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Chapter 1
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
The U.S. has always had enough resources to provide the world’s best services to its people. But it chooses not to, and its government spending and infrastructure are essentially the worst in the industrialized world. A team of researchers whom McGhee met while working at Demos suggested that many Americans don’t even understand what the government does. McGhee suspects that it's also because Americans associate public services with “lazy Black people,” but the researchers never even considered race.
McGhee connects the U.S.’s specific policy failures to Americans’ broader skepticism about government. But it’s difficult to separate correlation from causality: perhaps Americans don’t trust the government because the government doesn’t function well, or perhaps the government doesn’t function well because Americans don’t expect or encourage it to. Or perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Of course, McGhee will specifically show how racism turned Americans against the government by teaching them to reject public life and goods in general.
Themes
In the 1850s, the abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper pointed out that southern states had far fewer schools and libraries than northern ones. This was because slavery gave plantation owners virtually all the wealth and power, and they had no incentive to invest in public services. This helps explain why the South has always been poorer than the North. In fact, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn found that counties that were more dependent on slavery in 1860 are still poorer in 2000.
More than 150 years apart, Helper and Nunn’s research reached the same conclusion: Southern plantation society created inferior public goods and services for all of its citizens (white as well as Black) because it was more unequal and exploitative. A small elite hoarded so much power that they could get away with ignoring the needs of the vast majority.
Themes
The government’s purpose is to help society build the kind of shared services that nobody can build alone. But the U.S. has long restricted such services to white people. For instance, the 1862 Homestead Act gifted white families 160 acres of Indigenous land each. In the 1930s, the government began insuring mortgages, but only in white neighborhoods. The New Deal’s worker protection laws, the G.I. Bill’s college tuition grants, the federal highway system, and the Social Security system were all also designed to exclude nonwhite people. As a result, by the 1960s, the U.S. had “a large, secure, and white middle class” whose identity is largely based on their supposed superiority to people of color. Surely enough, since the civil rights movement, this white middle class has started to turn against the same government programs.
McGhee makes three key points through her brief history of government services in the U.S. First, she points out that a government is effective if it creates public goods (like infrastructure and social programs) that benefit the majority of its citizens. Second, she explains that the U.S. government used to do this—which raises the question of why it doesn’t anymore. And finally, she highlights the way that these public goods were restricted to white people: the government’s goal wasn’t to provide for the whole public, but only for the white public. An overarching picture starts coming together: the U.S. government was ambitious and effective when it viewed its mission as providing for white people, but it shut itself down when it had to start providing for all of the American people.
Themes
In the 1920s and 1930s, American cities started building thousands of grand, public swimming pools. They were supposed to be “social melting pots” where Americans from different ethnic backgrounds could come together—as long as they were white. In 1950s Baltimore, after a series of Black children drowned in the river, the NAACP successfully forced the city to integrate the pools. But white people stopped going to them. This pattern repeated around the country. Many cities privatized their pools so that they could restrict access to white people.
Baltimore’s public swimming pools symbolize the pattern that McGhee has identified: the U.S. cares about providing public services for white people, but it withdraws those services when it’s expected to extend them to people of color, too. This isn’t just because a few nefarious government officials decide as much—rather, it’s because white people pressure the government to make the change. McGhee proposes that this is classic zero-sum thinking: white Americans view sharing public services with nonwhite Americans as tantamount to losing out.
Themes
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Montgomery, Alabama officials even drained their pool instead of integrating it. In fact, Montgomery closed down all of its public parks, its community center, and even its zoo. When McGhee visits the site of Montgomery’s old pool in 2019, an elderly white couple in a car tells her that they remember the pool, but then they roll up their windows and refuse to keep talking to her.
Montgomery’s extreme reaction to integration shows how deeply racism influences white people’s attitude toward the government and its services. Ultimately, everyone ended up worse off: nobody got the beautiful public services that their city could have afforded. (At best, those who could afford it ended up with private versions of them.)
Themes
Many other cities, like New Orleans, also shut down their pools. After St. Louis integrated its grandiose pool, a white mob rioted and attacked Black swimmers. Eventually, white swimmers stopped going and the pool shut down. But in 1971, the Supreme Court affirmed that it is legal to close public services instead of desegregating them. By then, most white Americans were already paying for private segregated pools, or building pools in their backyards, instead of using integrated public pools for free.
Most Americans who have come of age in the last half-century are likely used to the nation’s present distribution of swimming pools: the vast majority of pools are private. While some affluent white Americans go to private recreation clubs or suburban community pools, public pools primarily serve people of color living in a few major cities. But most Americans likely don’t know that there’s a long, tense history behind this arrangement—or that it could have easily been different.
Themes
National poll data shows that, in 1960, 70 percent of white Americans wanted the government to guarantee jobs and basic needs for everyone. But by 1964, this number fell to just 35 percent, and it has never recovered. This was a reaction to the civil rights movement, which was demanding the same economic benefits for Black people, too.
This poll clearly shows how zero-sum thinking turned a significant number of white people against social policy—not a majority, but enough to swing national politics. This cohort supported public goods within the context of segregation but turned against them after the civil rights movement began demanding equality. This isn’t because white people didn’t want the benefits of these policies, McGhee suggests, but rather because they felt that sharing these benefits with nonwhite people would eliminate the racial hierarchy to which they were attached.
Themes
While the idea that white people are biologically superior to Black people has largely disappeared, most white people now believe that they are superior to Black people because of their behavior and culture. Researchers call this idea “racial resentment” and have shown that it explains why most white people still do not support policies that would bring about racial equality. In fact, McGhee’s research has found that racial resentment closely correlates with white opposition to government spending in general. White people are so against the government helping those they deem “inferior and undeserving” that they undermine themselves in the process.
McGhee emphasizes the switch from biological to behavioral and cultural racism in order to fight the misconception that racism has not shaped policy since the civil rights movement. Rather, McGhee argues, zero-sum thinking has merely taken on a new form. Previously, white people insisted that the government prioritize their interests in order to maintain the racial hierarchy. But now, they try to maintain that hierarchy by stopping the government from acting at all, because they assume that government action will benefit people of color. In short, opposition to government is the new form of segregationism.
Themes
Racial resentment has increased because, as racial equality took a step forward in the 1960s, economic equality took a step backwards. For 30 years, white political, labor, and business leaders had worked together to ensure that white male workers reaped the benefits of the nation’s rapid economic growth. But then, women and nonwhite people started demanding the same treatment.
The economic story is similar to the political one: hard-won collective institutions built the white middle class, which withdrew from those institutions once they had to start sharing them with people of color. The implication is that if those institutions were still around, the U.S. economy would likely be far more equal. In this way, racism helps explain the nation’s spiraling inequality since the 1970s.
Themes
The Reagan administration began pushing the idea that the government was taking white people’s money and giving it to undeserving Black people. In reality, welfare is only a tiny part of the government’s budget, and it mostly benefits white people. But by playing on the age-old trope of lazy Black people, Republicans convinced most white people “that Black Americans take more than [they] give to society.” Then, they used this idea to justify eroding the government’s power to regulate corporations and tax the wealthy.
Reagan’s messaging explains why, today, so many white Americans associate the government primarily with welfare spending on Black people. This has never accurately reflected what the government does, but it has always served as a powerful tool for translating racial resentment into anti-government sentiment. As McGhee explains here, the primary motivation behind this strategy was to give the wealthy and powerful even more wealth and power.
Themes
Today, most white Americans still vote Republican. But while the Republican Party’s two main policy positions are maintaining a private healthcare system and cutting taxes, approximately half of Republicans actually favor a public Medicaid for All system and increasing taxes for the wealthy. And while white voters claim that they’re not racist, psychologists find that they respond to conversations about race with “demonization, distrust, zero-sum thinking, resistance to change, and resource hoarding.” Some do not know how race influences their judgments, and many simply refuse to admit it.
Zero-sum thinking about the government explains why white voters still turn out for the Republican Party, despite its unpopular policy positions. Of course, this suggests that white voters care more about punishing people of color than they do about helping themselves. But the research about white people’s psychological reactions to race helps show why: all of the behaviors that the study cites help white people preserve, justify, and strengthen the nation’s racial hierarchy.
Themes
White Republicans generally repeat the narratives that they hear from conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Notably, these figures portrayed Obama’s stimulus policies as an anti-white redistribution plot, when they were actually designed to help all Americans recover from the financial crisis. This example shows how racism hurts white Americans by forcing them to choose “between class interest and perceived racial interest”—and they consistently choose race. Research shows that, if this hadn’t happened, U.S. social policies would be similar to northern European countries’ today.
McGhee briefly summarizes why government fails in the U.S. White voters choose their “perceived racial interest”—their desire to stay at the top of the racial hierarchy—over their actual “class interest.” This also helps explain the Republican Party’s appeal to white voters: it promises them that, even if their lives won’t improve, at least they will continue to be better than people of color’s. Finally, the research that McGhee cites at the very end of the chapter suggests that racism isn’t just one reason why Americans don’t have “nice things”—it’s actually the main reason.
Themes
