Thanks to Donna D.
Heather McGhee was cooking dinner in her Brooklyn apartment in January as she opened a YouTube link to watch Joe Biden deliver his first speech on race as the President. As she bustled around the kitchen, Biden recited a line that seemed so familiar that she nearly dropped her wineglass. “We’ve bought the view that America is a zero-sum game in many cases: ‘If you succeed, I fail,’” Biden said. But, he continued, “When any one of us is held down, we’re all held back.”
McGhee’s first book, The Sum of Us, was about to hit shelves in February, and she’d shared copies of it with some Biden advisers. The book argues that Americans have been fed a “zero-sum story” that says progress for people of color will take away what white Americans already have. “The logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it,” she writes. McGhee uses the book to explain that racism actually costs all Americans, by allowing wealthy conservatives to take away resources from all of us.
McGhee had worried that The Sum of Us, coming after the death of George Floyd and the country’s reckoning with race, was being published too late. But as Biden spoke, she realized it might be coming at exactly the right time. There, in her kitchen, she heard the President of the United States—an older white man—telling Americans that they shouldn’t fear the success of Black people, using some of the very phrases she had used in her book. “I was like, ‘What is happening?! This is amazing!’” McGhee says.
For her book, McGhee journeyed around the nation, interviewing people to illustrate how that zero-sum game hurts everyone. She goes to Montgomery, Ala., where in 1959, white citizens decided to drain the public pool rather than integrate it. The same thing has happened as the U.S. has gotten more diverse, she argues; rather than share the benefits of government with Black people, many white Americans have sought to end benefits for everyone. This history helped answer a question she’d been asking for a long time: Why doesn’t America have well-funded schools, good wages for everyone and low-cost health care?