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Chapter 9
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sum of Us, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Zero-Sum Thinking vs. Solidarity
The Toll of Racism
American Values and Identity
Research, Persuasion, and Policy Change
Summary
Analysis
McGhee visits Lewiston, a former mill town in Maine, which is the U.S.’s oldest, whitest state. Industrial decline has crushed Lewiston’s economy since the 1960s and 1970s, so it’s easy to see the city through the zero-sum paradigm: “progress for people of color means a loss for white people.” Maine’s former governor, Paul LePage, won election by telling these kinds of stories—and then spent his term cutting taxes on the wealthy and refusing Medicaid expansion.
In this concluding chapter, McGhee takes Lewiston as a case study for how the U.S. can choose between zero-sum thinking and solidarity. Of course, Lewiston has all the characteristics of a place where zero-sum thinking would dominate. But remarkably, as McGhee will reveal later in this chapter, solidarity has actually won out there. Indeed, Lewiston’s story captures McGhee’s deep sense of hope and optimism about the U.S.’s collective future.
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But actually, Lewiston’s revitalization proves the zero-sum paradigm wrong. As she walks down its main street, McGhee passes blocks of boarded-up storefronts, an empty lawyer’s office, and a giant pawn shop. Then, she reaches a block full of vibrant stores serving the city’s growing Somali community. She gets a coffee at the Mogadishu Business Center, which sells groceries and offers a variety of services from tax preparation to tailoring. Then, she visits City Hall, where the hallway is lined with portraits of Lewiston’s white, male mayors.
The streetscape shows how African immigrants and refugees (particularly Somalis) have turned Lewiston around. They have brought energy, skill, and revenue to the declining, aging, racially homogeneous town. Of course, the endless portraits of white mayors suggest that Lewiston is not used to this kind of change and may not be ready to accept it. After all, McGhee’s analysis indicates that places like Lewiston typically respond to changes in racial demographics with zero-sum thinking.
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McGhee meets city administrator Phil Nadeau, who tells her how Lewiston’s industry all moved to the South, and then to Asia. By 2000, the city’s jobs were gone, and its young people were leaving fast. The city government realized “that only one thing would save the town: new people.” By pure chance, Somali refugees started moving to Lewiston around the same time, and then refugees from other countries in Africa followed. Suddenly, the city’s vacant housing was occupied and its empty storefronts became vibrant. Now, it’s one of the only Maine cities that is actually growing. Many Lewiston mayors haven’t appreciated the “new Mainers,” but Nadeau clearly does.
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Immigration has revitalized rural towns like Lewiston all across the U.S. In fact, 83 percent of the nation’s rural population growth has been people of color. Of course, white locals can easily choose the zero-sum story and blame newcomers for their towns’ decline. But some locals see the reality: the newcomers actually bring jobs and growth. So those locals decide to help the newcomers integrate, instead.
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Sometimes, the opposite happens too: the newcomers help the locals integrate. For instance, like many Franco-American Mainers, Cecile Thornton stopped speaking French as a child. After retirement, she had no family left in Lewiston, so she visited the local Franco Center to try and connect with others. But she was frustrated to see that everyone was still speaking English. So she tried visiting the French Club at the Hillview public housing project, whose residents are mostly African immigrants. She befriended a Congolese man named Edho; their conversation was the most French she had spoken since childhood. She started visiting repeatedly and befriending the other immigrants. Eventually, these new friends started mingling with the other Franco retirees—and helping them relearn French.
Father-of-two Bruce Noddin had a similar experience. While recovering from a serious opioid addiction, he started preaching in the local jail. One evening outside the jail, he met ZamZam, a woman who was bringing delicious-smelling food to the Muslim inmates during Ramadan. ZamZam recruited him into a progressive political group called the Maine People’s Alliance, and he started organizing for political change alongside new immigrants. Now, he leads an annual Community Unity Barbecue. To him, the African refugees are no different from his own Franco-American community, which also came to Lewiston to escape persecution.
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Despite these uplifting anecdotes, there is still lots of “zero-sum tension” in Lewiston. Said, the owner of the Mogadishu Business Center, tells McGhee about both sides of the coin. He explains how his wife hired a white seamstress named Brenda to make African clothes and how immigrant children are winning state soccer championships, but he also details how white voters and politicians have lashed out against change. The mayor wrote an open letter asking immigrants to leave, white supremacists demonstrated in town, and the governor accused Somali people of moving to Maine for welfare. Said concludes that different kinds of people naturally come together, but “the politicians will try to separate us.”
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In 2015, Lewiston’s Republican mayor, Robert Macdonald, ran for reelection against the multiracial minister and Maine People’s Alliance activist Ben Chin. During the campaign, Ben noticed that many white voters believe in absurd, racist myths—like “Somali people get a free car as soon as they come to America.” Ben amassed a large grassroots following and emphasized economic issues, but his opponents attacked him by sticking racist posters of him all over town, and he narrowly lost. Two years later, he ran again and lost by just 145 votes, in part because an email in which he called a group of rich white voters “a bunch of racists” leaked to the press.
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Mayor Macdonald’s policy priorities were lowering taxes on the wealthy (but increasing them for everyone else) and restricting immigrants’ access to welfare. Meanwhile, Governor LePage was busy vetoing Medicaid expansion five times (even though the vast majority of poor and uninsured people in Maine are white). But the people of Maine overrode the governor’s veto and expanded Medicaid through a ballot initiative in 2017. Ben Chin’s Maine People’s Alliance helped the campaign succeed by spreading accurate information about Medicaid and organizing working-class people of all races. Somali taxi drivers played a key role by shuttling voters to the polls.
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Maine has garnered a clear Solidarity Dividend from the Maine People’s Alliance’s multiracial activism. In 2018, the state elected a progressive legislature that passed public health laws to counter the opioid epidemic and significant new labor protections. Across the state, candidates for school boards are focusing on racial justice. And Shane Bouchard, Lewiston’s Republican mayor, ended up resigning over racist jokes he made about slavery.
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McGhee presents her five main conclusions about how Americans can build a better society. First, we should move beyond the zero-sum paradigm and try to achieve Solidarity Dividends instead. Second, the way to do this is by “refill[ing] the pool of public goods.” Third, policies should recognize that racism hurts everyone, but they shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Instead, they should direct resources to the nonwhite communities that have suffered the most. Fourth, the best replacement for the zero-sum paradigm is the principle that people “truly do need each other.” And finally, the American people must collectively learn about and reckon with their history of racism in order to move on from it. In the rest of this chapter, she will address each of these points in more depth.
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First, we need Solidarity Dividends, not zero-sum politics. The U.S.’s current system of extreme inequality is unsustainable: a few elites capture all the economic gains, while most Americans can’t afford to pursue education, innovation, or entrepreneurship. This seriously weakens economic growth. Fixing this economy requires solidarity: “the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.” Elites use racism to try and divide working-class people, but they can come together by empathizing across racial lines (like Bridget Hughes, who joined the Fight for $15 after empathizing with a Latina woman who also worked in fast food).
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Second, we need public goods. 21st-century problems like inequality and climate change require collective political responses. But the U.S.’s capacity for collective action is weak because many Americans have turned against the very ideas of government action and public goods. The solution is to “refill the pool” by holding the government to higher standards, giving it the resources it needs, and engaging young people in public service jobs—like installing renewable energy capacity, caring for the young and elderly, and rebuilding infrastructure (including public pools). These jobs should connect young people from different backgrounds and parts of the country.
Third, we should tailor policies to help the most vulnerable through “targeted universalism.” This means choosing a universal goal for society, but trying to achieve this goal through targeted strategies that meet each social group’s needs. For instance, to achieve universal homeownership, the U.S. needs policies that specifically help Black people buy homes, because the government has deliberately excluded them from homeownership in the past.
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The government currently tries to promote homeownership by making the interest on mortgages tax-deductible. But this actually gives the most money to the people with the most property, aggravating inequality instead of rectifying it. Instead, the U.S. should help redlining victims with down payments. This would have positive spillover effects: increasing Black homeownership would increase local property taxes and improve local school systems. (In fact, overcoming racial disparities would add $8 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2050.) Homeownership policy should be part of a broader reparations program, like the one that William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen outline in their book From Here to Equality. Such a program would eliminate the racial wealth gap and finally give most Black people the financial freedom to pursue the American Dream.
The COVID-19 pandemic also shows how failing to fix racial inequities hurts everyone. The virus disproportionately killed people of color because American society is structured in a deeply unequal way. From lacking health insurance and being an “essential” worker to air pollution to crowded housing, people of color were more vulnerable to COVID-19 in every relevant way. The U.S.’s public health and hospital systems are so weak because the nation has drained the metaphorical pool—or stopped investing in public goods. And the U.S. government is dominated by white men, who often don’t understand the social conditions that everyone else experiences. Above all, McGhee concludes, there should be more women of color leading our democracy.
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Fourth, McGhee argues that people must connect with each other across racial lines. Diversity doesn’t mean bringing together different people who have nothing in common; rather, it means different people coming together based on shared values and experiences, even though they don’t necessarily share the same ethnicity or culture.
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Of course, diversity can be uncomfortable. But this is why it’s so powerful: in a diverse group, people must think creatively and work harder to reach agreement, so they tend to come up with better solutions. In fact, Columbia Business School professor Katherine W. Phillips and Harvard Business School professor Samuel Sommers have found that diverse groups outperform all-white groups on tasks like a murder mystery game and a mock jury trial. Specifically, white people simply work harder when there are nonwhite people around. This proves that diversity is key to solving our most pressing problems.
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Fifth, Americans need to cope with their country’s “racial story” on a collective, national level, through a formal program backed by the government. Cities and universities have already started Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) processes, and Congress is considering replicating these efforts nationally. After studying truth-and-reconciliation commissions in dozens of other countries, nearly 200 experts designed the TRHT system for the U.S.’s specific needs.
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TRHT involves assembling a representative cross-section of a community to participate in guided conversations. The participants tell personal stories about race, then identify how policies have created racial hierarchies in their community (and how new policies can fix them). Then, the attendees identify racism in their stories and rewrite them so that they start from a place of respect for human equality.
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Jerry Hawkins, a Black educator who specializes in teaching the young children of recent immigrants, became Dallas’s TRHT program’s director in 2016. He was very skeptical about TRHT until he opened the guidebook. He changed his mind when he saw the question, “Do we need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States?” and learned that TRHT involves doing a “community racial history” and “community visioning process.” Three years later, after interviewing hundreds of people, Jerry’s team published the report “A New Community Vision for Dallas.” The report boldly declares that stolen land and stolen labor are the city’s foundation, then documents a series of striking, lesser-known racist incidents in the city’s history.
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Dallas’s TRHT process is also remarkable because it changed its participants’ minds. For instance, a white school superintendent publicly apologized to a Black activist during one of the meetings because he finally understood why she was so outspoken. Lastly and most importantly, the TRHT program has enabled several policy changes, such as racial equity offices in the city and its school system, as well as trainings for top city officials and new historical markers around the city. TRHT participants even met with the publisher of the Dallas Morning News to discuss the paper’s racist covering of police shootings.
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One of the experts who developed TRHT, Dr. Gail Christopher, just so happens to be Heather McGhee’s mother. At the very end of her research for this book, on the day that the proposal for a nationwide TRHT process officially entered Congress, McGhee visits her. Dr. Christopher argues that TRHT is powerful because it offers people new beginnings: it helps them free themselves from racist thinking and truly see others as equal human beings, often for the first time. Overcoming racism is “bending that moral arc toward justice,” Christopher continues, quoting Dr. King.
But truly building a brighter future, McGhee concludes, will require overcoming the idea of human hierarchy that has always been at the core of the U.S.’s public policy. The future depends on the question: “Who is an American, and what are we to one another?” Embracing demographic change and expanding our vision of “We the People” are the best ways to fulfill America’s long-elusive promise of freedom, justice, and equality.
