The Sum of Us Characters

May Boeve is a founder of the international climate change advocacy group 350.org. She and McGhee discuss racism’s role in climate change denial and conclude that a diverse leadership would make climate activism far more effective.

Ben Chin is a mixed-race minister and progressive activist who helps direct the Maine People’s Alliance. He narrowly lost the Lewiston mayoral election twice, in 2015 and 2017.

Chip is a white worker at the Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi. His white coworkers get angry at him for supporting the union proposal, so he publicly pretends to switch sides, but votes for the union anyway.

Heather McGhee’s friend Robin DiAngelo is a white education scholar and antiracism activist who is best known for her bestselling 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

Jerry Hawkins is a Black activist and educator who ran Dallas’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) program.

Bridget Hughes is a white Kansas City fast food worker who joined the Fight for $15 after realizing that her Black and Latinx colleagues shared many of the same day-to-day struggles as she did.

Johnny is a white worker at the Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi. He supports the union effort, which he knows will benefit all the workers, but sees most of his white colleagues reject it because of their zero-sum mindset.

Julie Christine Johnson is a white novelist from Washington who decided to educate herself about racism after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Kirsti M. Jylhä is a sociologist who studies the beliefs that underlie climate change denialism (including social dominance orientation). She is from Finland but lives in Sweden.

Angela King is an ex-neo-Nazi who now helps people leave white supremacism as part of the advocacy group Life After Hate. She tells Heather McGhee about her transformation and explains that white people often use racism as a coping method to deal with their own insecurities.

Charles and David Koch, or the “Koch brothers,” are oil barons who have spent billions of dollars funding a network of far-right politicians, think tanks, and media organizations to push a pro-corporate agenda. (David Koch died in 2019.)

Paul LePage was the Republican governor of Maine from 2011 to 2019. He ran on racist rhetoric and repeatedly vetoed Medicaid expansion until a popular ballot initiative led by the Maine People’s Alliance overruled him.

Robert Macdonald was the Republican mayor of Lewiston, Maine from 2012 to 2108. He blamed African immigrants for many of Lewiston’s problems and focused his campaign on cutting welfare.

Nancy MacLean is a political historian of the South who wrote the book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America about James M. Buchanan’s economic theory and its effect on far-right figures like the Koch brothers.

Melvin is a Black worker and union organizer at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi. He tries to convince his white colleagues to join him, but often they just refuse to listen to him out of prejudice.

Bruce Noddin is a white Christian man from Lewiston, Maine who joined the Maine People’s Alliance after befriending an African Muslim immigrant. Now, he runs community programs that bring white Mainers and immigrants together.

Torm Nompraseurt is a Laotian American activist who works on environmental justice issues in his hometown of Richmond, California.

Michael Norton is a Harvard Business School psychology professor who researches a wide range of topics, including racism and social status.

Susan Parrish is a white woman from Washington who lost her home during the Great Recession, never financially recovered, and ended up living in an RV, on the brink of homelessness.

Amy Rogers is a white woman from North Carolina who lost her home during the Great Recession and fell into poverty. Her story shows how, even though it was initially directed at people of color, predatory mortgage lending ended up devastating many white people, too.

Samuel Sommers is a social psychologist at Harvard Business School who studies discrimination, racist cognition, and the benefits of diversity in organizations.

Ali Tataka is a mixed-race (but often white-passing) mother who made the difficult but rewarding decision to send her children to a majority-Black and Latinx public school instead of an all-white “good school” after moving to Austin, Texas.

Maureen Wanket is a white teacher from California. While teaching at a majority-Black school, she learned firsthand about police violence because the police shot and killed one of her students. But when she moved to a majority-white school, her colleagues made racist comments about her previous school.

Terrence Wise is a Kansas City fast food worker and labor activist who helped found the local Fight for $15 chapter.

Tracy Wright-Mauer is a white woman who sent her children to a predominantly Black school in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Dr. Gail Christopher, author Heather McGhee’s mother, is a public health and social policy expert who helped develop the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) procedure.