What Racism Costs Everyone and
How We Can Prosper Together
By Heather McGhee
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Author Heather McGhee tells the sad tale of the Oak Park swimming pool in Montgomery, Alabama. It was built as a pool for white kids only. In 1958, a federal court decided that such swimming segregation was unconstitutional. What did the city leaders do? They closed the pool. McGhee writes: “To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center.… The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after it reopened, they never rebuilt the pool” (25).
In depriving some citizens of opportunity, they deprived all citizens of opportunity. This is the fundamental perspective of this powerful book about the history of race relations in the United States during my lifetime: since 1950.
McGhee takes a look at a series of public policy issues: college and university funding, housing and home ownership, public services, voting, unionization of workers, and waste disposal. And what she finds in each of these is the same: rather than expand opportunity for all, public policy has restricted opportunity for all out of a desire to limit opportunity to some.
Those “some” are black citizens of the United States. And the persistent movement to limit opportunity and services to these “some” arises from what she calls the “zero-sum” equation. Which means this: there is, white people think, a limited supply of goods, services, and opportunity, one defined “pie” from which we all seek our “piece.” In order for you (or the “other” or the “immigrant” or the “black”) to get your piece of the pie, my piece must be sliced thinner and thinner; for you to get more, I must get less. “The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America” (15).
I am “widening the aperture,” she writes in the Introduction, “to show the costs of white supremacy to our entire society” (xx).
So, she explores this question: why would white workers in southern factories vote against a union that promises them better pay, better working conditions, and better job security? Because they see the union as a strategy to help “lazy blacks” get opportunity they don’t deserve. She references studies that document the racial dynamics in these elections.
And she explores the decline in state support of public education (and the more recent state support with tax money of private schools); she shows how this trend began just after court-ordered desegregation. States run by white people were willing to let their public schools deteriorate (and student debt rise) as the minority student population began to grow.
Southern (and formerly slave) states are not alone in taking the brunt of this book. McGhee takes us to Portland, Kansas City, Washington DC, Chicago, and finally to Lewiston, Maine. The race card is played effectively across the country, always to the detriment not just of the minority group despised (and feared) by the white majority but also to that of the white majority.
Maine is the whitest state in the Union; and its factories and plants that once hummed with activity have fallen silent, largely due to the outcomes of globalization. White supremist politicians blamed this on immigrants, refugees, and foreigners…and got elected. But when French-speaking refugees from Africa (Congo and Somalia) began to relocate to Lewiston, things began to change. Activity, commerce, community, and investment began to replace dilapidation and despair, producing what McGhee calls the “solidarity dividend”—that which is produced when people in need pull together, vote together, work together, hope together. In the process, they learn “that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us” (272).
This is the best book I have read on the subject of race in America, largely because it focuses on public policy in recent decades (and she could add an entire chapter on the recent legislative decisions in Texas, Georgia, and Florida that limit access to the ballot). I feel deeply the need to reread this book in the company and conversation of a diverse group of Americans. I recommend it without reservation to groups searching for the next book to review and discuss, especially the kind of groups that allow the widest spectrum of citizens and sojourners to voice their experience and vent their frustration.
Such conversation will ignite the kind of collaboration that will make possible “a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the “We” in “We the People” is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us” (289, the last words of this marvelous book).
(May 2021)
