It can not be denied that white people benefit from racism by not being targeted by the police, having access to better health care, better housing, less student debt, and so many other institutions racism has infiltrated. This is something I know to be true and is an obstacle in uniting white and black Americans against racism. However, after reading the book The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, I now have a new perspective about racism in America and white privilege. The book opens by pointing out how focusing on how white people benefit from racism and how people of color lose ingrains in our heads that racism is a competition with clear-cut winners and losers. This makes the narrative that progress for one group comes at the expense of another all more believable for white people and holds our country back from the achievements that are possible.
How do we get white people who are unwilling to give up their privilege to join the fight for an anti-racist society? Reveal the truth, says McGhee. The truth is that white privilege is unsustainable. Racism costs white people as well. The Sum of Us powerfully makes this claim and, as an economist, McGhee focuses on the costs that racism has for everyone yet not undermining the effects racism has had on people of color in America.
She starts with the example of public pools. In the early twentieth century across America, there were public pools in towns where people would socialize and bond with their communities. Governments wanted to improve the quality of life in their towns and break down the walls of class. Since these pools were public, people of all different statuses would meet each other. However, the people at these pools were all white. Then, when a thirteen-year-old black boy in Baltimore drowned because he went swimming in a dangerous river, a lawsuit against the state to integrate the pools was successful. In 1956 when black people could finally enjoy the benefits of their tax dollars spent on these pools, white people stopped going to them. In some areas, north and south, the pools were sold to private corporations, which became members only with fees to access this resource. In many places, however, city counsels decided to drain the pools all because of skin color. Everyone lost a public resource, all at the expense of racism. She refers back to the idea of the drained pools because it is the physical representation of the lengths white people are willing to go to keep people divided and hold all of us, including themselves, back.
The same issue happened with higher education. Many colleges once had immense public funding, and student debt wasn’t nearly the devastating problem it is today. However, once schools became integrated, public funding decreased, and students began paying more and more of the tuition themselves. Today, people in their forties are still paying off student debt, and interest rates make it even more of a challenge. Many regret going to college in the first place. Racism played a significant role in cutting the public resource that once helped so many. The mindset, if people of color could finally start accessing some of the public resources that were so abundant to white people, then no one should have it has cost so many.
A recent study done two years ago found that only eight percent of high school seniors in America believed that the main cause of the Civil War was slavery. Only eight percent. When the author stated this fact, I had to make sure I read it right. These people make up our generation and the future of our country. These are the people we will encounter and work with in the near future. Why is the education system failing to expose the truth and cruelty of America’s past? One necessary factor contributing to this failure is the effects of slavery. Plantations and the slave labor system were self-contained because they did not have to pay for the labor they violently forced on black people. Slave owners did not need or want government-funded education programs because they wanted to keep the economy centered around the plantations. Whether it be for white or black people, education was against the wealthy elites’ economic interests. When slavery was abolished, the slave states found themselves struggling to develop public infrastructure to support the community. Today, seven out of the ten states with the least education achievement are in states that once had a slave-based economy. Slavery impoverished the south, and it cost everyone except the small percent of the wealthy. The slave-based economy states lacked public funding and infrastructure, which helps everyone achieve the American dream of moving up the socioeconomic ladder. This is only one factor, yet it must be addressed.
This hidden part of the story of how racism costs all of us is what can unite our country across racial groups. The racist competitive fallacy that progress for one racial group comes at the expense of another, known as the zero-sum narrative, is such a hurtful lie because everyone loses when people think this way. Showing the ways racism has cost all of us may be the way to finally end the social divisions made between racial groups and the approach we can take to defeating racism in America. I highly recommend that everyone read this book to see how climate action, healthcare, poverty, education, housing, and democracy can achieve real progress in an anti-racist society. This book lays out the ways white privilege is apparent in all these issues, but also identifies the hidden burdensome costs. While it is important that white people realize how racism has cost them, it is fundamental that the suffering and pain people of color endured and still face today is not overshadowed because it has always been greater. We have to “refill the pool” of public goods for all of us. In order to do that, we have to have the will. It starts with fixing America’s broken moral compass and facing the truth of our country’s history and current state.
Note: Here is the link to the study conducted about high school seniors:
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/us-students-disturbing-lack-knowledge-about-slavery#:~:text=',-By%3A%20Tim%20Walker&text=Share-,Only%208%20percent%20of%20U.S.%20high%20school%20seniors%20can%20identify,the%20Southern%20Poverty%20Law%20Center.
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https://www.rbf.org/news/new-book-rbf-trustee-heather-mcghee-examines-costs-racism
