The Sum of Us
What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Heather McGhee examines a central contradiction in American public life: policies shaped by racial division often harm the people they are presented as protecting. Drawing on economic research, political history, interviews, and reporting across the United States, she connects racism to weakened public services, barriers to healthcare, declining worker power, housing inequality, environmental danger, and restrictions on democratic participation. Her governing idea is the “zero-sum” story—the belief that progress for people of color must mean loss for white people. The book’s defining image is the public swimming pool that officials chose to close rather than integrate, sacrificing a shared resource to preserve racial exclusion. Against that pattern, McGhee develops the “Solidarity Dividend”: the material and civic gains made possible when people organize across racial lines. The result is both a diagnosis of American inequality and an argument that racial justice and broadly shared pr…