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Themes
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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
While breastfeeding her three-week-old son one evening, McGhee reads an article about how human-caused climate change is making the planet increasingly uninhabitable. But humans can also fix the problem by overhauling our energy system. After all, renewable energy is finally inexpensive enough to truly compete with fossil fuels. The U.S. should be leading this transformation, especially because it’s responsible for more emissions than any other country. But the U.S. is also the only major economy where a conservative political faction simply denies that the climate crisis exists at all. Of course, American conservatives are nearly all white.
Just like in healthcare, education, and unionization, the U.S. lags behind its peer countries in addressing climate change. The immediate reason for this disparity—the Republican Party—is obvious, McGhee suggests. But McGhee strongly believes that there’s an even deeper reason behind the Republican Party’s climate denial: racism. This may seem counterintuitive, as building new energy infrastructure seems to have nothing to do with race, but McGhee has already demonstrated how racism influences conservatives’ attitudes about government and public policy in general.
Themes
In 2019, the Oregon state Republican party refused to attend a vote on a cap-and-trade policy that would have forced polluters to pay for their emissions. The Democrats gave up; the next year, the Republicans used the same tactic to block the bill again. This strategy reminds McGhee of the communities that drained their public pools. But the climate walkout didn’t appear to have anything to do with race. As climate activist May Boeve tells McGhee, the major national climate organizations attribute climate change denial to lobbying and greed, not racism.
The Republican obstructionism reminds McGhee of the drained pools because both follow the same logic of extremist overkill. Oregon Republicans shut down the whole legislative process to avoid voting on a bill they didn’t like, just as Southern conservatives destroyed public pools in order to avoid sharing them with people they didn’t like. This is why McGhee thinks climate policy has something to do with racism: this kind of zero-sum, all-or-nothing behavior is rooted in white conservatives’ ideas about themselves and their place in American life, which is in turn rooted in their sense of the nation’s racial hierarchy.
Themes
Large majorities of Black and Latinx Americans want climate action, but only a minority of white Americans does. May Boeve suggests that the climate movement’s white leadership may simply overlook race’s impact on climate politics. Polling data show that white voters turned against climate action when Obama began advocating for it and that climate denial correlates closely with racial resentment. Indeed, a major sociological study by Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap concluded that conservative white men tend to deny climate change for “system justification.” Namely, their sense of self is linked to their faith and status in “the current industrial capitalist order.” They reject the truth about global warming because it challenges this system.
Boeve’s comments show that there’s a fundamental mismatch in the climate movement: its leadership is mostly white, but its base of support is far more diverse. This means that the movement is simply failing to harness all of the talent and energy available to it—and that it needs serious reform in order to succeed. Meanwhile, the polling data suggest that racism impacts climate policy because, as with the Affordable Care Act, white conservatives simply transferred their racist feelings about Obama onto all of the policies he advocated. Finally, the research into “system justification” suggests that white men’s sense of self is tied closely together with the racist, extractive economic system that has enriched them. (Of course, this explains their denial of racism as much as their denial of climate change.) After all, polluting activities like oil extraction, mining, heavy manufacturing, and industrialized agriculture form the economic foundation of the nation’s most conservative regions.
Themes
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McGhee considers how white male politicians often claim that social policies are “bad for the economy” even when research proves that these policies will actually increase economic growth and employment. She realizes that these men are really talking about their own status in the economy, not the economy as a whole. Kirsti M. Jylhä, a Finnish sociologist who lives in Sweden, finds that one strong predictor of global warming denial is “social dominance orientation”—or believing that social hierarchies exist because some groups are just naturally superior to others. According to Jylhä, white men with this mindset know that climate change will harm countless people but just don’t care. They know that they benefit from the system that is causing climate change and just don’t think climate change will affect them.
The speeches McGhee describes are another example of “system justification.” Namely, these white men politicians care less about the health of the overall economy and society than the about preserving the systems of unregulated capitalism and social hierarchy that have built their wealth and power. (This underlines how important it is for policymakers to guide their decisions by research and not whim.) Ultimately, this boils down to zero-sum thinking: white politicians and voters see climate-destroying policies as a way to continue enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense. Of course, this isn’t true—climate change will harm everyone. But as McGhee explained in her first chapter, this zero-sum economic model used to work for white Americans, so they still largely believe in it today.
Themes
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During Jylhä and McGhee’s meeting in Manhattan, a fire alarm goes off, and they have to evacuate the building. On the street, Jylhä explains how, when she came to the U.S., she realized for the first time: “Wow. I am white.” Coming from Sweden, she also finds the U.S.’s widespread poverty surprising. McGhee points out that social dominance orientation is strong in the U.S.—zero-sum thinking is normal, and hatred and neglect for the poor are already built into the system. She also explains how racial resentment typically fuels white opposition to government action in the U.S. On the subway ride home, McGhee contemplates Sweden’s successful social democracy and remembers how southern Democrats blocked President Franklin D. Roosevelt from setting up a similar system in the U.S.
Jylhä’s observations about life in the U.S. highlight how deeply unusual and unequal the American economic system is, compared to those of other developed countries. Like McGhee, Jylhä fundamentally attributes this inequality to Americans’ zero-sum thinking, which prevents them from building the kind of public goods that ensure prosperity for everyone in countries like Sweden. Indeed, while Americans tend to think about their fellow Americans through the lens of zero-sum competition with their fellow citizens, Swedes appear to view one another in terms of solidarity—working together to achieve better collective outcomes. In this sense, Sweden demonstrates what the U.S. can achieve in the future, if it builds a more inclusive, equitable political and economic system.
Themes
The zero-sum idea that climate change won’t affect the rich and powerful is a dangerous lie. Sea level rise, droughts, wildfires, and major storms do and will affect everyone, even if they disproportionately hurt people of color, both in the U.S. and around the world. But historically, the U.S. has gotten away with zero-sum environmental policy: it has long directed toxic pollution to the nonwhite neighborhoods and cities colloquially termed “sacrifice zones.” In the 1970s, lawyer Linda McKeever Bullard and her sociologist husband Dr. Robert Bullard sued the Houston city government for discrimination after finding that 82 percent of the city’s garbage ended up in Black neighborhoods, which only housed 25 percent of the city’s population. Their work laid the groundwork for future environmental justice activism.
Zero-sum thinkers cannot address collective problems, like climate change, because they always think in terms of their own group (like their family, race, or nation) advancing at the expense of its enemies. However, fighting climate change requires seeing that all humans share the same interests. With climate change, there is no upside to be gained at someone else’s expense—just downsides to avoid. However, while it’s nearly impossible to frame climate change in a zero-sum way, it’s quite easy to do so with pollution. Garbage has to go somewhere, and locating it in one area frees other areas from it. Like subprime lenders, polluters are not necessarily motivated by racism. Rather, they face a difficult question—what to do with toxic waste—and racism provides a cheap, easy answer to it.
Themes
McGhee visits the highly polluted Bay Area city of Richmond. Historian Richard Rothstein has chronicled how the government segregated Richmond during World War II. It subsidized the construction of brand new suburbs exclusively for white factory workers, while relocating Black workers to ramshackle housing in unincorporated North Richmond, which had “no roads, streetlights, water, or sewage.” Today, there are about 350 toxic dumping areas in Richmond—most notably, a massive Chevron oil refinery. However, Richmond’s diverse residents managed to take back the city council, confront Chevron, and win the Solidarity Dividend of health.
Richmond’s development is a classic example of how the government segregated American cities by implementing zero-sum policies that directed virtually all resources towards white people. This segregation divided residents politically and made it easier for the government to turn North Richmond into a “sacrifice zone.” After all, North Richmond’s mostly Black residents have generally had fewer resources and less political power than the neighboring towns’ white residents. But the activists’ success demonstrates that even disadvantaged communities can wield significant power when they organize.
Themes
Laotian refugee Torm Nompraseurt, who has lived in Richmond for nearly 50 years, introduces McGhee to other local activists. The city has few stores but endless factories and highways; its residents have extraordinarily high rates of asthma, heart disease, and cancer. The vast Chevron refinery, which is ringed by a six-mile fence, releases over half a ton of toxic pollution into the air every day. One summer day in 2012, the refinery caught fire because of a maintenance issue that Chevron had long ignored. The residents had to stay inside and block their doors and windows to avoid breathing the toxic smoke. 15,000 people got sick and needed medical attention.
The pollution-spewing highways and factories are proof that Richmond is now a “sacrifice zone,” and the residents’ health problems show what living in a “sacrifice zone” does to people. The government’s indifferent, ineffective response to the Chevron fire shows that the “sacrifice zone” mentality is specifically based on zero-sum thinking. Namely, it relies on the assumption that certain groups of people simply do not have political power, and so it is fine for the government to harm them.
Themes
The wealthy, white community of Point Richmond sits right next to the refinery, but Torm claims that its residents don’t get sick because the wind always blows in the other direction, toward the poorer, 97 percent-nonwhite North Richmond. However, air quality data shows that Point Richmond is just as contaminated as North Richmond. As McGhee puts it, the two neighborhoods are “still living under the same sky.”
“Living under the same sky” is a powerful metaphor for the basic insight behind McGhee’s book: zero-sum thinking doesn’t work because it forgets that everybody in society is interconnected. The effects of pollution simply do not stay limited to the places designated as “sacrifice zones.” It’s notable that Torm Nompraseurt believes zero-sum politics does work—this shows how powerful the zero-sum framework remains U.S. politics today.
Themes
In a 2012 study, economist Michael Ash found that well-off white people in segregated, unequal cities get exposed to more pollution than their counterparts in more equal, integrated cities. Ash argues that this is because powerful people in unequal cities “put on blinders”—they assume that pollution will only affect people who are unlike them. As a result, they don’t care about limiting the total amount of pollution, and lots of that pollution ends up reaching their wealthier, whiter communities, too. Still, limiting pollution is cheap and effective, so long as there’s political will.
Ash’s study provides clear empirical evidence against the zero-sum paradigm. Racism doesn’t hurt people of color for white people’s benefit: it hurts everyone, and nobody benefits. This is because the total amount of pollution in a community isn’t fixed. Rather, pollution can always be cleaned up—it is simply not true that there has to be a “sacrifice zone” somewhere. But a community’s collective political mobilization determines whether it can actually keep pollution out. And when white people monopolize power in diverse, segregated cities like Richmond, they tend to accept pollution and create “sacrifice zones” rather than requiring cleanup.
Themes
Chevron long controlled Richmond’s local politics by paying off city council candidates and community groups. But then, activists like Torm Nompraseurt formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance, won a majority on the city council, and started imposing regulations on Chevron. The new council invested in a massive, publicly-owned solar power plant, built with local labor, which now powers the city. The council’s guiding aim is to create a “Just Transition”—meaning to ensure that the move to a renewable economy helps the people who have been most hurt by fossil fuels. The city council has even started pushing for state-level policy changes.
The Richmond Progressive Alliance’s success is a true David-and-Goliath story. It shows that democracy can still work, even in an era of concentrated corporate power. Namely, disadvantaged American communities often have far more power than they realize, and they can unlock this power through grassroots organizing. But to do so, they must elevate their common goals above the factors that divide them. The way to do this is by cultivating a solidarity mindset—which is the opposite of zero-sum thinking.
Themes
Climate skeptics are still stuck in zero-sum thinking, but the Richmond city council’s approach proves that green energy investment is “a win-win” for both the environment and the economy. Interracial, inter-class climate justice movements are spreading fast around the globe. And now, U.S. political leaders are uniting around the popular proposal of a Green New Deal, or a coordinated nationwide investment in a Just Transition. When May Boeve visits McGhee in 2019, she is more optimistic about the climate movement’s future than ever before.
Richmond demonstrates how cities can generate prosperity by fighting climate change. Specifically, they can replace fossil fuel infrastructure, which generates profits for faraway shareholders, with renewable projects that power and pay the local community. On a national scale, McGhee and Boeve suggest, decentralizing the power grid can also decentralize political power by giving communities the opportunity to make their own decisions about infrastructure investment, energy production, and pollution. McGhee hopes that this challenge will spur American towns and cities to form the more democratic, participatory local institutions they deserve.
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