BR1: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

[Dill]

A couple years back Bels started a tradition of reviewing books, which unfortunately died out. I thought it might be good to revive it by reviewing books from “both sides” of the current political divide, which address topics like foreign policy, racial inequality, the filibuster, Trumpism, voter suppression, disinformation, the pandemic, health care, etc. Two books a month, maybe.

This week’s book is, then, Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: One World, 2021). I’ll articulate her thesis here; then in the following post I will cover the second chapter, “Racism Drained the Pool,” which sets up the dominant metaphor/analogy used throughout the book—the closure of public swimming pools throughout the South in response to desegregation. The message of the White power structure back then: “If we have to share public goods with Blacks, then we’d prefer to exclude everyone, including Whites.” McGee’s counter message—racism against Blacks has always hurt Whites too. We can accomplish more together, for whites as well as blacks, than apart.

McGhee’s point of departure is a study on Whites’ perception of racism: “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” (2011), which found that many whites believed that decreased bias against Blacks correlated to increased bias against whites. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/norton%20sommers%20whites%20see%20racism_ca92b4be-cab9-491d-8a87-cf1c6ff244ad.pdf.

Her thesis, then, is that this zero-sum perception of racial gain/loss is “the core idea at the root of our country’s dysfunctions.” If we want to “uproot” that dysfunction, then “we need to understand how it was planted,” and how it hurts whites as well as minorities (6).
Setting the stage for this understanding, she connects two historical trends usually analyzed separately—racism against Blacks and government help for Whites.

The first trend begins with the “Founding zero-sum,” the slavery which set whites over blacks. From a 1705 Virginia law which secured the private possessions of white servants but stripped slaves of theirs to be sold by church parishes for charity to poor whites (10), to the 3/5ths compromise, to the 1790 Naturalization Act, to the Civil War era* to Jim Crow, she establishes that point of dividing poor whites from blacks was not only a material, but also a social/psychological elevation which could be threatened by equality.

The second historical trend is government help for Whites which, in her analysis, begins big time with the Homestead Acts of 1862 and ’66. This trend continued through the New Deal, which helped Whites and some Blacks, and the GI Bill, which stimulated home ownership and education for millions of whites, but relatively few Blacks.

Between the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society, White support for government programs among both Democrats and Republicans was extremely high. However, with the onset of segregation, that changed. The ideal of limited/small government, buttressed by the resources of the “States rights” tradition, are revived, and a shift in values sets in.

Solution? What McGhee calls the “Solidarity Dividend” the notion that “the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us” (272). Throughout the book, she balances losses in wages, education, healthcare and environmental quality with stories of how Blacks, Whites, Asians, Latinxs and new immigrants have worked together, identifying common interests to create union jobs, educational and healthcare opportunities, and local economic renewals—always in the face of zero-sum politics.

I may have a few criticisms of this work, but I’d rather withhold them and listen to others responses. If there are questions, I’ll try to answer them as McGhee might.

*E.g. the New York Herald’s publisher warned” in 1860: “If Lincoln is elected you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes”—i.e., zero-sum: their gain is your loss.

[Dill]

Chapter 2 “Racism Drained the Pool.”

Many Americans have fuzzy ideas about government, says McGhee. Many don’t associate it with interstate highways and public schools, but with taxes and regulation. But it has not always been that way.  An interesting point of departure in this chapter is The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, a book written in 1857 by Hinton Rowen Helper, a racist Southerner, to complain about how slavery was hurting white people.

“Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had aby part or lot in framing the laws under which they live” (qtd in McGhee, 19). By his count, there were 393 public libraries in PA, but only 26 in SC: Maine had 236 while Georgia only had 38.  Little New Hampshire had 2,381 public schools while Mississippi had only 782. That’s because, says McGhee, owners in a slave economy had little need for literate laborers, and their plantations “didn’t depend on local customers, whether individuals or businesses: the market for cotton was a global exchange. . . . Life on a plantation was self-contained; the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system” (19). The strong tradition of investing in local schools and infrastructure never developed in the slave counties of southern states as it had in the North and Mid-West.  Helper wanted the slave owners, at least the big plantation owners, held to account. Rather than discussing how they should be compensated for the loss of their slaves, he demanded that lower-class whites be compensated for their loss/underdevelopment owing to slavery.

Fast forward to the new millennium--Those counties which relied most on slavery in 1860 still had lower per capita incomes than surrounding counties in 2000, according to a study, “Slavery, Inequality, and Economic Development,” by Harvard professor Nicholas Nunn (20). When the Civil War ended, the infrastructure of southern states was severely underdeveloped in comparison with the North. This lack limited the upward mobility of ALL residents, not just Blacks. Today 9 of the 10 poorest states in the Union are still in the South, as are 7 of the 10 with lowest educational attainment.

In the 19th century, the gov. began using its power and resources to help White citizens, beginning with the Homestead act of 1862, which, with its 1866 complement, enabled some 1.6 million citizens to become landowners—though a mere 6,000 Black families were able to take advantage of this offering. McGhee makes similar points about the New Deal—a good deal for whites with limited benefits for blacks. And then the GI Bill which helped millions of whites into college, and thousands of blacks into trade schools. And finally, in the ‘50s, the building of our interstate highway system and the accompanying suburbs—with their racial covenants barring Blacks (22).

As the ‘50s began, whites overwhelmingly supported government policies and interventions in the economy which directly benefitted white citizens. According to the American National Election Studies of 1956, 65% of white people “believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.” This number reached 70% in 1960, then dropped precipitously to 35% in 1964—the year of the Civil Rights Act (28). McGhee connects this drop to de-segregation, via the example of mass closures of public swimming pools in the South in response to forced integration. Here is a partial list of the pools McGhee discusses.

Baltimore, 1956: a lawsuit forced city pools to integrate, but whites simply stopped going and the pools were closed.

Warren, Ohio, privatized public pools. Montgomery, WVA, leased to private businesses.

Oak Park, Alabama, had a public park with a zoo, but sold of the animals and filled the pool with cement.

Fairground Park, St. Louis, had 313,000 visitors in the summer of ’49, but barely 10,000 in ’50, the year they decided to integrate the pool. The first week it opened there was a riot involving 5,000 whites. Closed for six years.

Jackson, Mississippi, had 5 pools, but closed 4 and leased one to a private corporation. Black residents sued all the way to the Supreme Court, where Hugo Black ruled in favor of the racists in Palmer vs Thompson, with a curious inversion of separate but equal—so long as the damage was equal to both races, closing the pools was not discriminatory (27).

New Orleans closed Audubon pool, the largest in the South, for six years.

In DC, between 1953-63 125 new PRIVATE swim clubs were opened.

If public pools had to be shared, public money thus providing equal access, Whites preferred to close and do without them. These closed pools then, and the rationale behind them, become the dominate metaphor/analogy of McGhee’s book. She examines efforts to “close the pool” of public education, as the push for school choice begins in the civil rights era, as does, almost as suddenly, resistance to policies intended to ameliorate inequality in housing, jobs, and educational opportunity. And of course, welfare and other forms of direct government support. Generic opposition to government spending on social programs steadily increases into the ’70-80s, and Reagan famously declared “Government is not the solution: Government is the problem.”  

Finally, in every chapter, McGhee seeks to balance losses with gains, to show how, from Sacremento, CA, to Lewistown, ME, people of all colors have been able to work together to take control of and improve their immediate communities--what she terms a “solidarity dividend”--thereby making her point that “The sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us” (273).