Racism also hurts white people

Tonya Mosley of Fresh Air on NPR spoke to Heather McGhee, author of the 2021 book The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together. Though the book is a few years old recent claims by the nasty guy that white people face a lot of reverse discrimination made a discussion of the book appropriate now. Some people believe the lie that anti-white bias is now more prevalent than anti-black bias. I’m working from a transcript of the hour long show. I haven’t read the book, though it is one I should get. The central idea of the book is that racism hurts more than the targets. It hurts white people too, including the perpetrators. The nasty guy’s administration has been masterful in declaring an underlying core narrative: “an us-versus-them zero-sum story.” That says there can me no mutual progress. If one group – women, people of color, immigrants – gets ahead, it’s at the expense of native-born white men. Therefore white men should fear progress and should fear people of color. This is a lie. Facts make that clear. Civil rights have clearly benefited white women, first-generation college students, and people of disabilities. White men have also benefited. Part of that is there is still a “long-standing deliberate and explicit bias towards them.” Part of it is they benefit when companies and institutions are more successful because of their diversity. The whole society benefits, including white men. Back in 2017-2021 as McGhee wrote the book she investigated where this zero-sum lie came from. It started when the continent began to be settled by Europeans – when Europeans began to codify slavery as based on race. They didn’t want white people at the bottom of the income hierarchy to find solidarity with black slaves. Preaching zero-sum made sure poor whites thought of themselves as above blacks and helping blacks would hurt themselves. Said McGhee:

When economic inequality gets really severe, people who are divided by race or color, language or origin start to realize that they actually have more in common than what sets them apart and that they shouldn't fear their neighbors or blame their neighbors for their economic status but should be looking up the economic ladder at the people who have the power to set the rules. And that's when you begin to hear the zero-sum story louder and louder from millionaires and billionaires, self-interested folks who want to keep the economic status quo just as it is.

Yes, the zero-sum lie also shapes our country’s economics. In the 1920s towns and cities created public swimming pools, a symbol of the common good. Many were drained and filled rather than shared with black neighbors. Social Security excluded the two job categories most black workers were in. The GI Bill excluded blacks. The big investment in mortgage support excluded blacks through redlining and racial covenants. White people saw government had a role in raising the standard of living, and all these programs were created. But white people were taught to disdain and distrust black and brown people, so they had to be excluded. When the book came out in 2021 white people across the country were waking up to understanding we’ve been lied to about our history, that we wanted to understand the country in its fullness. We wanted to know our heroes of all races, those who stood with the oppressed. And the nasty guy wants to erase that. McGhee thinks the erasure will be temporary. Too many people, too many white people, don’t want history whitewashed. White people have told her they were furious they were lied to in school history classes. Young readers, the most diverse generation and with phones to access all the info in the world, don’t want to be lied to. More importantly, the nasty guy hasn’t changed public opinion, our support for history without lies. We’ve seen the nasty guy pursue supposed (accused, not proven) black fraud, as in the Somali immigrants in Minnesota. But no one pursues white fraud, as in Brett Favre redirecting assistance to needy families into college sports facilities, including a million for himself. That doesn’t fit the narrative. The whole purpose of DOGE was to eliminate woke, slashing governmental budgets and causing chaos in their effort. That mostly affected black workers. Whenever we hear “states’ rights” in legal documents, think slavery and segregation. An example is the Roberts court, that Medicaid expansion should be up to the states. And the higher percentage of black people in a state the more likely Medicaid was not expanded. The current fight about the Affordable Care Act is in its core about racism. Dr. King said injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman system in our society. If health care is not universal someone is left out. Black and brown people are disproportionately uninsured but there are more uninsured white people than black. Yet, a majority of white people are opposed to the Affordable Care Act. McGhee remains optimistic. Pull on and resolve the racism thread and a lot of our big issues – health, housing, education, environment, democracy, the things conservatives declare as too expensive – become easier. We need each other. There are too many things I can’t do on my own. Community can do some of them but government helps us do the rest of them. In a diverse society we need multiracial action. When a community rejects zero-sum thinking and embraces cross-racial solidarity they get higher wages, cleaner air, better schools. The whole community benefits. An example is Lewiston, Maine where African refugees helped revitalize the town. Which is why the nasty guy is targeting it. An important need is organizing. And, in a lot of cities targeted by ICE, that’s what residents are doing. A lot of people are becoming participants in their communities, working towards a common goal. This is King’s Beloved Community, the exact opposite of zero-sum thinking. That’s why the nasty guy is trying to make “activism” a dirty word. He wants us to be afraid, to “think that it is dangerous and socially undesirable to speak out and be active.” And Americans aren’t listening to that idea. For white people who continue to believe in zero-sum: When people are “sidelined due to debt, discrimination, disadvantage” they aren’t contributing to the economy the way they could. Citigroup found racism cost the US GDP $16 trillion over 20 years. A black college graduate has less wealth than a white high school dropout. Instead of spending a decade working through a mountain of debt, what if that black graduate could jump right in to contributing to the economy? Don’t think of reparations as zero-sum, of one group giving to another, or as an admission of white guilt. Instead, think of it is seed capital to a new America, a cushion of wealth for black people that benefits everyone. Before I give McGhee the final word, I’ve been thinking: While the white male benefits from the end or racism, he does lose something. That something is the sense of being higher in the social hierarchy. For many white people that is of primary importance. For those in the nasty guy’s administration that’s what they obsess over and what defines their lives. I can’t wait to be rid of it.

This is a country that is in fact, just as it has always been, warring between a faction that wants to keep wealth and power concentrated in its hands and a diverse, striving, agitating, often activist, multiracial population that is trying to figure out who they are to one another. But I think that the reason why the attacks have been so brutal and overreaching is because we are so close to a place where there is an enduring multiracial governing majority that wants this country to live up to the values that we were taught it was founded on and is ready to do the work to actually make it so.