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Heather McGhee
Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, served two terms from 2009 to 2017. Even though his political messaging focused on unity and equality, he oversaw an era of deepening political polarization that culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. McGhee argues that this is primarily because Obama inspires distrust and racial resentment in white voters who view politics through the zero-sum racial paradigm. In fact, the Republican Party manipulated this paradigm to turn white voters against universal policies that would have benefited everyone, such as the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and emissions reductions programs to tackle climate change.
Barack Obama Quotes in The Sum of Us
The The Sum of Us quotes below are all either spoken by Barack Obama or refer to Barack Obama . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Introduction
Quotes
The logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it. They should be arming themselves (as they have been in record numbers, “for protection,” since the Obama presidency) because demographic change will end in a dog-eat-dog race war. Obviously, this isn’t the story we want to tell. It’s not even what we believe. The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that Black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1
Quotes
Today, the racial zero-sum story is resurgent because there is a political movement invested in ginning up white resentment toward lateral scapegoats (similarly or worse-situated people of color) to escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few. For four years, a tax-cutting and self-dealing millionaire trumpeted the zero-sum story from the White House, but the Trump presidency was in many ways brought to us by two decades of zero-sum propaganda on the ubiquitous cable news network owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
Chapter 3
Quotes
“These folks are gonna come out of the woodwork like bugs.”
Get the entire The Sum of Us LitChart as a printable PDF.
Barack Obama Quotes in The Sum of Us
The The Sum of Us quotes below are all either spoken by Barack Obama or refer to Barack Obama . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Introduction
Quotes
The logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it. They should be arming themselves (as they have been in record numbers, “for protection,” since the Obama presidency) because demographic change will end in a dog-eat-dog race war. Obviously, this isn’t the story we want to tell. It’s not even what we believe. The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that Black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1
Quotes
Today, the racial zero-sum story is resurgent because there is a political movement invested in ginning up white resentment toward lateral scapegoats (similarly or worse-situated people of color) to escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few. For four years, a tax-cutting and self-dealing millionaire trumpeted the zero-sum story from the White House, but the Trump presidency was in many ways brought to us by two decades of zero-sum propaganda on the ubiquitous cable news network owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
Chapter 3
Quotes
“These folks are gonna come out of the woodwork like bugs.”
