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Summary
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
Heather McGhee begins by asking, “Why can’t we have nice things?” The U.S. government fails to provide Americans with many basic services, from public health insurance and fair wages to functioning schools and infrastructure. As a young woman, McGhee observed the nation’s worsening economic inequality. But working at the think tank Demos in her 20s showed her that information could actually transform policy. So she went to law school, then returned to Demos to dedicate her career to economic policy research.
McGhee explains the basic premise of her book, which is also the guiding mission behind her career in policy research. She wants to understand why the U.S. is so unequal, and why the U.S. government struggles to implement public policies that benefit the majority of its population. After all, the U.S. is the richest country in the world, but lags far behind its peers. Yet McGhee deeply believes that knowledge is power: she thinks that politicians can pass better policies if they understand why current policies are failing and how better ones could succeed.
Themes
McGhee used to believe that bad economic policies disproportionately harm Black communities because structural racism already puts those communities at a disadvantage. But while working at Demos, she had an experience that changed her mind.
McGhee sets the reader up for the central insight in her book: just as policy exacerbates racism, racism also leads to bad policy. And this has major implications for McGhee’s work. Namely, it suggests that better research alone will not get political leaders to pass policies that help the people who need it, because those leaders often do not believe that those people are worth helping.
Themes
In the 1990s and 2000s, Americans started carrying far more debt, which led to a wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies. The problem was especially pronounced in Black and Latinx communities. Demos published a report on this trend and received significant media attention. But lenders spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress, which passed a bill making it much harder for consumers to escape debts.
The consumer debt crisis is a clear example of the kind of issues that McGhee researched for Demos, the way that exploitative economic trends disproportionately harm people of color, and the way that corporations can derail effective policy by hiring lobbyists to buy off politicians. Above all, it shows that good research does not always convince politicians to implement good policies.
Themes
One day at the Capitol, McGhee overheard a senator complaining that “deadbeat” dads declare bankruptcy to avoid paying child support. She realized that Congress’s attitude towards indebted consumers wasn’t just about class: it was also about “coded racial stereotypes.” Of course, McGhee has always known that white people “assume the worst” about Black people—she just didn’t think it would affect policy.
This senator opposed stopping predatory lenders and giving consumers debt relief because he believed that those consumers were not the type of people worth helping. And he believed this because of age-old racist stereotypes of Black people as irresponsible, promiscuous, and deceitful. Of course, all of these stereotypes date back hundreds of years, when they served as convenient excuses for enslaving and exploiting Black people.
Themes
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McGhee had a similar experience on a conference call with several white economists in 2010. She remarked that politicians wanted to stop investing in the U.S. middle class because, in a generation, it would be mostly people of color. The economists replied that her idea was true but not “persuasive.” After all, “the unspoken conventional wisdom” is to avoid talking about race in Washington, since most of the people in power are white. But perhaps racism is already behind their thinking—and perhaps it leads them to reject policies that help white people, too.
The economists’ awkward silence shows that, while they understand that racism is responsible for the U.S.’s failed economic policies, it’s taboo to say this quiet part out loud. Put differently, powerful white people want to be told that their racist policies are not racist, even though, at some level, they know that they are. As McGhee will explain in her ninth chapter, studies show that a significant majority of white people (about 80 percent) respond to evidence of racism through evasive strategies like denial, projection, and rationalization.
Themes
Similarly, white Americans did not act in their “rational economic self-interest” by electing Donald Trump. Instead, they voted based on powerful assumptions about how American society works. After Trump’s inauguration, McGhee decided to quit her job running Demos and start researching how factors like “belonging, competition, and status” drive people’s political behavior. In the U.S., these factors usually come down to people’s beliefs about race, and those beliefs are the source of our laws.
McGhee left Demos because she realized that economic policy research is based on the misleading assumption that people choose “rational economic self-interest” over “belonging, competition, and status.” Concretely, American politics is often about the relative status of the nation’s different racial and ethnic groups. Trump’s policy agenda promised to make economic conditions worse for the majority of white Americans, but they voted for him anyway because he promised that they would remain racially dominant.
Themes
Psychologists have found that, when white Americans read about how the U.S. will become majority-nonwhite in the 2040s, they start to favor more conservative policies. They assume that different racial groups are competing, so their own status will go down when there are more people of color around. Conservative politicians and media have long pushed this “zero-sum paradigm.” In fact, even McGhee used to believe a version of it: she thought that racism led to policies that benefited white people. But her research has shown her that, on a range of issues, “racism is actually driving inequality for everyone.”
McGhee introduces the central concept in her book: the “zero-sum paradigm.” A situation is zero-sum if, for one side to gain, the other must lose—like in a game of poker. But many situations (like team games, international trade, and love) are not zero-sum: it is possible for both sides to gain without the other losing. McGhee’s argument is that most white voters view American politics as a zero-sum game, in which white people can only succeed if people of color fail. But in reality, it is a non-zero-sum game, in which white people and people of color mostly have the same interests, and so they do best when they collaborate rather than competing.
Themes
This book is about McGhee’s “journey to tally the hidden costs of racism to us all.” She traveled around the U.S. to understand how white people have hurt themselves by supporting racist policies. (But these policies have always been far worse for people of color.) To build a true multiracial democracy, Americans must abandon the zero-sum paradigm. More and more white Americans believe in this paradigm, but most Black Americans don’t. Ultimately, it only serves the rich and powerful, who profit from dividing the majority. But when ordinary people work together across racial lines, they can build better policies and overcome animosity. McGhee calls this the “Solidarity Dividend.” Indeed, millions of white voters helped oust Trump in 2020, and they give McGhee hope for the future of the U.S.
McGhee lays out her book’s overall argument. The vast majority of Americans, regardless of race, would benefit from politically popular commonsense economic and social policies, like a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, and so on. But elites like Trump don’t want these policies, which would require them to give up some of the wealth that they have hoarded. So they try to stop these policies by dividing the majority through racism. Specifically, they invest billions of dollars in persuading white Americans to believe in the zero-sum paradigm. This convinces them that the policies will benefit people of color and hurt white people.
Themes
