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Chapter 2
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
From building state universities in the 1800s to paying veterans’ tuition through the G.I. Bill after World War II, the U.S. government long provided massive support for Americans to attend college. In the 1970s, when nearly all students were white, public universities were primarily funded by the government and tuition cost an average of $617 a year. But by 2017, 40 percent of students are people of color, public spending on colleges has plummeted, and tuition and student debt have skyrocketed. Financial aid has shifted from mostly grants to mostly loans.
Until the concluding chapter, the rest of McGhee’s book will focus on specific ways that the U.S. has “drained the pool”—or destroyed public goods instead of spreading them equitably. The university system is a key example: the U.S. made a collective decision to educate the white middle class from the 1940s to the 1970s, but stopped investing in higher education once it became more racially equitable.
Themes
The new “debt-for-diploma system” particularly harms Black students, who must borrow far more because they have far less family wealth. McGhee is 40 and still has student loans, as do all of her Black friends. But the system also harms white graduates: 63 percent of them take on debt. McGhee asks why the U.S. has chosen to make college, the key for entering the middle class, totally inaccessible to working-class families. This is pure “self-sabotage.” By keeping college affordable, other developed countries have easily outpaced the U.S.
The “debt-for-diploma system” weaponizes the racial wealth gap to ensure that college remains more accessible to white people than to people of color. In this way, it maintains the racial hierarchy. However, it also hurts all young people by forcing them to start their careers saddled with debt. And, as McGhee points out, it also harms the nation’s overall economic competitiveness by dissuading Americans from getting the higher education that is necessary for specialized jobs in the 21st century. Thus, it’s yet another example of how zero-sum economic thinking harms the whole nation.
Themes
Racism explains the collapse of free public education in the U.S., just like it explains the drained public swimming pools. For instance, California leads the U.S. in innovation today in part because it built the nation’s first free, universal higher education system in the late 1800s. But in the 1970s, the state’s white voters passed a law capping property taxes, which devastated school funding. The campaign for this law was based on racist fearmongering about integration and Mexican immigrants.
California’s success shows how investment in public goods pays off in the long term. But the property tax cap, which gradually choked off the education system’s funding, demonstrates that people with wealth and power have to actively support this kind of public investment. And racism can threaten this support because it prevents the wealthy and powerful from identifying with the rest of the public.
Themes
While cutting funding to colleges and universities, states have dramatically ramped up spending on policing and incarceration. In the 1970s, the collapse in American manufacturing particularly hurt Black city-dwellers. The federal government responded by cutting spending on social programs and launching the war on drugs, which created the current system of mass incarceration. Now, Black people are six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes than white people, even though they use drugs at the same rate. However, as opiate and methamphetamine use have grown in suburban and rural America, the war on drugs is starting to fail white people, too.
McGhee suggests that political leaders chose to shift resources from education to policing in order to prevent the generation of Black Americans growing up after the civil rights movement from entering the middle class. Indeed, researchers, activists, and civil rights attorneys like Michelle Alexander have argued that the war on drugs is a replacement for Jim Crow: a new social system designed to keep Black people at the bottom of the social, economic, and political hierarchy. In turn, this kept white people on the top of the hierarchy, if only because it has become extremely difficult for anyone to enter the middle and upper classes since 1970.
Themes
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Similarly, the majority of Americans with student debt are now white. McGhee briefly profiles a 39-year-old who lives at home, works two jobs, and pays 75 percent of his earnings towards his loans; a young teacher who has paid $28,000 towards her loans but barely reduced the balance; and a disabled, bankrupt senior who is being sued over his loans. Many Americans with student debt regret going to college at all.
The three people McGhee profiles reflect how the pre-2022 student debt system keeps college-educated Americans from achieving the financial stability traditionally associated with joining the middle class. It’s far worse for those who don’t graduate. Ultimately, the drug epidemic and the student debt crisis show how racist policies have a boomerang effect: they end up hurting white people, too. Specifically, although they disproportionately hurt Black people, most of the people they hurt are white.
Themes
The U.S.’s healthcare system is even more regressive than its education system. Americans pay more and fare worse than people in any other developed country. This is because the U.S. is the only one without universal coverage. In the 1940s, senator Claude Pepper began campaigning for universal healthcare. But the American Medical Association lobbied aggressively against the idea, which they painted as a socialist, integrationist conspiracy. It also publicized images of Pepper with Black people, which contributed to him losing reelection. President Truman took up Pepper’s plan but never implemented it. Ultimately, White Americans—who were 90 percent of the population—undermined universal healthcare for themselves simply because they didn’t want people of color to have it, too.
The same pattern repeats itself: conservatives shut down a government investment in public goods—and kept a lucrative private market open—by convincing white voters that such a policy would primarily benefit people who don’t look like them. Thus, as with its pools and schools, the U.S. has chosen a fractured, privatized healthcare system over a unified, public one. But healthcare is simply cheaper and more effective in a universal system, which can reduce costs and distribute care more efficiently, so the U.S.’s privatized system makes conditions worse for everybody (except the people who own insurance companies).
Themes
In the 1960s, President Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid, which respectively cover the elderly and about half of low-income people. And the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act now subsidizes Americans to buy private insurance. But the U.S. never finished building out a universal system. Moreover, most white Americans still oppose “Obamacare,” and political science research shows that it’s because of racial resentment. In one experiment, white voters supported a public healthcare plan when told it was Bill Clinton’s, but not when told it was Barack Obama’s.
The U.S.’s patchwork of federal programs still doesn’t add up to a truly universal, public system. And because President Obama made building such a system his political priority, healthcare has been one of the most prominent examples of the U.S.’s failure to build effective public services in the 21st century. The study of white voters’ reactions to Obama and Clinton suggests that they oppose public healthcare spending less because they think it is a bad policy than because they associate it with Obama—who, in turn, represents people of color achieving power and status in the U.S.
Themes
Rural hospitals are closing fast around the U.S., particularly in states that rejected Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion option. For instance, rural health expert Don McBeath tells McGhee that uninsured people’s unpaid bills are bankrupting the Texas hospital system, but the state still refuses to expand Medicaid to anyone beyond poor pregnant women. In most southern states, the annual income caps for a family of three to qualify for Medicaid are around $3,000-7,000, but in states that have expanded it, anyone earning less than about $30,000 is eligible—and the federal government foots the bill. In these states, like Arkansas, rural hospitals are thriving.
Texas’s refusal to expand Medicaid is deeply ironic because Medicaid expansion would most benefit white people living in rural areas—it would amount to a massive transfer of resources from the federal government to the Texas state hospital system. But according to McGhee, politicians’ reasoning is likely based on racist stereotypes about people of color mooching off the government. Perhaps more than any other example, this shows how white conservatives often do not understand who really benefits from government spending and policy.
Themes
Political science research has found that states like Texas rejected Medicaid expansion largely because of zero-sum racist thinking: white voters think that Medicaid expansion will harm them, while benefitting Black and Latinx people. And white voters are so overrepresented that their preferences determine policy. While only 41 percent of Texans are white, two-thirds of their state lawmakers are. In meetings, these lawmakers warned that uninsured “freeloaders” would “come out of the woodwork like bugs” to claim government benefits. There was no chance they would vote to expand Medicaid. In fact, Texas governor Greg Abbott has built his political brand around opposing every Obama policy.
Zero-sum thinking turns policy discussions upside-down by convincing people that getting more from the government is actually bad for them. Of course, white voters think this because they interpret positive developments for people of color as negative ones for themselves. This underlines the broader challenge that zero-sum thinking poses to American democracy: how can the U.S. advance if its people refuse to recognize one another as worthy of living good lives?
Themes
As Texas continues refusing to expand Medicaid, uninsured Texans continue dying of preventable and treatable conditions. An organizer named Ron Pollack tells McGhee about John, a white man whose uninsured wife died of stomach cancer. Her dying wish was for John to join Pollack’s bus trip to campaign for universal healthcare. Pollack, a white liberal who has dedicated his life to activism, tells McGhee that racial divisions and a lack of “social solidarity” are the main reasons why the U.S.—the world’s richest country—still doesn’t guarantee basic human rights and necessities to all its people. But McGhee wonders how much progress the U.S. could make if Americans managed to unlock this solidarity.
McGhee makes her case against zero-sum politics even stronger by linking John’s moving story to the hard data that she has provided thus far. In short, John’s experience demonstrates the profound human cost of conservative politics—a cost that conservatives themselves often fail to appreciate, because they don’t recognize the humanity of the people whom their policies affect. In contrast to zero-sum thinking, “social solidarity” would be a system in which people do recognize their fellow citizens’ humanity and seek out policies that benefit them.
Themes
McGhee admits that it’s possible to tell stories about the U.S.’s declining public services without mentioning race. But when she ran Demos’s Race-Class Narrative Project, she learned that most Americans will only listen to such stories until race comes up—even if indirectly, through words like “‘illegals,’ drugs, gangs, and riots.” In other words, ignoring racism can’t beat the zero-sum paradigm; only confronting it head-on can do that. In 2018, a group of Minnesota Democratic activists reworked the state party’s messaging based on Demos’s research. They launched a “Greater Than Fear” campaign showing Minnesotans working together across racial lines, and they won the election.
McGhee’s research poses a crucial challenge for the kind of policy professionals she discussed in the introduction: white technocrats who resist talking about race because it makes them uncomfortable and they don’t think it will persuade anyone. Namely, McGhee’s work shows that Americans always approach political issues through the lens of race, even when they don’t realize it. Once race comes up, knee-jerk reactions start to take precedence over reason and logic, and so effective political messaging has to be race conscious.
Themes
