Words&Dirt

Back in 2018, I read Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Here’s my favorite passage from that excellent book:

The common experience of oppression and exploitation creates the potential for a united struggle to better the conditions of all…Political unity, including winning white workers to the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of Black and Latino/a workers, is key to their own liberation…In this context, solidarity is not just an option; it is crucial to workers’ ability to resist the constant degradation of their living standards. Solidarity is only possible through relentless struggle to win white workers to antiracism, to expose the lie that Black workers are worse off because they somehow choose to be, and to win the white working class to the understanding that, unless they struggle, they too will continue to live lives of poverty and frustration, even if those lives are somewhat better than the lives led by Black workers. Success or failure are contingent on whether or not working people see themselves as brothers and sisters whose liberation is inextricably bound up together. Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression. (214-15)

I remember thinking that I’d very much like to read a whole book devoted to the idea of building solidarity between disenfranchised Americans of all colors and backgrounds. Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us is that book. It tackles the history and present problems of American racism better than any piece of nonfiction I’ve read to date. McGhee navigates these murky waters with intelligence, sensitivity, and poise, highlighting the specific oppression experienced by minorities while also revealing racism’s damaging effects on American society as a whole.

The Sum of Us begins with a simple question: “Why can’t we have nice things?” (xi). McGhee’s answer is comprised of two central claims––one positive and one negative. The negative claim is that, throughout American history and still today, a pernicious narrative of “zero-sum racism” has led to the systemic degradation of public goods, making life worse for nearly everyone than it would be otherwise:

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it…The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America. Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all. Today, The racial zero-sum story is resurgent because there is a political movement invested in ginning up white resentment toward lateral scapegoats (similarly or worse-situated people of color) to escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few…This divide-and-conquer strategy has been essential to the creation and maintenance of the Inequality Era’s other most defining feature: the hollowing out of the goods we share. (14-5)

McGhee goes about proving this point with impressive energy, engaging prose, and reams of evidence. Her go-to image is that of a drained public pool, which is lifted from a particularly weird and shameful series of events that took place during the mid-20th century. As part of FDR’s New Deal, America built 2,000 public pools across the country during the 1930s and 40s. These were “glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents,” McGhee writes. She continues:

Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand public resort pools as “social melting pots.” Like free public grade schools, public pools were part of an “Americanizing” project intended to overcome ethnic divisions and cohere a common identity––and it worked. (23)

Well, it worked for a little while. These public pools were not open to black citizens, and when pressure to integrate increased in the 1950s, municipal governments nationwide decided to drain and decommission their pools rather than allow blacks to share them. Others were sold off to private companies in order to preserve segregation. In a cruel capstone that seems bizarre from our modern perspective, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that scrapping public pools was legal “because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm” (27). McGhee’s blunt summaries hit home: “If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all…Public goods are seen as worthy of investment only so long as the public is seen as good.” (27, 179).

It would be comforting to believe that this “pool thing” was an aberration, a distasteful cultural quirk from a time gone by. Not so, says McGhee! She takes us on a stomach-turning tour, documenting in distressing detail the reservoirs of past and potential public goods that have suffered from this dynamic: public education, universal healthcare, affordable housing, labor organizing, voting rights, and environmental protections. Even our minds and personal identities are compromised by our commitment to zero-sum racism, she argues.

Along the way, McGhee follows a fitting formula, first identifying the harmful effects of racism on people of color, and then expanding her perspective to include the ancillary harms inflicted on white people. The trend is: Racism leads, and general immiseration follows. Below are two of my favorite examples of this formula in action; the first reflects on the impacts of predatory housing loans that caused the Great Recession, and the second examines the collective threat of climate change:

All of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through Black and brown communities across the nation. Instead, the predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too––and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency. There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes. (96-7)

Racism has a cost for everyone. And with the environment and climate change, many white people’s skeptical worldview, combined with their outsize political power, has life-or-death consequences for all…Climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action. The claims are racially innocent––we won’t risk the economy for this dubious idea––but those using them are willing to take immense risks that might fall on precisely the historically exploited: people of color and the land, air, animals, and water. Like the zero-sum story, it’s all an illusion––white men aren’t truly safe from climate risk, and we can have a different but sustainable economy with a better quality of life for more people. But how powerful the zero-sum paradigm must be to knock out science and even a healthy sense of self-preservation. And how dangerous for us all. (205-6)

The Sum of Us would be almost unbearably grim if not for McGhee’s positive claim, which is that Americans can and should embrace a new, positive-sum narrative that will end the Inequality Era and kickstart a new era of shared prosperity. The key is for downtrodden people of all stripes to band together in pursuit of a “Solidarity Dividend” that will grow and redistribute American wealth, restore our sense of common humanity, and leverage our nation’s diverse talents to drive innovation and collective decision-making. This process begins with storytelling and psychological framing:

The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything Americans have in common, from our schools to our air to our infrastructure. And everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. I set out on this journey to piece together a new story of who we could be to one another, and to glimpse the new America we must create for the sum of us. (xxiii)

To make this aspirational abstraction more concrete, McGhee gives numerous examples of individuals, communities, and organizations that have unlocked or are in the process of pursuing Solidarity Dividends across the nation. She also provides plenty of economic data showing the vast amounts of money we’re leaving on the table by refusing to build a better and more secure society for all Americans. These hopeful sections are scattered throughout the book like rays of sunshine striking an otherwise-stormy sea. McGhee’s inclusive idealism is something all Americans should be eager to endorse:

We must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class; we must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us. (289)

As I said previously, The Sum of Us is the best book on this topic that I’ve yet encountered. I will probably recommend it to loads of people in the coming months and years, and am happy to finally have a text to which I can outsource most of my opinions on these matters. That said, I do want to grapple with a few elements of McGhee’s perspective that I find problematic.

In general, I think McGhee overfavors monocausal explanations, with racism depicted as America’s original sin––that perversely-fecund shitspring from which all our troubles flow. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, but McGhee doesn’t make much of an effort to to explore causes for our societal ills that aren’t racism. As a result, I think The Sum of Us fits snugly into its cultural moment, with many liberal Americans treating racism as a catch-all explanation for everything that goes wrong. But everything we’ve learned over the course of human history––and especially in the last few centuries––tells us that nature and civilization are always more complicated than they seem. As Peter Turchin puts it: “History is too complex for single-factor explanations” (War and Peace and War, 29). The same is true, of course, of the present. McGhee’s arguments about the particularly-toxic effects of racism would be more powerful if accompanied by careful inquiries aimed at separating out those effects from possible confounding factors such as poverty, class, culture, and luck. Perfectly clean distinctions are of course impossible in this arena of analysis, but a stronger attempt would have been nice.

I am perhaps being too uncharitable here. After all, McGhee does include a lot of social science studies that claim to control for confounding factors, exposing racism as the true source of, for example, various forms of political bias (see pages 28-39 and 52-3). I’m not nearly as familiar with this literature as McGhee is, so what I’m about to argue could be entirely wrong. However, it seems to me that much of this research utilizes psychological measures of “implicit bias” to identify racist individuals and/or beliefs, which is a red flag for me (see this article for an explanation). Furthermore, the links between supposed “racial bias” and political positions appear to be correlational, meaning there’s no causal relationship––no way to confidently conclude that it’s racial bias and not some other factor or set of factors that lead people to assume these political positions. Add on top of that the replication crisis in social science and recent concerns about p-hacking, and I think we’ve got cause for skepticism regarding what these studies can teach us about the real world. McGhee doesn’t mention any of these issues, so I guess she’s either unaware of them or doesn’t think they apply to the particular studies she cites. But either way, McGhee’s more comfortable with these kinds of data than I am, which is really no surprise given how effectively they support her outlook and arguments.

Another issue is that The Sum of Us lacks any substantial criticism of the political left. McGhee is a staunch liberal/leftist, so perhaps we should expect this. But one thing I’ve previously struggled with when reading political books is how easy they can be on their own side, even as they critique their political enemies with gusto. Self-criticism, including criticism of one’s political allies, is not only a best practice of general discourse, but also a surefire way to signal openness to dialog with people who don’t already agree with you. Given that McGhee’s book is explicitly about coalition-building, I was very disappointed that she remained silent about ways the left has actively contributed to political and racial division. For examples of what I’m referring to, here are a few articles from Persuasion: here, here, and here. Also, here are two terrific passages from Van Jones’s Beyond the Messy Truth that demonstrate the kind of healthy self-criticism I’m talking about (Jones’s personal politics are pretty similar to McGhee’s as far as I can tell):

We must have a ceasefire in the “who’s the wokest of them all” war. We cannot win against the worst of the right if all of our best weapons are pointed at one another. Right now, too many of us seem to approach liberal causes and conversations mainly by looking for ways to show other progressives what they are doing wrong. Too many of us can deconstruct everything but can’t reconstruct anything and make it work. Too many of us know how to run a protest against the adults on our campuses but don’t know how to run a program for children in our neighborhoods. Too many of us are great at opposition but awful at proposition. Too many of us know just enough critical theory to critique everything but don’t have the practical skills to make anything function at the level of our high standards. Too many of us know how to march against an elected official but not how to elect one. Too many of us know how to call people out but don’t know how to lift people up. And this reality creates internal dangers as real as anything we face externally. (54)

Working together in this way is not easy, but it is what our country desperately needs. In the end, the promise of America is liberty and justice for all. My fellow liberals are so focused on justice we too easily forget about liberty. Conservatives can be so committed to liberty that you become blind to cases where injustice curtails freedom. We need each other. We cannot improve this country alone. If we focus only on winning elections, we end up demonizing the other side. If we focus on solving problems, we’re forced to build bridges. To build bridges, we must listen to each other. When we listen to each other, both sides change and grow. We find ways to disagree without disrespecting each other. As we better articulate our visions and solutions, we find points of tension––but also points of cohesion. We are forced to defend our beliefs to people who disagree with us, which makes them stronger and reveals the cracks. This is what America needs, and it will take contributions from all of us to get to a better place. (89)

My final criticism concerns McGhee’s dismissal and simplistic assessment of “colorblindness”––a term that has become a political punching bag for the left in recent years. For anyone interested in this topic, McGhee’s perspective will be familiar:

We now know that color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement––that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”––and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy, or structure. The moral logic and social appeal of color blindness is clear, and many well-meaning people have embraced it. But when put into practice in a still-racist world, the result is more racism…For two generations now, well-meaning white people have subscribed to color blindness in an optimistic attempt to wish away the existence of structural racism. But when they do, they unwittingly align themselves with, and give mainstream cover to, a powerful movement to turn back the clock on integration and equality…Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it. (228-30)

This passage wonderfully captures one of the most fascinating and contentious points of internal disagreement between contemporary liberals/leftists. I happen to be one of those “well-meaning white people” on the opposite side of this argument, but before I explain why, let me first concede that there are plenty of people who utilize colorblindness in precisely the fashion McGhee describes. But I don’t think her description applies to all proponents of colorblindness, and certainly not to its most intelligent and informed advocates.

In my view, the continued cultivation of a positive form of colorblindness is critical for two reasons. The first is that it keeps us oriented toward a possible future in which race––a meaningless and fabricated social category that has been illusory from the very beginning––no longer plays any significant role in how people judge and treat one another. This is not our current reality, but it ought to be our ultimate goal. We can walk and chew gum at the same time––acknowledging and seeking to correct the harms of racism while also aspiring to a colorblind ideal. This doesn’t mean colorblind solutions should completely dominate all action we might take to ameliorate present injustice, but it does mean that those efforts need to be aimed at creating a world in which a person’s race becomes increasingly less important, not more.

People who hold this perspective are naturally wary of ideas and propositions that appear to double-down on the reality of race and treat skin color as an “essential” or “primary” tool for understanding individuals and solving socioeconomic problems. Given our historical context, it’s perfectly reasonable to treat race as one of many tools for understanding our fellow humans, but it should be neither overemphasized nor imbued with false significance. In fact, that style of thinking is precisely what created race and racism in the first place, and as McGhee points out: “You can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it” (xxiii).

The second reason colorblindness is desirable is that it helps us avoid the kind of monocausal thinking discussed above. Colorblindness isn’t a way of literally “not seeing race,” but rather an imaginative mechanism that helps us explore alternative explanations. In personal and civic life, whenever an accusation of racism is brought to bear, we ought ask ourselves if there’s a better (more logical or parsimonious) explanation for whatever outcome we’re observing. We ought to inquire about a broad range of possible causes, including familiar or novel combinations of different causes. In this process, it can be helpful to imaginatively assume a position of colorblindness––a kind of racial “veil of ignorance.” Doing so might reveal possibilities, incentives, and/or motivations that explain an observation in a more satisfactory manner compared to racism. It might also emphasize how and why racism actually is the best explanation, or at least among the best available explanations. It’s one way of avoiding extremes––either accepting all accusations of racism at face value or rejecting them out of hand. And this general mentality doesn’t just apply to racism, but should characterize all our efforts to identify root causes in order to most effectively address collective problems.

If you find my arguments in support of colorblindness unpersuasive, perhaps these will have better luck: here and here. Or maybe you just disagree with me, which is fine of course. The nature and viability of colorblindness is a live hypothesis for me at this moment in time, so I might be wrong.

For anyone who made it this far into this lengthy review, I appreciate it! I want to close by briefly listing McGhee’s “Five Discoveries” from her journey:

1. We have reached the productive and moral limit of the zero-sum economic model that was crafted in the cradle of the United States. We have no choice but to start aiming for a Solidarity Dividend.
2. The quickest way to get there is to refill the pool of public goods.
3. When it comes to designing solutions, one size has never fit all.
4. We truly do need each other.
5. It’s time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together. (271)

These insights aren’t novel, but that doesn’t matter. They’re sincere, wise, compassionate, humanistic, and urgent. I may not agree with McGhee about everything, but I’m proud to be one of her fellow citizens. The Sum of Us is an essential contribution to the American conversation that will be relevant and useful for generations to come.

Rating: 9/10