Author and educator discusses the roots of racism in America’s continued economic struggles

Heather McGhee was a curious child. Growing up on the south side of Chicago in the 1980s, she was seeing firsthand the way that economic policies were playing out for her family and her community.

“I was the kind of kid who always asked, ‘Why?,’ and I was lucky that my family and my community didn’t answer that with individual justifications like, ‘People aren’t working hard enough,’” she says. “They really encouraged me to look upstream at more powerful decision makers in society and to look at laws and structures, so I was always interested in the decisions that shape our lives.”

That kind of curiosity has led to her extensive professional work in both racial justice and economics, which she will discuss during “The Sum of Us: An Evening with Heather McGhee,” an online event hosted by the San Diego Public Library and the University of San Diego Copley Library as part of their Black History Month programming. The lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. Monday and registration is free .

McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” which explores and analyzes how America’s economic problems are rooted in racism. Before writing the book, she ran the think tank Demos, where she designed a racial equity curriculum and more than doubled the staff’s racial diversity; her 2020 TED Talk, “Racism Has a Cost for Everyone,” has 2.4 million views online; her live, on-air 2016 conversation with a White man who called in during her appearance on C-SPAN to ask for help overcoming his racial prejudice, went viral and led to heavy media coverage; and she’s engaged in extensive work to protect voting rights, secure pay increases for low-wage workers. She’s currently chair of the board for Color of Change and is a visiting lecturer in urban studies at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. She took some time to talk about her book, her upcoming online lecture, and the ways that racism continues to harm everyone. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: What prompted you to tackle the topic of how racism ripples out to affect all of us, regardless of our ethnicity, and how people can begin working together to increase gains for everyone in “The Sum of Us”?

A: I made the unexpected decision in 2017 to quit my job leading the think tank and take a series of trips across the country to try to figure out, once and for all, why it is that we can’t seem to have nice things in America (and by “nice things,” I really mean things like affordable housing, health care, child care, living with a well-funded school in every neighborhood). I felt the need to take this journey that would ultimately become “The Sum of Us” because the answers that economics offers about costs and benefits — about rational, economic self-interest — were coming up short. It is in our economic self-interest to invest in our people, and inequality’s bad for growth, and racial economic inequality costs us trillions of dollars a year in missed GDP growth. Yet, we continue to have policies that foster inequality and businesses continue to make decisions that foster inequality, and our culture continues to excuse inequality, so I wanted to really get at what are some of the underlying cultural, historical and social explanations for why we are the way we are.

Q: What have you learned about how economics intersects with race in America?

A: I learned that there’s a real economic cost to racism that almost all of us, except for the very self-interested and wealthy elite, pay. I learned that our economic progress is being held back by a zero-sum story that says that we are in a competition for a fixed pie, and if people of color get a slice, that means a smaller slice for White people. That zero-sum story is inaccurate in economic terms, but it has a powerful cultural resonance because that story is being sold and marketed, particularly to White Americans who are much more likely to see the world through that zero-sum prism than people of color. Generally speaking, folks of color don’t think that our progress has to come at White folks’ expense. So, if you look at these trends across time, what really helps to explain how we lost the American dream — how the middle class security of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s has disappeared — really has a lot to do with race and the way in which the social contract of high wages, good jobs, strong benefits, high taxes and generous public investment really fell apart once that social contract was expanded during the Civil Rights Movement to include everyone who contributed to the nation’s prosperity. That’s where the central metaphor at the heart of the book comes in, and that’s the story of the drained public pools and what happened across the country, not just in the Jim Crow-South, but in California; towns drained their lavishly funded and segregated (either by law or custom) public swimming pools when it was time to integrate them. For me, the drained pool is a metaphor for what happened to the high-road, generous public policy model that helped to build the greatest middle class the world’s ever seen after the Civil Rights Movement expanded its beneficiaries across the color line, and we begin to see the rise of anti-government sentiment that ultimately is self-sabotaging.

“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee

(One World/Penguin Random House)

Q: Can you talk about some of the ways racism affects others, and not just those who appear to be the direct targets of racism?

A: In the book, I give lots of examples about the way that racism in our politics and our policymaking drives anti-government sentiment that is ultimately self-sabotaging: the issue of health care, where racism stopped us from filling in the pool of public goods of true universal health care in the first place; or, where Harry Truman’s [push for universal health care failed] in the ‘40s because the segregationist Dixiecrat caucus of his own party refused to go along because it would be a threat to Jim Crow; to today, when we still have a patchwork health care system. Even though White Americans are the largest group of the uninsured, White people have been disapproving the Affordable Care Act since it burst onto the scene and became law, known as Obamacare.

In the book, I talk about how racism undermines collective action. When you don’t trust your fellow Americans, it’s hard to link up arms and say, “Let’s solve this problem together.” That takes the form of government, understanding that there’s some problems we simply can’t solve on our own [as individuals], whether that’s addressing global climate change, universal health care, or funding public college so that it can be debt-free again, as it was when 90 percent of the college-going population was White. Or, the example of collective bargaining and unions, and how racism has undermined workers’ rights over time.

Q: Some of this reminds me of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign [his movement designed to unite poor people in demanding better jobs, wages, education and unemployment insurance from the government], and I wonder about why we seem to be unable or unwilling to approach this zero-sum issue differently after all of this time. What do you make of this continued belief that if that group over there begins to gain access to resources they’ve been previously denied, then that’s a threat to the resources of others who’ve always had that access?

A: The zero-sum is a very profitable story that is sold by self-interested elites for their own gain because who really wins when poor people and economically struggling people can’t unite across lines of race to change the rules? Who wins when the majority of White voters vote against economic solutions for their own families? Who wins when unions are weak? It’s the corporate class, which is heavily represented in our politics and in our media. If you look at who’s selling the story of the zero-sum, it’s very clear that they’re doing so at tremendous financial gain, whether that’s the paid bullies in the corporate media on nightly cable news, or politicians who run on culture war divisions, but govern on tax cuts for the rich.

Q: What’s your response to people who may take issue with the idea of appealing to White people as being both the beneficiaries and victims of White supremacy?

A: Don’t take it from me. Martin Luther King spoke about this, [as did] James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and W.E.B. DuBois, who coined the phrase “wages of Whiteness.” This is an old idea and it’s an idea that both is hard to refute when you look at the data, as I did in this book with 130 pages of notes, and it is an idea that allows us as racial justice advocates to avoid invoking the same zero-sum paradigm that our opponents do. Our opponents say that racism is a zero-sum, and we have to obviously acknowledge, as I do in the book, that racism always hits its targets. The burdens are borne most grievously by communities of color, and particularly Black people, due to anti-Black racism; but if we’re honest about how extensive racism is in our politics and policymaking, we have to acknowledge that it is a lie that distorts everything in our society, and therefore no one can go completely unscathed.

Q: What is your hope for the lecture on Monday, and for those of us reading of “The Sum of Us”?

A: I hope that “The Sum of Us” provides an opportunity to have conversations with people across lines of race. I hope that it’s an invitation to find a sense of mutual interest in this central, defining challenge of our society, which is eradicating the belief in a hierarchy of human value. I hope that people walk away from reading the book, or hearing my lecture, and feel like everybody has skin in the game in this long fight for racial justice, that is not a zero-sum game. That there is a role for people of all backgrounds in helping make this country live up to its ideals. And I hope that people read the book, or hear the lecture, and are inoculated against the messages coming from a self-interested elite, who are trying to divide us and turn the clock back on racial justice and claim that it’s bad for White people to learn about racism. So, I hope that “The Sum of Us” helps people understand who’s being served by the backlash against racial justice — it’s not White families and middle-class parents, it’s the elite who want to keep us divided and at odds with one another.