Put The Sum of Us on Your Summer Reading List

My treadmill reading companion this summer is The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. I put it on my summer reading list in February after hearing about it on a morning news program. Most probably think that summer reading is supposed to be light, airy, and fun, like a murder mystery, a romance novel, or a fun Huckleberry Finn type adventure.

I finished my summer mystery in one week while traveling at the end of May. I read While Justice Sleeps, the fictional novel by Stacey Abrams. Yes, THE Stacey Abrams who ran for governor of the State of Georgia. In addition to being intelligent, she is multi-faceted and multi-talented. While pundits invoke her name to rally their election suppression troops, she writes a bestselling fictional novel. Who else can walk, chew gum, influence elections and write a novel at the same time?

It is the nonfictional work The Sum of Us that has captivated me for 4 weeks. One might ask why it is taking me so long to read it. Ms. McGhee uses a storytelling style that makes her book easy to read. She writes as if you are sitting at the kitchen table listening as she prepares dinner. Each chapter is a story within the larger story.
Additionally, she includes conversations she had with real people. Also, complex financial systems are broken down into bite-sized pieces that make sense to common people, like me.

However, the history of the Zero-Sum paradigm, which is woven into the foundation of the United States, is painful. I stop reading because it hurts. I put the book down to process what I have read and to deal with the pain I feel.

If you are Black or a person of color in America, you have in some way experienced the negative effects of the zero-sum paradigm. McGhee discussed the study of Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers, two researchers from Boston.

The title of their study is “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.”
Norton and Sommers began researching white attitudes during President Barak Obama’s first administration. At that time the Tea Party, which was primarily white, fueled a backlash against the Obama administration’s policy agenda. White Americans felt they were being left behind although they maintained dominance in every aspect of life in the United States.

The following passage from Chapter 1 of The Sum of Us provides insight into the study results:

“It turns out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for Black people, it must be at the expense of white people.”

As to why white Americans who have 13 times the median household wealth of Black Americans, feel threatened by diminished discrimination against Black people, neither Sommers nor Norton had an answer that was satisfying to any of us.

“There’s not really an explanation,” said Professor Sommers.

White conservative media perpetuates the false narrative that white people lose when Black people or people of color do better.

The Sum of Us also raises other interesting and unexplainable actions. For example, McGhee dedicates an entire chapter to pool closings. In the second chapter entitled “Racism Drained the Pools,” McGhee provides a history of public works in the United States. She also makes the case that when public pools, which were funded by public tax money, were forced to integrate, elected officials and white patrons preferred to close the pools rather than share them with tax paying people of color.

“The council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well.”

Fast forward to today. I understand why many Black people my parents’ age grew to fear water. They only had access to rivers or lakes which posed greater danger than a monitored public swimming pool. My brother-in-law recently shared a story of losing a close friend who drowned in a river at a young age. “He wanted me to go swimming with him, but mama would not let me go.”

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together should be required reading for professional social workers. It provides historical context to the stories of so many people in this country. It also offers a reasonable, rational argument for understanding the prevailing undercurrent of racism and classism that hurts people of color and whites alike.

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