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Chapter 8
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 attending her school’s Black History Month assembly in sixth grade. Her class sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (“the Black national anthem”) while watching the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. Afterward, a white girl whispered to her, “I wish I was Black.”
This humorous, ironic memory shows how white people struggle to make sense of American racism and its legacy. Clearly, the white girl didn’t “wish [she] was Black” because she wanted to suffer what the people in the movie did, but rather because she didn’t want to feel like the villain in the story of freedom fighters battling oppression.
Themes
The one privilege that Black people have over white people, McGhee muses, is that they’re the protagonists in the national fight for equality. In contrast, white people must learn to see themselves as the villains. They often respond to this uncomfortable truth with rationalizations, resentment, shame, and denial. These reactions shape their political attitudes, which then shape the policies that determine the country’s future. After all, McGhee’s work really boils down to a simple moral question: who belongs in the U.S., and who deserves what?
In this chapter, McGhee focuses on how racism shapes white people’s psychology, moral conscience, and sense of identity. Understanding and responding to these effects is crucial because they all deeply shape political behavior. For instance, McGhee suggests that zero-sum thinking is a psychological strategy that white people use to avoid feeling responsible for building a racist, deeply unequal society.
Themes
Since the U.S. hasn’t gone through a national “truth-and-reconciliation process,” white Americans have to decide individually what to do about racism. This choice is difficult: it is hard to speak up against racism, and far easier to just accept stereotypes and conclude that white people are racism’s true victims.
McGhee contrasts the U.S., which lacks any unified national story about its history of racist violence, with countries that have gone through a formal, nationwide effort to cope with theirs. This is also why McGhee will argue that the U.S. needs a national Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation process (TRHT). So far, with racial reckoning—as with healthcare, pools, and climate change—the U.S. has made individual people responsible for tasks that really should be collective undertakings.
Themes
McGhee meets with ex-neo-Nazi Angela King to try and understand why many white people find racist beliefs so convenient. Angela explains that casual racism was normal in her rural Florida hometown. After suffering serious bullying, she became a bully herself and fell in with a group of violent Nazi kids. For years, Nazism was her excuse to commit acts of violence, avoid responsibility, and blame her failures on Black people. But she befriended Black women in prison and realized that her prejudices were wrong. Her new friends confronted her about her past, and upon her release from prison, she went back to school.
Angela King’s childhood demonstrates how white people can easily fall into racism and political extremism. Notably, King’s racism didn’t come from a specific political philosophy or from bad experiences with people of color. Rather, for King, racism was simply a coping mechanism: it was the easiest tool she could find for dealing with her own pain. Of course, King’s transformation suggests that even the most stubborn, violent racists are capable of change in the right circumstances, when they meet people of color as equals over a sustained period of time. The problem is that, in a racially segregated, unequal society like the U.S., such circumstances are hard to come by. Of course, many racists also respond to racially mixed settings like prison by insisting on segregation and becoming even more racist.
Themes
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Now, Angela King is an activist and public speaker who helps people leave neo-Nazi groups. But she also argues that ordinary white people need to learn about racism: because “no one wants to think they are benefiting from a system that hurts other people,” she explains, “it’s much easier just to pretend like you don’t know.”
Angela King’s transformation shows how individual white people can transform themselves through racial reckoning. McGhee also tells her story in order to suggest what it would look like for the nation as a whole to do the same. Of course, the first step is for white people to squarely acknowledge the truth: that “they are benefiting from a system that hurts other people.” But if they take McGhee’s overarching argument into account, they can also recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way. Namely, they would benefit far more from an equal, integrated system than they do from the current, zero-sum one.
Themes
Just like Angela King scapegoated Black people for her problems in the past, conservative elites blame Latin American immigrants for white Americans’ problems today, from unemployment to cultural decline. They justify this claim by pointing out that immigrating without a visa is illegal—even though virtually all of their own ancestors did the same thing, back when there were no restrictions on white immigration to the U.S. This scapegoating distracts white people from the economic policies that are actually making them worse off. Melanie, a poor white woman from North Carolina, tells McGhee how she talked her parents out of their prejudices by explaining the economic reasons for Black and Mexican people’s behavior.
McGhee’s work focuses on anti-Black racism, which was the politically dominant form of racism from the mid-1800s to the beginning of the 21st century. But anti-Latinx racism is arguably even more central to American politics today. McGhee notes that, historically, xenophobia came first, and laws against undocumented immigration came later. The vast majority of Americans are descended from European immigrants who came in the same circumstances as Latin American immigrants do today—the only difference is race. Moreover, undocumented migration between Mexico and the U.S. was ordinary and widely accepted from the 1700s until the 1950s. In reality, white people don’t oppose undocumented immigration because it’s illegal; rather, it’s illegal because they oppose it, and they oppose it because of zero-sum racist thinking. This is why McGhee believes that fighting prejudice is the key to fighting racist policies.
Themes
Everyone immediately notices the skin color of anyone else they see, but many people still think that the solution to racism is becoming “color blind”—or just pretending that everybody is the same. This is absurd because it ignores history, power, and society. Indeed, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that this line of thought is just a new, more evolved kind of racism. If racism no longer exists, the color blind logic goes, then minority groups must be behind because they are less hardworking, capable, or deserving. Political and legal conservatives also increasingly use the language of color blindness to oppose policies like school integration and collecting official statistics on race.
At worst, the “color blind” strategy is an insidious excuse for refusing to change policy. And at best, it’s a form of magical thinking: it assumes that pretending racism doesn’t exist will make it go away. Like much of American public policy, it mistakenly focuses on individual people instead of the collective. Namely, it tries to change individual attitudes, rather than broader cultural norms and public policies. This is because it views day-to-day casual racism as the primary problem, and not the longstanding inequities that McGhee focuses on (including the racial wealth gap, disparities in healthcare and education, and “sacrifice zones” for toxic pollution).
Themes
Research shows that about 80 percent of white Americans respond to evidence of discrimination through denial: they deny that racism exists, that it’s a serious problem, and/or that it caused the situation in question. But by choosing denial, white people miss out on the chance to learn from people of color and develop empathy. Over time, they can struggle to understand and get along with people who are unlike them. Writers like Wendell Berry and James Baldwin have argued that white people often choose denial to avoid taking responsibility for harming others—even though, on some level, they know that they’re lying to themselves. Baldwin argues that this contradiction leads them to “personal incoherence,” a condition that Berry terms “the hidden wound.”
The 80 percent statistic is powerful: it shows that white people’s psychological defense mechanisms are one of the greatest obstacles for dealing with racism and its legacy. Even hard data is not always enough to persuade white people. (Of course, this explains why McGhee tries to persuade her white readers by mixing such empirical evidence with compelling personal stories.) In a way, white denial is just another version of zero-sum thinking: white people assume that acknowledging and making amends for racism will mean losing something, while people of color benefit. But in reality, reckoning with racism will benefit everybody. Confronting racism, not ignoring it, is the key to healing white people’s “hidden wound.”
Themes
The concept of meritocracy works hand-in-hand with denial: if the U.S. is meritocratic, the thinking goes, then people with money, power, and status probably have those things because they deserve them. This idea makes rich and successful people feel better about their privileges and less guilty about the U.S.’s severe inequality. In fact, psychology research shows that wealthy white people are the most likely of any group to underestimate how unequal the U.S. is. They tend to blame racial inequality on cultural problems like broken families, rather than on public policy and discrimination. Finally, white people overestimate affirmative action’s effect on admissions and hiring, even though factors like legacy preferences and screening for organization “fit” give white people a significant advantage in both these fields.
Meritocracy is an inherently individualistic, zero-sum framework for thinking about society. By framing everything as a competition, meritocracy simply overlooks the possibility that some changes might actually benefit everyone, without putting anyone ahead of anyone else. Worse still, the concept of meritocracy is based on the assumption that people have equal opportunities. This means that people who believe in meritocracy generally assume that the existing rules are fair, perhaps with some limited exceptions. This leads meritocracy proponents to view any changes to the rules as potentially unfair, when in reality, such changes are designed to make an unfair system fairer. The survey data back up this interpretation by showing that white people simply do not see biases in the system that favor them, while they view equality as a form of bias against themselves.
Themes
Next, white fear of Black and brown people leads to widespread racist violence in the U.S. Many states have “Stand Your Ground” laws, which make fear a legal justification for harming or killing someone. Police officers also kill Black Americans at extraordinarily high rates. After all, the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and above all George Floyd convinced millions of people to join the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like hatred, colorblindness, and meritocracy, fear enables white denial about the way racism harms people of color. In fact, fear turns this harm around. It projects a zero-sum mindset onto other people: it supposes that they (people of color) want to take from us (white people). By treating this fear as legitimate, public policy accommodates and affirms this distorted zero-sum mindset. This has tragic consequences for people of color.
Themes
Many Black Lives Matter activists are white, like California high school teacher Maureen Wanket, whose Black former student was killed by the police in 2018. Still, her white colleagues at another school jokingly compared her Black students to zoo animals and asked if she was scared of them—as though they were the perpetrators of violence, not its victims. She was really “scared for them.”
Wanket’s experience suggests that, in most white people’s eyes, Black people pose more of a threat to white people than white people do to Black people. But empirically, just the opposite is true, both historically and today. Still, pop culture, news media, and politicians endlessly repeat the trope of threatening Black people.
Themes
In 2020, several viral videos showed white people reporting Black people to the police for things like napping in public, canvassing voters door-to-door, and (most famously) requesting that a leash be put on a dog. Peg, a progressive white activist in Maine, tells McGhee how she feels her brain’s fear and stress response kick in when she sees a person of color, even though she knows that this is racist and irrational. For instance, she was terrified when a group of Black men approached her friend’s florist shop—even though they were just buying a bouquet of flowers.
These videos demonstrate that many white people view Black people as inherently threatening. Worse, they then use this distorted perception as a justification for controlling Black people through force (such as through policing). Peg admits that much like Maureen Wanket’s colleagues, she learned to automatically fear and dehumanize Black people. In a way, she ends up in zero-sum thinking: when she sees a Black person, she assumes that they are coming to take something from her, even though there is no real threat. Still, her self-preservation instincts kick in—and her instincts for empathy and altruism shut down.
Themes
But this kind of irrational fear makes sense: the U.S. is so segregated that Black and white people scarcely interact, and white people view many low-income Black neighborhoods as “no-go zones.” Moreover, the news overrepresents crimes committed by people of color, even though a large majority of criminals are white, and poor Black neighborhoods have just as much crime as poor white ones. After the media started focusing on conflict and property destruction at Black Lives Matter protests, moderate voters turned against the movement—even though 93 percent of the protests were peaceful. Gun companies even market their products through white fear by spreading messages about racialized “terrorists,” “thugs,” and “criminal immigrants.” But guns are far more likely to be used in suicide than self-defense.
McGhee argues that white people have collectively taught themselves to fear Black people. Readers may ask why they would do such a thing; the answer is that it serves their political interests. It’s not just because fear helps sell guns and maintain segregated neighborhoods—it’s also because fear makes zero-sum thinking far easier. Fear tells white people that Black people want something at their expense. It also leads white people to turn off their emotions and empathy when they see Black people. This makes it much harder for them to view Black people as their political peers—or to team up with them in building a better nation. White support for Black Lives Matter collapsed for precisely this reason: fearmongering convinced white people to revert from a solidarity mindset to a zero-sum mindset.
Themes
In contrast, McGhee’s mother grew up afraid of white people because she knew that they could have murdered her with impunity. This very legitimate fear makes the white fear of Black people look absurd by comparison. McGhee has always wondered whether white people’s true fear is that “people of color would do to them what they have long been doing to us.” Experts call this projection: people attribute their worst characteristics to other people. For instance, Western movies depict Native Americans (the victims of genocide) as villains and white American cowboys (who perpetrated that genocide) as heroes. Stereotypes about Black thievery, hypersexuality, and “ghetto” culture are all forms of projection, too.
Like “color blindness” and meritocracy, racial projection is a psychological tool that allows white people to deny racism’s existence and effects. Put simply, it enables white people to confuse themselves about what is right, what is wrong, and what really happened. This enables them to avoid recognizing their responsibility for violence and inequity, which makes it easier for them to keep supporting zero-sum policies now and in the future. But it also often leads them to lose track of their basic sense of morality and identity.
Themes
In 2018, a retired white man named Ken told McGhee that, even though he supported Black Lives Matter, he couldn’t stand seeing Colin Kaepernick kneel for the national anthem during football games. Ken compared Kaepernick’s protest to “using a shotgun instead of a rifle” because it was “hitting innocent bystanders.” Remarkably, Ken described silent, nonviolent protest against police violence as a form of gun violence directed at white people. Like so many white people, he may have loved the idea of American values like “equality, freedom, liberty, [and] justice,” but he wasn’t willing to actually practice them.
Ken’s rant is a clear example of racial projection. By comparing anti-violence protests to “using a shotgun,” he recasts Black people as the perpetrators of violence instead of the victims (and white people as the victims instead of the perpetrators). To Ken, complaining about the police murdering Black people is a greater violation of American values than the actual murder. This is because, like many white people, he only thinks about whether “equality, freedom, liberty, [and] justice” insofar as they apply to white people. He simply assumes that Black people’s rights matter less—so much less that white discomfort counts more than Black death.
Themes
After becoming the president of Demos, which was mostly white, McGhee led a training process to educate the staff about racial equity and teach them the skills necessary to navigate diverse organizations. By the time she left Demos, it was mostly people of color (because it grew, not because the white people quit). Her staff was grateful for the training because most of the information that Americans receive about race is inaccurate. Fox News, “a propaganda outlet owned by a right-wing billionaire,” is the nation’s most popular news network. Conservative content dominates social media and research shows that the vast majority of high school students learn next to nothing about American slavery and the Civil War.
McGhee uses her overhaul of Demos as an example of how organizations can build antiracist cultures, if they’re willing to do the work. But it’s notable that even Demos, a progressive policy organization that focuses on inequality, was dominated by white people until McGhee took charge. This is a stark reminder of how deeply the culture of white supremacy shapes social behavior and cultural norms in the U.S. Nobody is perfect, McGhee suggests, and everyone has more to learn about race and racism. Moreover, since ignorance about race is the norm, it’s unfair to fault people for this ignorance—so long as they have an open mind about race and are willing to change, if necessary.
Themes
But many white Americans are choosing to reeducate themselves about race. For instance, progressive white novelist Julie Christine Johnson, who grew up in an all-white, Christian community in rural Washington, began learning about racism after being exposed to the Black Lives Matter movement and reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s book about mass incarceration. Julie joined an online antiracism seminar and noticed how vulnerable her white counterparts seemed when their own biases and blind spots came up. While she admitted that feminism has often excluded women of color, for instance, many of her friends reacted to the idea defensively. After going through this process, Julie feels more free, authentic, and fearless than before.
Just like organizations, individual people can learn about racism, transform themselves, and join the fight for racial justice. Of course, it’s unrealistic to think that Johnson’s kind of individual effort could transform American society—although, on a large enough scale, it could definitely make a real difference. Still, in the next chapter, McGhee will explain why she thinks the nation needs to undertake a collective racial reckoning process, rather than leaving it to individual people. Notably, while Johnson views learning about antiracism as an important service to her fellow citizens of color, she also views it as a service to herself because it is making her into a better person. Her response shows that, once again, fighting racism is far better for white people than maintaining it.
Themes
McGhee decided to discuss the nation’s moral reckoning with faith leaders. The Black Chicago pastor Daniel Hill, whose church is full of interracial families, tells her about “the antiracist lessons of the Bible.” The white reverend Jim Wallis tells McGhee about how he confronted other church leaders over American Christians’ role in genocide and slavery.
In this chapter, McGhee has argued that racism is fundamentally about morality and identity. Thus, it makes sense that she would discuss it with Christian leaders, the people whom most Americans view as moral authorities. Hill and Wallis’s backgrounds and congregations are different, but they agree that Christian doctrine, properly understood, advocates for antiracism.
Themes
Indeed, white Christians score far higher in racial resentment today. This is largely because, as religion scholar Robert P. Jones points out in his book White Too Long, the church has historically made preserving white supremacy central to its political agenda. Jones argues that white supremacists, slaveowners, and segregationists have long used concepts of Christian purity to depict themselves as “the noble protagonists and the blameless victims” of American history. They view racism as a problem for people of color to deal with, rather than a problem that white people have caused. In fact, Jones argues that white Christians must confront racism in order to save their souls.
Jones suggests that American Christianity, as an institution, has largely turned against its own original purpose. Instead of living out Biblical values and trying to build a more ethical society, many Christians simply insist that American society always has been ethical—even when this requires rewriting history. In the short term, this protects white people’s feelings, but in the long term, it only makes their true goals harder to achieve by further dividing society. Jones takes this a step further by arguing that white Christians’ salvation is at stake, too.
Themes
New York City rabbi Felicia Sol also views antiracism as a “spiritual imperative,” a way to repair the world and keep it going. When humans divide themselves through racism, Rabbi Sol argues, they actually defile their own inner nature and degrade their relationship with God. Black Jewish leader Yavilah McCoy tells McGhee about how Jewish activists have always been at the front lines of antiracism efforts in the U.S. Most Americans associate Judaism with whiteness because most Jewish immigrants to the U.S. came from Europe, McCoy explains, but Judaism is really a multiracial religion with roots among “brown people” from the Middle East.
McGhee’s interviews with Sol and McCoy show how shared antiracist goals can unite people from different faiths. Rabbi Sol makes a similar point to Robert P. Jones: racism morally degrades the racist, so embracing antiracism is key to spiritual growth. Notably, she specifically phrases this as an argument against zero-sum thinking: God asks us to love humanity in its totality, without any divisions. Meanwhile, Rabbi McCoy argues that antiracism is a key Jewish value and blames white supremacist culture for the mistaken American assumption that Judaism is a white religion.
Themes
Finally, human unity and equality are also central to Islam. Black Muslim activists like Malcolm X helped lead the civil rights movement, and Muslim Americans have come to the fore of racial justice activism since 9/11. But historian Zaheer Ali also tells McGhee that many Muslim immigrants learn anti-Black racism when they move to the U.S. Fatefully enough, a few hours after their conversation, a Muslim shopkeeper called the police on George Floyd and the police murdered him. But a few days later, protestors burned down a Bangladeshi restaurant. The owner told reporters that “justice needs to be served” for George Floyd, as “we can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human.”
McGhee’s conversation with Ali shows that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all share the same antiracist values. But in practice, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish practitioners all struggle to live up to these values and easily fall into zero-sum thinking. Still, the restaurant owner’s speech suggests that most people’s basic moral sense will point them toward justice. Thus, just like empathy, friendship, and patriotism, religion can also serve as the foundation for the kind of cross-racial solidarity that McGhee views as the key to building a more just society.
Themes
McGhee concludes that all major religions preach antiracism because they care about “compassion and human interconnectedness.” Her conversations about racism frequently take a spiritual turn, and even though she’s not religious, she views her mission to fight racism as a spiritual calling to create the “promised land of a caring, just society.”
McGhee concludes that anyone who wants to truly live out their faith must oppose racism. All religions recognize “human interconnectedness” as the foundation of society, so their followers should try to promote a “caring, just” system. Of course, nonreligious people can share the same values for purely humanistic reasons. After all, McGhee sees these values as the key American ideals that should guide policymakers, activists, and communities.
Themes
