Heather McGhee

Heather McGhee is an American author and specialist in economic and social policy. A Yale graduate with a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, she spent nearly two decades at the policy organization Demos, including four years as its president. She has drafted legislation, testified before Congress and appeared as a political commentator. She is also board chair of the racial-justice organization Color Of Change.

Her nonfiction joins policy research and history with reporting from communities across the United States. In The Sum of Us, McGhee examines the zero-sum belief that advances for one racial group must come at another’s expense. Her examples range from towns that drained public swimming pools rather than integrate them to the racial politics surrounding housing, labor, health care and environmental protection. Against that pattern, she sets what she calls the “solidarity dividend”: benefits created through cooperation across racial lines.

Published in 2021, The Sum of Us became a New York Times bestseller, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the Porchlight Business Book of the Year award. McGhee later adapted it for younger readers, and the book also became the basis of a podcast produced by Higher Ground and Futuro Studios.

The Sum of Us is the natural starting point. It introduces McGhee’s central argument through data, history and encounters with Americans around the country, while keeping its focus on a practical question: what could people gain by rejecting zero-sum politics?