McGhee’s Positive-Sum Take on Anti-Racism

Heather McGhee’s new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, offers an updated way of looking at racism. She abandons zero-sum thinking in favor of appreciating how racism drags the whole society down. In a war or in an election, zero-sum thinking makes sense because any disadvantage for “them” is an advantage for “us”. In society, however, we tend to prosper more when others in our society also prosper. McGhee is right that we would do well to embrace positive-sum thinking and to work together for a better America. 

McGhee leads with the story of Hinton Rowan Helper, an antebellum Southerner who wrote about how the slave economy hurt the South rather than helping it. He pointed out, for example, that the North had many more schools than the South. In zero-sum thinking, the labor that white Southerners took from enslaved Africans should have made the South rich. For Helper, however, the statistics plainly showed that the North’s capitalist society was outpacing the South, with its medieval social structure and land-focused economy. 

The plantation society of the South represented an intentional attempt by the elites to recapture the lost glory of the Middle Ages, especially as romanticized in Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. The point of a plantation was not merely to make a profit off of stolen labor but also to establish the owners as lords, with the same power of life and death over their slaves as medieval lords had over their peasants. Rather than using their profits to invest in capital or education, southern “lords” expended their wealth on cotillions and gambling. In contrast to the feudal slavery of the southern states, capitalist slavery is perhaps best represented by Caribbean sugar plantations, whose owners were in London or Paris. 

McGhee uses real-world, historical examples to show that racism hurts the whole society. McGhee’s iconic image representing the society-wide cost of racism is the filled-in public swimming pool.  Municipal swimming pools were once a symbol of American civic pride. After the federal government ruled that even bigoted cities in the South have to provide equal access to African American swimmers, many of these cities filled their pools in rather than see whites and Blacks swimming together as equals. McGhee also offers the example of sub-prime loans. African Americans might have been disproportionately channeled to predatory loans, but all of America was hurt when the home loan industry collapsed.

It’s easy to think of other examples. Mass incarceration disproportionately affects African Americans, but it’s also a drain on the whole society. Poor schooling disproportionately affects African Americans, but society as a whole loses out if kids don’t reach their potential. 

McGhee’s book offers a welcome perspective. It reminds me of Kendi when he points out policies that would be good for white Americans and even better for African Americans. Feminists have long said that ending the patriarchy would be good not just for women but also for men. Maybe now we’ll hear more people talking about how ending racism would be good for white people, too.

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