The Sum of Us (adapted for Young Readers)

Heather McGhee, a public policy advocate who worked at the research and advocacy think tank Demos, poses a central question: Why can't Americans have "nice things," meaning foundational public goods like quality schools, affordable health care, debt-free college, and living-wage jobs? McGhee argues that the hidden costs of racism harm all Americans, including white people, and that the country's dysfunction stems from an outdated belief in a racial hierarchy of human value. She sets out on a cross-country journey to investigate this thesis and introduces the concept of the "Solidarity Dividend": gains in higher wages, cleaner air, and other public goods made possible when people come together across racial lines.

McGhee opens with her own background growing up in what economists call the "fragile middle class" on Chicago's South Side. Her parents were the first generation of Black Americans to live full adult lives with explicitly racist barriers partially lowered, yet the economic rules shifted just as they arrived: executive-to-worker pay ratios ballooned, the richest one percent came to own as much wealth as the entire middle class, and 40 percent of adults could not meet basic needs before the COVID-19 pandemic. She visits Harvard Business School professors Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers, whose research found that white survey respondents rated antiwhite bias as more prevalent than anti-Black bias, viewing racial progress as a zero-sum game. Black respondents did not share this view.

McGhee traces zero-sum thinking to America's colonial origins. European invaders created racial categories to justify exploitation and enslavement, generating enormous wealth through stolen land and unpaid labor. After cross-racial uprisings like Bacon's Rebellion in the late 1600s, colonial governments divided the servant class by skin color, passing laws that gave even the poorest white person someone to rank above. McGhee argues that wealthy elites have revived this story in every generation, stoking racial fears to distract from their own accumulation of wealth.

She uses the literal draining of public swimming pools as her central metaphor. In the 1920s through 1940s, American cities built grand public pools as symbols of community life. When courts ordered desegregation, cities including Montgomery, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, chose to drain their pools rather than allow integrated swimming. The 1971 Supreme Court decision in Palmer v. Thompson upheld this approach, ruling that denying a public resource to everyone constituted equal harm. McGhee argues that the same impulse now drains pools of shared resources rather than literal ones. She cites economist Nathan Nunn's research showing that counties that relied more heavily on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000, limiting economic mobility for white families as well.

She applies this framework to three policy areas. State governments once covered 60 percent of public college costs, but as students of color grew from one in six to over four in ten, legislatures slashed funding, and student debt reached $1.5 trillion by 2020. The mass incarceration system born from the 1980s drug war diverted state spending from education to prisons, with 18 states spending more on jails than on colleges by 2016. The failure to achieve universal health care traces to racial politics: President Truman's 1945 national health insurance proposal was defeated partly because Southern Democrats refused to support a plan that would serve Black Americans without discrimination. Decades later, the Affordable Care Act, passed under President Obama with no Republican votes, remained deeply unpopular with white voters. Political scientist Michael Tesler's research showed that racial resentment significantly increased white opposition once the policy was associated with a Black president. In Texas, which leads the country in rural hospital closures, Don McBeath of the rural hospital network TORCH describes how politicians have "demonized" Medicaid expansion; an 18-month-old died after choking because her parents could not reach the nearest hospital in time.

McGhee devotes sustained attention to predatory mortgage lending. She introduces Janice and Isaiah Tomlin, a Black couple in Wilmington, North Carolina, whose perfect payment record did not prevent a broker from selling them a deceptive, high-interest subprime loan. The Tomlins became lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit representing 1,300 homeowners, winning a settlement of approximately $10 million. McGhee argues that predatory loans were tested first on Black and brown families, then spread to devastate white homeowners and the broader economy, ultimately causing $19.2 trillion in lost household wealth and 8 million lost jobs. She tells the story of Amy Rogers, a white woman in Charlotte whose home was foreclosed by Wells Fargo after years of the bank blocking her modification attempts, leaving her at 63 working three part-time jobs. Testimony from Wells Fargo employees in Memphis reveals systematic targeting of African American customers for expensive subprime loans, while federal regulators ignored over 9,000 state-level actions against predatory lenders.

McGhee examines how racial division undermines worker organizing. At a Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi, workers voted against unionizing in 2017. Management assigned physically demanding jobs disproportionately to Black workers while easier positions skewed white, and antiunion forces cast the union as associated with degrading stereotypes about Black people, discouraging white workers from joining. She contrasts this defeat with the Fight for $15 movement, which began in 2012 when fast-food workers rallied near Times Square demanding $15 an hour. In Kansas City, the Stand Up KC campaign named racism as a common enemy, winning white support alongside workers of color. The movement achieved $15 minimum wages in multiple states, with no drop in employment.

On voting rights, McGhee argues that American democracy has never been fully representative. She profiles Larry Harmon, a white Ohio navy veteran and software engineer who was purged from voter rolls after failing to vote in a two-year period and not returning a confirmation postcard. Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union took Harmon's case to the Supreme Court and lost 5 to 4. Modern restrictions, from voter ID laws to roll purges, target people of color but sweep in white voters too: About five percent of white Americans lack photo ID. McGhee notes that civil rights-era reforms like eliminating poll taxes freed lower-income white voters alongside Black voters, and that a fuller democracy produced more responsive government for all races.

She examines how segregation harms white people through isolation, citing research that diverse schools improve critical thinking and test scores for students of all races. On climate change, McGhee travels to Richmond, California, a sacrifice zone near a massive Chevron oil refinery, where a national study confirmed that environmental racism increases total pollution for everyone because decision-makers who can displace the burden onto vulnerable communities feel less pressure to minimize it. A multiracial coalition overcame Chevron's political dominance to win emissions reductions and community benefits.

McGhee explores the psychological and spiritual costs of racism to white people. She profiles Angela King, a former white supremacist who was befriended by Black women in prison and later cofounded Life After Hate, an organization helping people leave violent extremist groups. Drawing on Wendell Berry's 1970 book The Hidden Wound, McGhee describes racism as a wound that damages white people's capacity for empathy and self-knowledge. Religious leaders across faiths describe racism as a spiritual harm to those who perpetuate it as well as those who endure it.

In her final chapter, McGhee visits Lewiston, Maine, a dying mill town revitalized by Somali and other African refugees who filled vacant apartments and storefronts and contributed $194 million in state and local taxes. She profiles Cecile Thornton, a Franco-American retiree who rediscovered her family's French language through friendship with Francophone Congolese refugees, rescuing herself from the social isolation linked to declining health among older white Americans. McGhee presents five conclusions: America has reached the limit of the zero-sum model; the country must refill the pool of public goods; universal solutions must account for different levels of need created by past exclusions; the value that people truly need each other must replace the zero-sum mindset; and a shared, truthful racial narrative must replace denial and ignorance. She describes the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) framework, created by her mother, Dr. Gail Christopher, with input from over 175 experts. TRHT involves relationship-building through personal stories about race, identification of racial hierarchy in laws and institutions, and narrative change to replace false stories with accurate ones. McGhee concludes that America's increasing diversity is not the country's unmaking but its fulfillment, and that the nation's potential can be realized only when "the 'We' in 'We the People' is not some of us, but all of us."