The Sum of Us Study Guide

Heather McGhee was born and raised in a middle-class Black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, an upbringing that convinced her to dedicate her career to fighting inequality in the United States. After attending the prestigious Milton Academy boarding school in Massachusetts, she went to Yale University, where she completed her degree in American Studies in 2001. After graduation, she briefly worked in Barcelona and Hollywood, then settled in New York City to work as an economic policy researcher for the relatively new, progressive think tank Demos. She spent the next several years researching issues like predatory mortgage lending, credit card debt, and minimum wage laws, all of which came to the fore of national politics several years later, during the financial crisis. After several years, McGhee decided to bolster her policy credentials with a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She briefly worked on John Edwards’s 2008 presidential campaign and helped draft Dodd-Frank, the massive law that transformed the nation’s system for financial regulation after the Great Recession, before returning to Demos. She became the think tank’s president in 2014, at just 33 years old—although her predecessor and colleagues reportedly had to ask her to take the role several times before she finally agreed. During her time leading Demos, she overhauled the organization through an extensive racial justice training. However, as she explains in The Sum of Us, Donald Trump’s election convinced her that simply proposing better policies wouldn’t be enough to improve Americans’ economic prospects. So in 2017, she left Demos to begin writing this book. Besides her role at Demos, she is best known for her popular TED talk and her frequent guest appearances on MSNBC shows like All In with Chris Hayes.

In The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee analyzes the broad sweep of U.S. history, while focusing on its political and economic dynamics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Specifically, she argues that social policies like the New Deal and the GI Bill created the white middle class from the 1930s to 1960s, and then policies adopted during and after the civil rights movement destroyed that middle class in order to prevent people of color from joining it. For instance, she shows how federal housing policy—which guaranteed mortgages for white Americans but intentionally discriminated against nonwhite people—is the root cause behind much of the U.S.’s residential segregation, unequal school system, and vast racial wealth gap. She also focuses on the way that conservative politicians have repeatedly turned white public opinion against public goods by associating them with Black and brown people. To take just one example, white voters largely favored labor unions until the 1960s, when the United Auto Workers union openly supported the civil rights movement. Thus, while unions were strong from the 1930s to the 1960s, enabling workers to win labor protections and higher wages, they started to decline from the 1960s onwards, which led wages to plummet and the middle class to shrink. McGhee also explains how similar effects have hollowed out the nation’s welfare system, repeatedly blocked government action on climate change and pollution control, and even led cities to destroy their public pools. Finally, besides her focus on the last 100 years, McGhee also briefly takes her readers back to the U.S.’s colonial days in order to show how slavery and genocide, which provided the economic and social foundation for the nation, also instilled a zero-sum mentality about race in many white Americans.

In The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee analyzes research on racism’s role in a wide variety of different policy issues to make the overarching point that zero-sum thinking about race has prevented the majority of Americans from achieving social and economic progress. Some of her most important evidence comes from books like Ian Haney López’s Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (2014), Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017), and Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (2019). McGhee’s book revolves around the central metaphor of public swimming pools, which segregationist governments chose to drain rather than integrate in the mid-20th century. This story comes largely from Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (2007). Similarly, her account of how the Koch brothers’ funding has catalyzed a new wave of anti-democracy activism is based on Nancy MacLean Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). Her analysis of how working-class white people have chosen racism over solidarity with people of color relies heavily on David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005) and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (2007). And Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (2014) is a major influence on McGhee’s thinking about the narratives that further racism today. When considering how to fight these narratives, McGhee frequently cites her conversations with Robin DiAngelo, the bestselling author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) and What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy (2012). Finally, McGhee recommends William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen’s From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century (2020) as an overall guide to how public policy can achieve racial equity in the 21st century.