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Introduction
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sum of Us, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Zero-Sum Thinking vs. Solidarity
The Toll of Racism
American Values and Identity
Research, Persuasion, and Policy Change
Summary
Analysis
McGhee’s parents were “always hustling” to try and stay in the middle class, as they had unstable income and no assets. Growing up, McGhee constantly wondered why there was so much poverty in their part of Chicago. Now, she knows that her parents came of age during the brief window when Black Americans could “glimpse the so-called American Dream”—after the civil rights movement and before the current “Inequality Era.” Today, almost half of workers can’t meet their basic needs, while CEOs are making several times more than they did in the 1970s.
McGhee opens by reminding her readers that, even though debates about policy often seem abstract, they deeply impact millions of people’s everyday lives. As she will explain in the coming chapters, her parents lacked assets because for centuries, slavery, Jim Crow, and discriminatory housing policy prevented Black families from building wealth. This situation improved in the 1960s. But since the 1970s, new economic conditions have made building wealth impossible for most Americans: wages have stopped growing, the jobs that enabled the middle class to grow have disappeared, and the cost of education, healthcare, and housing has skyrocketed.
Themes
To try and understand why Americans keep choosing policies that exacerbate inequality, McGhee visits the Harvard Business School professors Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers. Their research shows that, contrary to reality, white Americans believe that they are the true victims of racism. This is largely because they believe in the zero-sum paradigm, while Black Americans do not. McGhee sets out to uncover why.
Norton and Sommers’s finding is baffling because it runs contrary to all the available evidence on racial inequity in the U.S. But the zero-sum paradigm explains it: white Americans believe that they are always competing with people of color, so they interpret progress for people of color as discrimination against white people. This is made worse by the fact that most white people live in segregated, all-white neighborhoods, so they know very little about the lives of people of color. So as the nation’s nonwhite population grows, gains cultural influence, and makes up an ever-larger share of the ever-smaller economic elite, many white people think they are losing their rightful place at the top of the nation’s racial hierarchy. (Of course, what most Americans of color really want is to get rid of the hierarchy altogether.)
Themes
Racism has been central to U.S. history since the colonial era, when Europeans used it to justify slavery, genocide, and land theft. They claimed that Black and Indigenous people were uncivilized and didn’t know how to use their land. In this era, the U.S. economy truly was zero-sum: white people enriched themselves by taking directly from nonwhite people. For instance, slaveowners’ profits depended directly on enslaved labor, and in turn, the whole U.S. economy was dependent on slavery (including the manufacturing, financial, and trade sectors centered in the North).
The zero-sum paradigm didn’t appear out of nowhere: rather, it is a deeply rooted idea that goes back centuries. Historically, most white wealth in the U.S. comes from exploiting people of color, so it only makes sense that many white people would assume that their prosperity still depends on nonwhite people’s misery. Finally, McGhee also notes how racist ideas helped early white Americans justify slavery and land theft—just as they helped the senator from the introduction justify voting against the consumer debt bill.
Themes
The zero-sum paradigm was central to colonists’ ideas about themselves and society. They understood what it meant to be free by contrasting themselves with enslaved African people. After interracial rebellions in the 1600s, colonial governments even implemented zero-sum laws that gave poor white people special privileges over Black and Indigenous people. For instance, they confiscated enslaved people’s property and donated it to poor white people. Enslaved people had absolutely no rights, and suddenly, poor white people were no longer at the bottom of the hierarchy. White women even viewed owning enslaved people as a way to free themselves from sexism, and they were often just as brutal as their husbands.
Just like white Americans have always thought in terms of the zero-sum paradigm, American political and economic elites have also always secured their own privilege by dividing the rest of society along racial lines. Curiously, these policies turned zero-sum thinking into a self-fulfilling prophecy: elites claimed that politics was zero-sum, then enacted laws that actually made it that way. Even foundational American values, like freedom and equality, were originally zero-sum—McGhee argues that white Americans originally sought to purchase their own freedom with nonwhite people’s oppression. Thus, the overarching question in her book is whether the U.S. can ever achieve its values completely, or only in this limited way, only for white people.
Themes
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Slavery’s zero-sum system was central to the U.S.’s founding. The French funded the Revolutionary War in exchange for plantation tobacco, the Constitution gave slave states extra political power through the Three-fifths Compromise, and in 1790 the government officially limited citizenship to “free white persons.” To early white Americans, freedom meant having the rights that enslaved Black people lacked.
Most Americans do not realize that slavery and Indigenous genocide were not just present in the U.S.’s early years: they were the economic and political foundation for the nation’s power. Put differently, the U.S.’s government and economy were originally designed as systems for the orderly management of genocide and slavery. This makes it clearer still why zero-sum thinking took root in the U.S more than in places without this history.
Themes
McGhee recognizes that the U.S. economy was zero-sum, but she also emphasizes that “it didn’t have to happen that way.” Yet the rich and powerful have continually pushed the zero-sum story in order to pit different groups against each other. And when white people are pitted against people of color, white people have almost always won out. So why do white people view themselves as the victims of racism? White conservatives tend to complain about affirmative action and welfare, but neither are actually zero-sum problems. Today, the zero-sum story is a way for elites like Donald Trump to rouse up white voters and “escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few.”
McGhee adds another complex but extremely important layer to her argument: elites choose what kind of economy to create through policy. They can build a zero-sum one, in which some groups’ prosperity depends on others’ exploitation, or they can build a collaborative one that generates prosperity for everyone. However, when left to their own devices, these elites often choose zero-sum economies, which enable them to become extraordinarily wealthy but leave the majority of people poor and precarious. Then, they tell that majority that the economy has to be zero-sum, and there is no alternative. This isn’t true, but McGhee thinks that most white Americans believe it.
Themes
