Book Review Without You There Is No Us
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'The Sum of Us' Tallies the Price of Racism for Anybody
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Hinton Rowan Helper was an unreserved bigot from N Carolina who wrote hateful, racist tracts during Reconstruction. He was likewise, in the years leading up to the Civil State of war, a determined abolitionist.
His 1857 book, "The Impending Crisis of the S," argued that chattel slavery had deformed the Southern economy and impoverished the region. Members of the plantation class refused to invest in didactics, in enterprise, in the customs at large, because they didn't accept to. Helper's business concern wasn't the enslaved Black people brutalized by what he called the "lords of the lash"; he was worried most the white laborers in the South, relegated past the slave economic system and its ruling oligarchs to a "cesspool of ignorance and degradation."
Helper and his statement come up early on in Heather McGhee's illuminating and hopeful new book, "The Sum of Us" — though McGhee, a descendant of enslaved people, is very much concerned with the situation of Black Americans, making clear that the primary victims of racism are the people of color who are subjected to it. But "The Sum of Us" is predicated on the idea that lilliputian will change until white people realize what racism has cost them as well.
The material legacy of slavery can be felt to this solar day, McGhee says, in depressed wages and deficient access to health care in the onetime Confederacy. Only it's a blight that'south no longer relegated to the region. "To a large degree," she writes, "the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the Southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and separate-and-conquer tactics, going national."
As the pandemic has laid bare, the United States is a rich land that also happens to be i of the stingiest when it comes to the welfare of its own people. McGhee, who spent years working on economical policy for Demos, a liberal recall tank, says it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 by a majority of white voters that made her realize how most white voters weren't "operating in their own rational economical cocky-interest." Despite Trump'southward populist noises, she writes, his calendar "promised to wreak economic, social and environmental havoc on them along with everyone else."
Prototype
At several points in McGhee's book, I was reminded of the old saw about "cutting off one's nose to spite i'south face," though she prefers a less gruesome metaphor — the drained swimming pool. Grand public pools were sumptuous emblems of mutual leisure in the early on decades of the 20th century, steadfastly supported past white Americans until they were told to integrate them. McGhee visited the site of one such pool in Montgomery, Ala., drained and cemented over since 1959 so that nobody, white or Black, could always savor it again.
It'southward a self-defeating grade of exclusion, a determination not to share resource even if the ultimate effect is that anybody suffers. McGhee writes about health care, voting rights and the environment; she persuasively argues that white Americans have been steeped in the notion of "zippo sum" — that whatever gains by another group must come at white people's expense. She talks to scholars who take found that white respondents believed that anti-white bias was more than prevalent than anti-Black bias, even though past any factual measure this isn't true. This cramped mentality is another legacy of slavery, McGhee says, which really was zero sum — extractive and exploitative, like the settler colonialism that enabled it. She writes that zilch-sum thinking "has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of united states, and therefore the whole."
Recent books similar Jonathan Metzl's "Dying of Whiteness" take explained how racial counterinsurgency ends up harming those who cling to a bubble of privilege. While reading McGhee I was also reminded of Thomas Frank's argument in "What'due south the Matter With Kansas?" (2004), nearly how the Republican Party had figured out a mode to push button through an unpopular economic agenda past stowing information technology inside a Trojan horse of social conservatism and cultural grievance.
Only there are major differences between their books. Frank derides the idea that racism has anything to exercise with what he's writing about. Not to mention that McGhee isn't a stinging polemicist; she cajoles instead of ridicules. She appeals to concrete self-interest in order to show how our fortunes are tied upwardly with the fortunes of others. "We suffer considering our society was raised scarce in social solidarity," she writes, explaining that this idea is "true to my optimistic nature." She is compassionate but besides cleareyed, refusing to downplay the horrors of racism, even if her ain book suggests that the white readers she'southward trying to reach tin can be easily triggered into seeking the safety space of white identity politics. Color blindness, she says, is merely another form of denial.
One of the phenomena that emerges from McGhee's account is that the zero-sum mentality tends to get questioned only in times of actual scarcity — when people are so desperate that they realize how much they need one some other. She gives the case of the Fight for $15 movement: Already earning poverty-level wages, fast-food workers began to ask what they had to lose by organizing.
Against "zero-sum" she proposes "win-win" — without fully addressing how the ideal of win-win has been deployed for cynical ends. McGhee discusses how the subprime mortgage crisis was fueled by racism, but it was as well inflated by promises of a constantly expanding housing market and ascent prices. One time the credit dried up, win-win reverted to zero-sum, with the drowned (underwater homeowners) losing out to the saved (well-continued bankers).
"We live under the aforementioned sky," McGhee writes. There is a striking clarity to this volume; at that place is also a depth of kindness in it that all but the almost churlish readers volition find moving. She explains in exacting detail how racism causes white people to suffer. Yet, I couldn't help thinking dorsum to the abolitionist Helper, who knew total well how slavery caused white people to suffer, but remained an unrepentant racist to the end.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/books/review-sum-of-us-heather-mcghee.html
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