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Chapter 6
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 remembers the harassment that she experienced and the alienation that she felt as a young Black girl at an elite, mostly white rural boarding school. Ever since, she has spent most of her life in white-dominated spaces, and she has learned that “white people are the most segregated people in America.” Usually, Americans reserve the word “segregation” for spaces that are all people of color, but in reality, white people are responsible for excluding other groups and hoarding resources for themselves. Today, “white people value diversity but rarely live it”—typically, their neighborhoods are more than three-fourths white.
Usually, conversations about “segregation” are framed from a white perspective: they treat all-white spaces as normal, but other racially uniform spaces as “segregated.” McGhee turns this assumption around in order to highlight how power and policy have shaped the present: white people have forcibly segregated the U.S. in order to keep people of color out of their spaces. So policy experts should be thinking about how to integrate white spaces, not “segregated” nonwhite ones.
Themes
Americans usually don’t realize that the government is responsible for segregating the U.S. In fact, northern cities forced Black residents into segregated neighborhoods long before southern ones did—the South was actually integrated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. But in the 1880s, Jim Crow laws spread in the South, dividing public space across a color line. The U.S. became one of the most racially segregated societies in modern history, behind only Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa.
McGhee emphasizes that segregation was not a natural or informal process—rather, the government actively segregated the nation through public policy and violence. Some readers might find it shocking that McGhee compares the U.S. to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, but this reaction only underlines how little most Americans know about their history.
Themes
As McGhee explained in Chapter Four, the government used redlining and mortgage discrimination to enforce housing segregation across the country. Later, urban planners started routing highways through nonwhite neighborhoods for the same reason. Today, residential segregation persists, but in different ways. Most importantly, zoning laws in white neighborhoods have restricted construction to single-family homes, which has kept those neighborhoods unaffordable for Black buyers (who long could not access mortgages). Of course, this practice has also hurt everyone by making the U.S. housing market extremely unaffordable.
Segregation did not suddenly end after the civil rights movement, as many Americans assume. In fact, equal housing opportunity has never existed in the U.S. From the 1960s onward, the government merely replaced segregation and redlining with a series of new urban planning policies designed to create the same effect. And the discriminatory lending policies that McGhee explored in Chapter Four ensured that the playing field remained uneven well into the 2000s. The racial wealth gap still ensures that wealthy, well-resourced neighborhoods remain all or nearly all white. So simply ending discriminatory laws and zoning is not enough to create housing equity today. Rather, governments must actively undo past discriminatory policies in order to create a level playing field.
Themes
McGhee is from a middle-class Black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Her maternal grandmother bought the house where she grew up on a high-interest contract, and her paternal grandparents lived in a single-family home in a wealthy adjoining Black neighborhood. McGhee’s paternal grandmother explained that everyone in her community looked out for one another because they all went “from terror and sharecropping […] to deeds and degrees. In just one generation.”
McGhee’s upbringing shows that some Black families did manage to build wealth in the 20th century, even though they didn’t have the same tools or support for doing so as white people. Her family’s story also shows how homeownership gives families of color the resources and stability that they need in order to thrive. Indeed, if the U.S. finally decides to correct for centuries of housing discrimination through policy, then countless families will have the same opportunity to achieve “deeds and degrees” as McGhee’s parents and grandparents did.
Themes
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Later in life, McGhee learned that her neighborhood went from 90 percent white to 60 percent Black just in the 1950s. (It was above 90 percent Black by the time she was born.) When McGhee went to boarding school near Boston, where “Black meant poor,” she realized how close-knit and prosperous her own Black community in Chicago was. She also realized that, while most Black people know lots about white people, most white people know next to nothing about Black people.
By describing the contrast between Boston and her middle-class childhood neighborhood, McGhee highlights how unusual the U.S.’s racial inequality is—it simply doesn’t seem natural or inevitable to people who didn’t grow up in it. Meanwhile, her experience at school explains how she learned that “white people are the most segregated people in America.”
Themes
In fact, research shows that a solid majority of white people have all-white social networks, even as public opinion celebrates diversity and integration. In one study, on average, white people say they want to live in neighborhoods that are just under half white, but they look for housing in areas that are about two-thirds white, and they live in neighborhoods that are about three-quarters white. In another study, white people rated the same neighborhood as less desirable if they saw Black people walking through it than if it appeared to be all-white.
McGhee homes in on the contradiction between white public opinion and the way that white people actually live. This underlines how the solution to racial inequality is to integrate white spaces: white people have to change their expectations, networks, and neighborhoods in order to spread opportunity more equally. Of course, white people do not necessarily avoid integrated neighborhoods because they hate people of color. For instance, they may know that racism increases property values in all-white neighborhoods, so reluctantly decide to live in those neighborhoods to maximize their financial return.
Themes
White people choose segregation because of public policy, which created a racial wealth gap. As a result, most nonwhite families simply can’t afford to live in white neighborhoods, and when white people move into nonwhite neighborhoods, they cause “gentrification and displacement [rather] than enduring integration.” The solution is affordable housing. While developers, homeowners, and local governments complain that affordable housing is too costly, researchers have found that segregation costs cities billions of dollars.
Even when white people want to live in integrated neighborhoods, this usually has unintended negative consequences. This further proves that simply making white people less racist will do little to improve the housing market. Rather, as McGhee concludes here, integrating American neighborhoods will require systemic policy changes to reshape the basic financial incentives surrounding homeownership and eventually close the racial wealth gap.
Themes
For instance, segregation costs Chicago costs $8 billion per year; if Chicago were only as segregated as the rest of the U.S., its homicide rate would be 30 percent lower, and its life expectancy and overall property values would be higher. This would also significantly reduce pollution. Many Americans know that industry disproportionally locates toxic pollution in nonwhite neighborhoods, but recent environmental health research shows that white people are also worse off in segregated cities. This is because pollution easily crosses neighborhood lines and segregated cities lack the interracial coalitions that can fight to reduce overall levels of pollution.
These statistics unambiguously prove a principle that McGhee has emphasized throughout the book: white people benefit more from fighting racism than from preserving it. This is because racial inequality not only concentrates social problems like crime and pollution in communities of color: it also increases the overall severity of those problems. In fact, the next chapter will specifically focus on how this effect worsens pollution and climate change. These are especially powerful examples because pollution and climate change simply cannot stay contained in communities of color.
Themes
As Robin DiAngelo has pointed out, when white people discuss “good schools,” they usually mean all-white schools—even if they don’t consciously realize it. Of course, many schools serving students of color are inadequate because they are underfunded. And they are underfunded because policy dictates that school funding depends on local property taxes, so wealthier communities have better schools. Today, there are a select few wealthy, all-white school districts; many poor, majority-minority districts; and a large number of private schools that serve the rest of the white population. On average, homes in the “good” school districts cost 77 percent more and go up in value much faster. White families pay a premium to live in these districts, while most families of color are priced out of them.
“Good schools” is just a thin euphemism designed to cover up white people’s preference for segregation. And once again, government policy enables and defends this segregation. Most of all, property tax law ensures that residential segregation translates into a segregated, unequal school system, in which white families can hoard resources rather than truly investing in a common system to educate the whole nation. Then, this school system further shapes property prices and people’s lifelong incomes, which leads to even deeper racial and class segregation. For McGhee, the solution is clear: breaking this cycle requires changing public policy, so that tax dollars subsidize integration instead of segregation.
Themes
However, white families actually do their children a disservice by buying into all-white enclaves. Research shows that, at racially diverse schools, white children perform better on tests, learn better critical thinking and cultural competency skills, and become more civically engaged than they do at segregated schools.
McGhee questions how white parents evaluate the quality of their children’s education—by most metrics, they should actually send their kids to diverse schools, not all-white “good schools.” Indeed, McGhee asks whether the obsession with “good schools” is about the quality of education at all. Instead, she suggests, it may actually be about maintaining the privileges that white families associate with living in segregated enclaves.
Themes
In the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court famously rejected “separate but equal” schools and ordered integration across the South. While activists and lawyers focused on the fact that Black schools weren’t truly equal, the court’s decision focused on separate schools, which social scientists considered harmful to Black children. But the court ignored the social scientists’ analysis of how separate schools would hurt white children by teaching them “unrealistic and non-adaptive” strategies for achieving status and evaluating themselves. It would be particularly disturbing, the social scientists argued, for white students to learn about principles like equality and justice from an institution that was obviously unjust and unequal. After all, children start absorbing messages about race by three or four years old.
By focusing on “separate” instead of “equal,” McGhee suggests, the Court overlooked the central problem with Jim Crow: the quality of Black students’ education. Worse still, thanks to this ruling, most Americans now assume that their country is racially equal just because the law no longer mandates segregation. (However, as McGhee has pointed out, the law still supports segregation.) Meanwhile, the research about how segregated, unequal schools fail to teach morality to white youth still applies today. As McGhee has repeatedly pointed out throughout her book, white people are unaware and uncomfortable about racism largely because they are used to all-white environments and have little experience interacting with people of color as equals.
Themes
In her quest to find families who chose integration over segregation, McGhee meets Ali Tataka, a Japanese and Italian American woman whose husband is Sri Lankan from Singapore. When they moved to Austin, they settled into a rich, all-white neighborhood with “good schools” for their daughters. But their classmates’ parents were competitive, superficial, and manipulative. Ali couldn’t stand the way they over-involved themselves in the school, circumventing rules to try and help their children get ahead. So she joined a parents’ group called Integrated Schools and decided “to desegregate [her] kids.” They now attend a much poorer, mostly Black and Latinx school on the other side of town. They are learning far more about themselves, their peers, and their society; Ali is completely satisfied with her decision.
Many white, privileged, or upwardly-mobile parents support school integration in theory, but are reluctant to try it out on their children in practice. To such parents, the time-tested “good schools” just seem to be a safer bet. But McGhee tells Ali Tataka’s story in order to show such parents that they have nothing to fear. “Good schools” have plenty of psychological and social disadvantages. In particular, they teach young people zero-sum thinking by presenting education as competition, not collaboration. McGhee encourages parents to ask whether test scores and college admissions really matter more to children later in life than social awareness and interpersonal skills.
Themes
In Poughkeepsie, New York, Tracy Wright-Mauer became an integrator by accident: she moved into a neighborhood she loved and sent her children to the local public elementary school, which was almost all Black. As in many U.S. cities, Poughkeepsie’s wealthiest, whitest area broke off from the rest of the city to form its own school district decades ago. In short, the beneficiaries of an exclusionary housing market are leveraging their advantages to hoard educational resources for themselves, too. Tracy’s children’s school might have had a lower test score average than the city’s whiter schools, but her children learned a wealth of social and emotional skills that they never would have otherwise. They are used to diversity, unlike most white people—and they still did well on their tests and went to college.
Tracy Wright-Mauer’s story shows that, by choosing where to send their children, white parents essentially decide whether to treat education as a public good or a private one. They can place their faith in the public education system, which is designed to serve all, but will treat their children as equals to people of color. Or they can choose to break away from the public system in order to try and give their children a competitive advantage over everyone else. By breaking off from the city of Poughkeepsie, the white parents effectively chose the second option, which is a form of zero-sum thinking. But McGhee argues that they gained far less than they imagined. In fact, McGhee concludes, white parents simply place far too much emphasis on their children’s schools, and this hurts everyone by creating a highly unequal, winner-takes-all education system that deprives most children of the opportunity to thrive.
Themes
