The Sum of Us

Why do so many Americans believe progress for some means loss for others? In The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee argues that economic and racial inequality share one root: the zero-sum story, a centuries-old belief that any gain for people of color comes at white people’s expense. She traces how elites sold this narrative from slavery to modern politics, shaping not only personal biases but national policy. The book’s central message is transformative: racism impoverishes the whole society, while multiracial solidarity enriches everyone.

A Story Built for Power

McGhee begins with history. Colonial America created hierarchies of human worth to justify theft and enslavement. White identity was defined as freedom in contrast to Black bondage, making liberty contingent on other people’s subjugation. Over generations, this evolved into a political strategy. Race became a tool: elites exploited white fear to block collective policy and protect concentrated wealth. From Lee Atwater’s coded appeals (“states’ rights,” “forced busing”) to modern dog whistles about “makers and takers,” leaders turned racial resentment into resistance against taxes, unions, and social spending.

How Racism Drained the Pool

McGhee’s metaphor of the drained public pool explains how racism dismantled public goods. During desegregation, white communities literally closed pools and parks rather than share them. Over time this became a national pattern: privatization, lower taxes, and reduced investment in schools, infrastructure, and health. White voters abandoned support for government programs when those programs were seen as helping people of color—even when the policies served them too. The zero-sum mindset shrank the whole commons, leaving weaker public systems for everyone.

Economic Crises and Their Racial Roots

When McGhee examines the Great Recession, she shows how racialized exploitation infected finance. Subprime lending began as redlining’s descendant—predatory products tested first on Black and Brown households. Wall Street later scaled these practices into global securitization. Regulators ignored warnings from affected communities, and the resulting crash annihilated trillions in wealth across racial lines. The so-called victims of irresponsible borrowing were actually victims of systemic profit-taking built on racial exclusion.

Public Policy and Racial Perception

Across healthcare, labor, education, and environmental policy, McGhee finds the same pattern: racial division undermines collective progress. The fight over Medicaid expansion, for instance, was less about economics than identity—southern states refused federal funds largely because opposition was framed as resistance to helping undeserving “others.” In labor politics, employers weaponized racial hierarchy to weaken unions and suppress wages. Climate action stalls for similar reasons: many white voters reject collective solutions as threats to freedom or status, even though inaction harms everyone.

Repairing the Moral and Civic Fabric

McGhee doesn’t stop at diagnosis. She introduces Wendell Berry’s idea of the “hidden wound,” showing how racism not only hurts its targets but damages white people’s moral and civic capacity. Whiteness as advantage costs empathy and belonging; denial perpetuates wound and distortion. Healing requires truth-telling and relationships that cross lines of race and class. Angela King’s transformation from neo-Nazi to activist embodies this process of moral repair through human connection.

The Solidarity Dividend

The book’s hopeful core is the Solidarity Dividend—the measurable benefits communities earn when they act together. McGhee shows it in Lewiston, Maine, where Somali immigrants restored economic life; in Richmond, California, where multiracial activists turned pollution fights into green jobs; and in campaigns like Fight for $15, which lifted wages nationally. Using john a. powell’s framework of Targeted Universalism, she argues that universal goals require race-conscious strategies to reach equity. When people recognize shared interest, public goods refill—and everyone prospers.

Transforming Narrative and Policy

Finally, McGhee connects personal awakening to systemic transformation through initiatives like Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT). These community processes rewrite local narratives about race, land, and labor so real policy repair can follow. The goal is not reconciliation but structural change—a new story of mutual benefit. The overarching lesson: dismantling racism is neither personal charity nor minority uplift; it is the project of national renewal.

In the end, The Sum of Us issues a simple, urgent invitation: recognize that your neighbor’s gain is not your loss. The zero-sum equation is false—and replacing it with solidarity is the way to rebuild democracy, economy, and spirit. This moral arithmetic changes everything.

McGhee calls the zero-sum story America’s most destructive myth: the idea that fairness for others means less for you. Its roots run from chattel slavery through political messaging that turns racial hierarchy into economic ideology. Research by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers shows many white Americans now perceive anti-white bias as stronger than anti-Black bias—a perfect example of this mentality.

How Power Sustains the Myth

Political operatives used coded appeals to entrench it. After civil-rights victories, explicit racism became taboo, so dog whistles replaced slurs. Phrases like “small government,” “law and order,” and “tax relief” connected grievance to policy, making racial resentment the hidden engine of anti-redistributive politics. By convincing white voters that public spending favored undeserving minorities, the wealthy preserved low taxes and high inequality.

The Everyday Psychology

McGhee shows how zero-sum thinking shapes ordinary behavior: resistance to affirmative action, denial of systemic bias, or fear of demographic change. Experiments by Craig and Richeson reveal that reminders of shifting racial demographics push many whites toward conservative policies even when unrelated to race. Understanding the psychology helps dismantle the myth—it shows fear, not fact, drives the zero-sum reflex.

If you want to change policy, start by changing the narrative. The story of division benefits elites but undermines everyone else. Replacing zero-sum thinking with solidarity begins the repair of democracy and shared prosperity.

The drained pool is McGhee’s unforgettable image. When white citizens closed public pools rather than integrate, they symbolized a larger shift: fear of sharing eroded public investment. Over decades, privatization replaced collective infrastructure. Parks, libraries, and schools suffered; so did health systems and transportation. The moral is plain: when you refuse to share, you lose what you built.

Policy Consequences

From Proposition 13 in California to Reagan-era tax cuts, anti-government sentiment tied to racial resentment gutted local capacity. Public goods became gated experiences—private pools, tuition hikes, toll roads. The cumulative result was weakened social mobility and declining intergenerational opportunity. Historical data from Nathan Nunn show that areas most reliant on slavery remain poorer today, proving exclusion harms whole communities, not just the excluded.

Rebuilding Solidarity

Restoring shared investment requires cross-racial trust. McGhee highlights Minnesota’s Greater Than Fear campaign, which framed civic pride through racial unity and helped secure progressive budgets. The drained pool becomes the template for revival: refill public goods by refilling empathy and common identity.

Ultimately, a functioning democracy depends on faith that government serves all. When racism collapses that faith, everyone swims in an empty pool. Rebuilding means seeing inclusion as infrastructure itself.

McGhee reframes the 2008 crash not as random misfortune but as the payoff of racialized exploitation. Redlining and exclusion produced vulnerable populations whom lenders could exploit. Once the profit model proved lucrative, Wall Street scaled it everywhere. When the bubble burst, millions of white families lost homes too—demonstrating that racism’s financial logic ultimately poisoned the entire economy.

From Red Lines to Global Lines

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s maps turned Black neighborhoods red in the 1930s. That exclusion persisted in modern lending: land contracts, rent-to-own deals, and subprime mortgages. The Tomlins of North Carolina, misled by predatory brokers, exemplify how ordinary homeowners were targeted and stripped of wealth. Regulators ignored thousands of state-level warnings; federal agencies even preempted stronger protections.

Systemic Fraud and Contagion

Securitization detached profit from accountability—lenders sold risky products, collected fees, and moved on. The IBGYBG (“I’ll be gone, you’re gone”) mindset ruled. When defaults began, the entire global market collapsed. Those first hurt were families of color whose protests went unheard; when losses spread, elite indifference turned into national crisis.

The lesson mirrors McGhee’s core thesis: listening to communities of color is self-protection, not charity. Ignoring racial injustice creates systemic risk that eventually engulfs everyone.

Healthcare should reduce risk for all, but U.S. policy continually treats universality as suspect. McGhee recounts how opposition to national health insurance—the AMA’s 1940s campaigns, Truman’s defeat, later attacks on Obama’s ACA—used racialized fear. In each era, expansion was sabotaged by linking aid to undeserving racial others.

Racialized Opposition

Claude Pepper’s loss after being branded a communist and racial equalizer showed how civil rights were made politically toxic. Even Medicare and Medicaid carried racial compromises: state discretion perpetuated unequal coverage. The ACA’s Medicaid expansion repeats the pattern—southern states with larger Black populations refused billions in federal support, worsening health and economic outcomes.

The Practical Impact

Rural hospital closures in Texas illustrate how excluding people of color harms white residents too. Healthcare refusal is self-defeating economics; Arkansas’s expansion proves inclusion strengthens clinics and local economies. Racial resentment thus becomes a public-health hazard.

McGhee’s answer is transparent: to fill the risk pool, you must fill the moral pool. Only cross-racial alliance can sustain universal coverage and lower costs for everyone.

Work is one of McGhee’s most vivid battlegrounds. Historically, unions built the middle class—but racism undermined them. The Knights of Labor and the CIO proved interracial organizing could win pensions and the forty-hour week. Yet the South’s racial hierarchy and corporate strategy blocked Operation Dixie, fracturing national worker power.

Modern Division and Resistance

At Nissan’s Canton plant, management split workers into Legacy, Pathway, and temp tiers, fostering resentment. White workers clung to minor privilege rather than solidarity, helping defeat unionization by a few hundred votes. The episode reveals how racial identity outweighs economic interest when manipulation succeeds.

Solidarity That Wins

The Fight for $15 movement flips that script. Terrence Wise and Bridget Hughes built multiracial unity—Black, Latinx, and white fast-food workers demanding dignity together. Wage increases followed in cities and corporations nationwide. Union presence lifts nonunion wages too: solidarity is the mechanism that raises the floor.

McGhee concludes that economic democracy requires racial democracy. Organize across lines or watch inequality persist. In labor, as in all public life, division serves only power at the top.

Segregation doesn’t just hurt those locked out—it reduces national prosperity. From HOLC redlining to exclusionary zoning, government cemented inequality. Homeownership and school funding tied to property values created self-perpetuating privilege. A white family’s wealth remains nearly ten times that of a Black family’s, sustained by these policies.

Economic and Health Toll

Research by Morello-Frosch and Novara shows segregated cities have lower GDP and shorter lifespans even for whites. Pollution clusters in marginalized zones, but air currents ignore borders. Segregation amplifies environmental hazards and weakens collective demand for reform.

Choosing Integration

Parents like Ali Takata and Tracy Wright-Mauer show voluntary integration yields unexpected benefit—richer community and better outcomes for their children. McGhee argues for conscious policy: undo zoning barriers, invest equitably, and treat integration as development strategy.

When you pay to isolate yourself, you pay twice: once in money, again in lost civic vitality. Integration isn’t charity; it’s growth.

In environmental policy, racial inequality becomes physical danger. Communities of color often bear pollution others avoid. Richmond, California’s Chevron refinery and Houston’s landfill mapping illustrate how race predicts toxic exposure. Yet McGhee shows that sacrifice zones ultimately degrade environment for all—the poisons spread beyond fences.

From Environmental Racism to Just Transition

Richmond’s multiracial coalition forced Chevron into community-benefit agreements and solar projects employing local labor. These organizing victories embody Just Transition—a shift from extraction to sustainability that includes workers and fence-line residents. It’s solidarity materialized in policy.

Climate Politics and Identity

Nationally, climate denial often correlates with racial resentment. McCright and Dunlap’s “Cool Dudes” studies show conservative white men resist climate science to protect status. Elites fund this doubt to preserve deregulation. The Green New Deal reframes climate action as multiracial economic renewal—clean jobs plus justice.

Climate change underscores McGhee’s thesis: collective threats require collective action. Build diverse coalitions, design inclusive policies, and environmental solutions become democratic solutions.

McGhee ends with cultural repair. Policy alone cannot undo centuries of hierarchy; you must change the story itself. The Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) framework offers a roadmap. Developed by Dr. Gail Christopher and applied to cities like Dallas, it uses storytelling, historical reckoning, and policy mapping to align narrative change with institutional reform.

Dallas as Example

Jerry Hawkins’s TRHT effort began by declaring, “Dallas is on stolen land and built with stolen labor.” That honesty opened civic conversations leading to racial equity offices and coordinated media accountability. Narrative truth became practical governance.

National Scale

By 2020, TRHT expanded to campuses and local governments nationwide. Representative Barbara Lee’s resolution proposed a federal commission. McGhee sees TRHT as civic therapy: it couples emotional healing with political clarity. When communities know their shared history, they can build shared future.

Transformation, not reconciliation, is the goal. Truth allows Americans to see solidarity not as idealism but realism—the only way the sum of us equals prosperity for all.