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Chapter 9
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 visits Lewiston, a former mill town in Maine, which is the U.S.’s oldest, whitest state. Industrial decline has crushed Lewiston’s economy since the 1960s and 1970s, so it’s easy to see the city through the zero-sum paradigm: “progress for people of color means a loss for white people.” Maine’s former governor, Paul LePage, won election by telling these kinds of stories—and then spent his term cutting taxes on the wealthy and refusing Medicaid expansion.
In this concluding chapter, McGhee takes Lewiston as a case study for how the U.S. can choose between zero-sum thinking and solidarity. Of course, Lewiston has all the characteristics of a place where zero-sum thinking would dominate. But remarkably, as McGhee will reveal later in this chapter, solidarity has actually won out there. Indeed, Lewiston’s story captures McGhee’s deep sense of hope and optimism about the U.S.’s collective future.
Themes
But actually, Lewiston’s revitalization proves the zero-sum paradigm wrong. As she walks down its main street, McGhee passes blocks of boarded-up storefronts, an empty lawyer’s office, and a giant pawn shop. Then, she reaches a block full of vibrant stores serving the city’s growing Somali community. She gets a coffee at the Mogadishu Business Center, which sells groceries and offers a variety of services from tax preparation to tailoring. Then, she visits City Hall, where the hallway is lined with portraits of Lewiston’s white, male mayors.
The streetscape shows how African immigrants and refugees (particularly Somalis) have turned Lewiston around. They have brought energy, skill, and revenue to the declining, aging, racially homogeneous town. Of course, the endless portraits of white mayors suggest that Lewiston is not used to this kind of change and may not be ready to accept it. After all, McGhee’s analysis indicates that places like Lewiston typically respond to changes in racial demographics with zero-sum thinking.
Themes
McGhee meets city administrator Phil Nadeau, who tells her how Lewiston’s industry all moved to the South, and then to Asia. By 2000, the city’s jobs were gone, and its young people were leaving fast. The city government realized “that only one thing would save the town: new people.” By pure chance, Somali refugees started moving to Lewiston around the same time, and then refugees from other countries in Africa followed. Suddenly, the city’s vacant housing was occupied and its empty storefronts became vibrant. Now, it’s one of the only Maine cities that is actually growing. Many Lewiston mayors haven’t appreciated the “new Mainers,” but Nadeau clearly does.
Unlike the mayors, Nadeau recognizes how the newcomers have helped Lewiston. This is because he thinks about what is good for the city itself, and not in terms of just its longtime white residents. Still, the newcomers clearly help white people from Lewiston, too, by providing key services and keeping the community afloat economically. Of course, this also applies to the U.S. as a whole: as its white population ages and begins to decline, it will only be able to maintain the strong population and economic growth that it needs through immigration. (Countries like Canada and Singapore have long since recognized this, but zero-sum thinking holds the U.S. back.)
Themes
Immigration has revitalized rural towns like Lewiston all across the U.S. In fact, 83 percent of the nation’s rural population growth has been people of color. Of course, white locals can easily choose the zero-sum story and blame newcomers for their towns’ decline. But some locals see the reality: the newcomers actually bring jobs and growth. So those locals decide to help the newcomers integrate, instead.
Contrary to the zero-sum model, in reality, immigration and demographic change are rural America’s only real opportunity for growth. But hopefully, demographic change can do away with zero-sum thinking on its own. After all, McGhee has noted multiple times that the best way for white people to overcome zero-sum thinking is by simply living alongside people of color.
Themes
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Sometimes, the opposite happens too: the newcomers help the locals integrate. For instance, like many Franco-American Mainers, Cecile Thornton stopped speaking French as a child. After retirement, she had no family left in Lewiston, so she visited the local Franco Center to try and connect with others. But she was frustrated to see that everyone was still speaking English. So she tried visiting the French Club at the Hillview public housing project, whose residents are mostly African immigrants. She befriended a Congolese man named Edho; their conversation was the most French she had spoken since childhood. She started visiting repeatedly and befriending the other immigrants. Eventually, these new friends started mingling with the other Franco retirees—and helping them relearn French.
Cecile Thornton’s experience is an example of how white people can switch from zero-sum thinking to solidarity thinking by simply befriending people of color and shedding their own racist assumptions. McGhee challenges conventional stories about immigration and integration by noting that Thornton was the one who felt culturally homeless, and who achieved a sense of belonging and identity through her friendship with immigrants. In contrast, most stories about immigration suggest that immigrants will assimilate into the existing local culture (at best) or gradually destroy it (at worst). But the reality is that they can often connect with and enrich this local culture, too, in the same way as generations of other immigrants have in the past.
Themes
Father-of-two Bruce Noddin had a similar experience. While recovering from a serious opioid addiction, he started preaching in the local jail. One evening outside the jail, he met ZamZam, a woman who was bringing delicious-smelling food to the Muslim inmates during Ramadan. ZamZam recruited him into a progressive political group called the Maine People’s Alliance, and he started organizing for political change alongside new immigrants. Now, he leads an annual Community Unity Barbecue. To him, the African refugees are no different from his own Franco-American community, which also came to Lewiston to escape persecution.
Bruce Noddin’s inter-racial, inter-faith friendship with ZamZam eventually led him to join a solidarity-oriented political coalition (the Maine People’s Alliance). Just like the French Club did for Cecile Thornton, the Alliance gave Noddin a sense of community and purpose as he was recovering from his addiction. This shows how simple personal connections across racial lines can lead to broader community-level collaboration and, eventually, the kind of progressive political change that McGhee thinks the U.S. needs.
Themes
Despite these uplifting anecdotes, there is still lots of “zero-sum tension” in Lewiston. Said, the owner of the Mogadishu Business Center, tells McGhee about both sides of the coin. He explains how his wife hired a white seamstress named Brenda to make African clothes and how immigrant children are winning state soccer championships, but he also details how white voters and politicians have lashed out against change. The mayor wrote an open letter asking immigrants to leave, white supremacists demonstrated in town, and the governor accused Somali people of moving to Maine for welfare. Said concludes that different kinds of people naturally come together, but “the politicians will try to separate us.”
Lewiston’s immigrants have certainly made progress, but they are still fighting an uphill battle because zero-sum thinking is still locals’ default mindset. So while the newcomers have won plenty of locals over to their side, the ones they haven’t still mostly oppose their presence. The mayor and governor’s rhetoric show not only how common these ideas are, but also how politically advantageous they are for conservative leaders. Finally, Said’s insight about politicians “try[ing] to separate us”—something he learned long ago in Somalia—shows how the divide-and-conquer political strategy is truly universal. In some places it’s based on religion, in others ethnicity, and in others—like the U.S.—it’s based on race.
Themes
In 2015, Lewiston’s Republican mayor, Robert Macdonald, ran for reelection against the multiracial minister and Maine People’s Alliance activist Ben Chin. During the campaign, Ben noticed that many white voters believe in absurd, racist myths—like “Somali people get a free car as soon as they come to America.” Ben amassed a large grassroots following and emphasized economic issues, but his opponents attacked him by sticking racist posters of him all over town, and he narrowly lost. Two years later, he ran again and lost by just 145 votes, in part because an email in which he called a group of rich white voters “a bunch of racists” leaked to the press.
This mayoral race shows that the conflict between zero-sum and solidarity thinking is the central political issue in Lewiston. Moreover, the stories that Chin recounts are part of the classic zero-sum mindset that took hold during the civil rights movement: white people assume that the government is giving people of color free things at their expense. It doesn’t matter that these stories are completely false—in fact, the egregious exaggeration makes them even more powerful. Ironically, the truth is just the opposite. The government isn’t giving white people’s stuff to immigrants and refugees; rather, the immigrants and refugees are saving the government by bringing it much-needed tax revenue, which mostly funds the services needed to support the town’s aging, economically inactive white population.
Themes
Mayor Macdonald’s policy priorities were lowering taxes on the wealthy (but increasing them for everyone else) and restricting immigrants’ access to welfare. Meanwhile, Governor LePage was busy vetoing Medicaid expansion five times (even though the vast majority of poor and uninsured people in Maine are white). But the people of Maine overrode the governor’s veto and expanded Medicaid through a ballot initiative in 2017. Ben Chin’s Maine People’s Alliance helped the campaign succeed by spreading accurate information about Medicaid and organizing working-class people of all races. Somali taxi drivers played a key role by shuttling voters to the polls.
The mayor and governor’s policies once again show that zero-sum politics doesn’t help ordinary white people in the least. Rather, it’s just a convenient strategy for conservatives to win power. Once they do, they govern exclusively in the interests of the elite, hurting the vast majority of the public in the process. But the Maine People’s Alliance’s successful campaign to expand Medicaid shows that solidarity politics is strong and rising in the state, too. The Alliance focused on uniting working-class people around their common interests—and their shared frustration with zero-sum politics.
Themes
Maine has garnered a clear Solidarity Dividend from the Maine People’s Alliance’s multiracial activism. In 2018, the state elected a progressive legislature that passed public health laws to counter the opioid epidemic and significant new labor protections. Across the state, candidates for school boards are focusing on racial justice. And Shane Bouchard, Lewiston’s Republican mayor, ended up resigning over racist jokes he made about slavery.
The Maine People’s Alliance harnessed the momentum it created in the Medicaid campaign to permanently reshape Maine state politics in a more progressive direction. This is what McGhee truly means by the Solidarity Dividend: when a community breaks free from zero-sum thinking, it opens itself up to a whole new realm of political possibilities. Of course, Maine’s future is still deeply uncertain, but McGhee affirms that it appears to be moving in the right direction.
Themes
McGhee presents her five main conclusions about how Americans can build a better society. First, we should move beyond the zero-sum paradigm and try to achieve Solidarity Dividends instead. Second, the way to do this is by “refill[ing] the pool of public goods.” Third, policies should recognize that racism hurts everyone, but they shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Instead, they should direct resources to the nonwhite communities that have suffered the most. Fourth, the best replacement for the zero-sum paradigm is the principle that people “truly do need each other.” And finally, the American people must collectively learn about and reckon with their history of racism in order to move on from it. In the rest of this chapter, she will address each of these points in more depth.
The rest of this chapter serves as the book’s conclusion. But McGhee wants to keep it practical: rather than drawing grand, lofty conclusions, she identifies the key takeaways from her research. She hopes that these five main points can guide scholars, activists, and policymakers who want to put her research into action and create better public policies. She envisions a policy program that tries to correct for the racism of the past by creating a prosperous future for everyone. Such a program must orient itself toward building out public goods that benefit everyone, while also taking different communities’ specific needs into account. And it must also retool Americans’ collective understanding of their history and inequalities. Over the rest of this chapter, McGhee will go into more depth about each of her five points.
Themes
First, we need Solidarity Dividends, not zero-sum politics. The U.S.’s current system of extreme inequality is unsustainable: a few elites capture all the economic gains, while most Americans can’t afford to pursue education, innovation, or entrepreneurship. This seriously weakens economic growth. Fixing this economy requires solidarity: “the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.” Elites use racism to try and divide working-class people, but they can come together by empathizing across racial lines (like Bridget Hughes, who joined the Fight for $15 after empathizing with a Latina woman who also worked in fast food).
McGhee’s first takeaway is just her book’s primary thesis: Americans must replace zero-sum politics with solidarity politics. Zero-sum politics uses racism to divide people from the top down. This lets politicians legislate in a way that only benefits the ultrawealthy (the tiny minority that least needs help from the government). Solidarity politics, in contrast, unites people across racial lines so that they can pass policies that benefit everyone. It’s far more powerful than zero-sum logic because it starts from the bottom up and is rooted in personal experience. But it’s often harder to get off the ground because it doesn’t have concentrated power and corporate money behind it. So once people (and communities) make the switch from zero-sum to solidarity, they seldom come back. The difficulty is just getting them to make this switch in the first place. But the Maine People’s Alliance, Richmond’s campaign against pollution, and the Fight for $15 all show that it can happen, and it can succeed.
Themes
Second, we need public goods. 21st-century problems like inequality and climate change require collective political responses. But the U.S.’s capacity for collective action is weak because many Americans have turned against the very ideas of government action and public goods. The solution is to “refill the pool” by holding the government to higher standards, giving it the resources it needs, and engaging young people in public service jobs—like installing renewable energy capacity, caring for the young and elderly, and rebuilding infrastructure (including public pools). These jobs should connect young people from different backgrounds and parts of the country.
McGhee’s second takeaway is that, over the last 50 years, zero-sum thinking has destroyed the U.S.’s ability to truly govern itself because it has destroyed Americans’ faith in the very idea of government. The U.S. is simply no longer capable of the kind of grand collective action that lifted it out of the Great Depression, built its middle class, helped it win World War II, and so on. But by revitalizing the nation’s politics around the model of solidarity, McGhee argues, Americans can rebuild this capacity and meet the challenges they face today.
Themes
Third, we should tailor policies to help the most vulnerable through “targeted universalism.” This means choosing a universal goal for society, but trying to achieve this goal through targeted strategies that meet each social group’s needs. For instance, to achieve universal homeownership, the U.S. needs policies that specifically help Black people buy homes, because the government has deliberately excluded them from homeownership in the past.
“Targeted universalism” helps solve a crucial problem: often, universal programs designed to help everyone end up directing the most help to the people with the most resources. So while such programs do technically help everyone, they wrongly allocate most of the resources to the people who least need them, and they ultimately increase racial inequities instead of reducing them. Instead of just giving everyone a little more than they already have, “targeted universalism” focuses on directing resources where they are needed so that everyone can meet all of their basic needs.
Themes
The government currently tries to promote homeownership by making the interest on mortgages tax-deductible. But this actually gives the most money to the people with the most property, aggravating inequality instead of rectifying it. Instead, the U.S. should help redlining victims with down payments. This would have positive spillover effects: increasing Black homeownership would increase local property taxes and improve local school systems. (In fact, overcoming racial disparities would add $8 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2050.) Homeownership policy should be part of a broader reparations program, like the one that William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen outline in their book From Here to Equality. Such a program would eliminate the racial wealth gap and finally give most Black people the financial freedom to pursue the American Dream.
The U.S.’s mortgage interest deduction policy is a key example of how some universal policies actually worsen inequality. Property owners—who are disproportionately white men—end up saving the most money. And people who cannot afford a down payment—who are disproportionately people of color—don’t get any benefits at all. This creates strange, backwards effects, like massive tax breaks for landlords (but not for the tenants who are actually paying off the landlords’ mortgages). In contrast, down payment assistance for redlining victims would decrease racial inequity by channeling resources to the people who need them. For McGhee and the authors of From Here to Equality, reparations is not a vague principle or hope: it’s a concrete economic policy plan. It involves correcting for the massive historical transfer of wealth from Black to white people (due to slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the financial crisis, and so on) by transferring some of this wealth back to Black people.
Themes
The COVID-19 pandemic also shows how failing to fix racial inequities hurts everyone. The virus disproportionately killed people of color because American society is structured in a deeply unequal way. From lacking health insurance and being an “essential” worker to air pollution to crowded housing, people of color were more vulnerable to COVID-19 in every relevant way. The U.S.’s public health and hospital systems are so weak because the nation has drained the metaphorical pool—or stopped investing in public goods. And the U.S. government is dominated by white men, who often don’t understand the social conditions that everyone else experiences. Above all, McGhee concludes, there should be more women of color leading our democracy.
COVID-19 was central to American politics when McGhee published this book in early 2021. It’s another key example of how policies that appear race-neutral end up worsening racial inequities, simply because wealthier, whiter communities are more able to access those policies’ benefits. “Targeted universalism” calls for investing resources in the communities with the worst hospitals and health outcomes—but the U.S. generally does just the opposite. Of course, the pandemic is also an urgent reason to overhaul the U.S.’s privatized healthcare system in general, as it currently provides the majority of Americans with overpriced, substandard care.
Themes
Fourth, McGhee argues that people must connect with each other across racial lines. Diversity doesn’t mean bringing together different people who have nothing in common; rather, it means different people coming together based on shared values and experiences, even though they don’t necessarily share the same ethnicity or culture.
McGhee rejects the common misconception that diversity is the opposite of unity. Rather, diversity is a kind of unity that depends on values and shared humanity, rather than superficial factors like skin color or shared religion. In fact, for McGhee, true diversity is the foundation for the kind of solidarity politics that she believes can transform the U.S. for the better.
Themes
Of course, diversity can be uncomfortable. But this is why it’s so powerful: in a diverse group, people must think creatively and work harder to reach agreement, so they tend to come up with better solutions. In fact, Columbia Business School professor Katherine W. Phillips and Harvard Business School professor Samuel Sommers have found that diverse groups outperform all-white groups on tasks like a murder mystery game and a mock jury trial. Specifically, white people simply work harder when there are nonwhite people around. This proves that diversity is key to solving our most pressing problems.
Phillips and Sommers’s research once again shows that diversity is actually better for white people than homogeneity—even though they typically choose the second. In a way, this research provides a psychological explanation behind the Solidarity Dividend. People feel discomfort in racially diverse environments because not everyone in the room shares the same assumptions. Sorting out these different assumptions takes work, but since such assumptions often blind people to the truth, the sorting process leads the group to better solutions. Still, as McGhee discussed in the last chapter, white people generally respond to racial discomfort with psychological tricks like denial and projection. Phillips and Sommers’s research suggests that they should learn to push through the discomfort instead.
Themes
Fifth, Americans need to cope with their country’s “racial story” on a collective, national level, through a formal program backed by the government. Cities and universities have already started Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) processes, and Congress is considering replicating these efforts nationally. After studying truth-and-reconciliation commissions in dozens of other countries, nearly 200 experts designed the TRHT system for the U.S.’s specific needs.
In her ninth chapter, McGhee argued that Americans can never truly reckon with their nation’s “racial story” as individuals. Some people (like Julie Christine Johnson) make an effort to learn about racism, but most don’t. Those who do make this effort sometimes end up at odds with their communities. And often, they end up thinking about racism at the scale of individuals and interpersonal relationships, instead of the nation’s whole social, political, and economic system. TRHT is a collective-oriented alternative to individual education. Some of the other countries that have transformed themselves through similar processes include Germany (after World War II), South Africa (after Apartheid), and Canada and Australia (today, as they cope with their histories of land theft and genocide).
Themes
TRHT involves assembling a representative cross-section of a community to participate in guided conversations. The participants tell personal stories about race, then identify how policies have created racial hierarchies in their community (and how new policies can fix them). Then, the attendees identify racism in their stories and rewrite them so that they start from a place of respect for human equality.
While TRHT does involve abstract conversations about race and discrimination, it primarily focuses on how racism affects the particular community where participants live. This makes it very practical: participants can identify specific harms and propose specific policies to fix them. At the same time, TRHT is also narrative in focus. Like McGhee, it views racism as a story that people tell themselves about the way the world works, and it attempts to fight racism by changing these stories.
Themes
Jerry Hawkins, a Black educator who specializes in teaching the young children of recent immigrants, became Dallas’s TRHT program’s director in 2016. He was very skeptical about TRHT until he opened the guidebook. He changed his mind when he saw the question, “Do we need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States?” and learned that TRHT involves doing a “community racial history” and “community visioning process.” Three years later, after interviewing hundreds of people, Jerry’s team published the report “A New Community Vision for Dallas.” The report boldly declares that stolen land and stolen labor are the city’s foundation, then documents a series of striking, lesser-known racist incidents in the city’s history.
Jerry Hawkins’s experience shows how TRHT is not like other diversity and community engagement programs. Rather than simply helping a community accommodate people of color, it aims to fundamentally change a community’s sense of identity. Specifically, TRHT tries to help communities develop a solidarity-based identity, in which every group gets the weight it deserves. Thus, TRHT can help correct the zero-sum assumption that “the people” really means white people, while people of color do not really count as part of the community. For instance, Hawkins’s TRHT commission rewrote Dallas’s history from the perspective of all its people—and not just the white residents who have long monopolized the story.
Themes
Dallas’s TRHT process is also remarkable because it changed its participants’ minds. For instance, a white school superintendent publicly apologized to a Black activist during one of the meetings because he finally understood why she was so outspoken. Lastly and most importantly, the TRHT program has enabled several policy changes, such as racial equity offices in the city and its school system, as well as trainings for top city officials and new historical markers around the city. TRHT participants even met with the publisher of the Dallas Morning News to discuss the paper’s racist covering of police shootings.
McGhee shows that TRHT works: it changes hearts, minds, and laws in a sustainable way. Of course, its success hinges on getting the right people involved—and then on those people reaching a unified conclusion about their community’s racial story. But this is really another of its advantages: because it brings community leaders together, it fosters the kind of empathy and friendship that can lead to solidarity-based political coalitions in the long term. The superintendent and Black activist’s relationship is a clear example. In the future, the tone of their conversations about school policy will certainly improve, and the superintendent is likely to adopt a solidarity mindset for addressing racial justice in the school system.
Themes
One of the experts who developed TRHT, Dr. Gail Christopher, just so happens to be Heather McGhee’s mother. At the very end of her research for this book, on the day that the proposal for a nationwide TRHT process officially entered Congress, McGhee visits her. Dr. Christopher argues that TRHT is powerful because it offers people new beginnings: it helps them free themselves from racist thinking and truly see others as equal human beings, often for the first time. Overcoming racism is “bending that moral arc toward justice,” Christopher continues, quoting Dr. King.
McGhee leaves the reader with one final, inspiring image: a mother and daughter uniting around their shared hope that the U.S. can truly reckon with its racist past and achieve its promise of liberty, equality, and justice for all. Like a form of collective therapy, TRHT can help Americans overcome their deep-set tendencies toward zero-sum thinking. And, if all goes well, it can leave Americans with a new vision of who they are as a nation: not a white country where people of color are guests, but rather a diverse democracy that seeks to overcome its history of racism and violence so that all of its people can truly belong.
Themes
But truly building a brighter future, McGhee concludes, will require overcoming the idea of human hierarchy that has always been at the core of the U.S.’s public policy. The future depends on the question: “Who is an American, and what are we to one another?” Embracing demographic change and expanding our vision of “We the People” are the best ways to fulfill America’s long-elusive promise of freedom, justice, and equality.
McGhee closes by highlighting two key reasons why her research matters. First, the issues that she has addressed define the core of American identity. And second, this core identity will determine how the U.S. copes with the challenges it will face in the coming century. Zero-sum thinking has always dominated, to everyone’s detriment, but now that the U.S. will soon have a nonwhite majority, solidarity thinking is the only way forward.
Themes
