacy comes from the fact that deep down, many of us know this, and know that we live on stolen land. 

In addition to her concept of a “solidarity dividend” whereby a rising tide lifts all boats for working class people who stand together and organize, another antidote for white supremacy that McGee proposes are truth, racial healing, and transformation commissions. (Importantly, she does not use the terminology “Truth and Reconciliation,” because that term has too often been associated with top-down, national processes, such as in South Africa, Guatemala, and El Salvador that have played important roles in establishing a factual record but have left the perpetrators of crimes unaccountable.) The W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded research and several local pilot projects in 2016 to learn from the lessons of truth telling commissions globally and try to implement them locally.  Racial truth telling is in the spirit of the project that the Equal Justice Initiative has launched in Montgomery, Alabama- a memorial to the more than 4,000 victims of lynching in the U.S. South, and a Legacy Museaum that shows the path from slavery to mass incarceration in this country. Truth telling is extraordinarily important if we want to put our feet on the path toward justice. Genocide and slavery have been largely erased in the narrative that the United States tells about itself, or seen as historical anomalies to a country otherwise devoted to the ideals of freedom and equality. But my feeling is that the closer to the truth we get, the more we have to question the premise that the United States aspires toward the goals that it professes to. 

In her Indigensous People’s History of the United States (2014), Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz points out that the American Revolution was never a revolution for equality and liberty.  It was a war of colonial secession; the American colonists sought to free themselves of British restrictions on and regulations of the theft of the Indigenous land. The major impetus for their drive to separate from Britain is that they wanted to take the reins off and run amok freely across the continent, taking land without any restrictions by the British crown.  That was not an accidental bi-product of an otherwise progressive revolution, it was its driving impetus. Real estate, then and now, is the raison d’etre of the United States. 

So perhaps the goal should not be about rescuing “American Democracy” (which, she writes, was never a real democracy), but about letting go of a project called the United States that is genocidal to its core, and the sanctity of private property which is its most important principle. White supremacy is deeply tied up with private (white) ownership of land. Maybe tearing down barbed wire fences and laying in front of bulldozers trying to clear land for pipelines will be one of the first important projects of a multiracial liberation movement. Like McGhee, I believe that a multiracial liberation movement is not only possible but also in (almost) everyone’s best interests. In fact, it is probably our only chance of longer term survival as a species. To get there, though, let’s take truth-telling all the way to its fullest possible extent, and let go of any ideas or structures that will hinder our imaging of a different future.