The Sum of Us

“Why can’t we have nice things?”
Perhaps there’s been a time when you’ve pondered exactly this question. And by nice things, you weren’t thinking about hovercraft or laundry that does itself. You were thinking about more basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics. The “we” who can’t seem to have nice things is Americans, all Americans.

Was it possible that even when we didn’t bring up race, it didn’t matter? That racism could strengthen the hand that beat us, even when we were advocating for policies that would help all Americans—including white people?

The logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it. They should be arming themselves (as they have been in record numbers, “for protection,” since the Obama presidency) because demographic change will end in a dog-eat-dog race war. Obviously, this isn’t the story we want to tell. It’s not even what we believe. The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that Black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right.

The story of this country’s rise from a starving colony to a world superpower is one that can’t be told without the central character of race—specifically, the creation of a “racial” hierarchy to justify the theft of Indigenous land and the enslavement of African and Indigenous people. […] This hierarchy—backed by pseudo-scientists, explorers, and even clergy—gave Europeans moral permission to exploit and enslave. So, from the United States’ colonial beginnings, progress for those considered white did come directly at the expense of people considered nonwhite. The U.S. economy depended on systems of exploitation—on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders. This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people.

For the common white American, the presence of Blackness—imagined as naturally enslaved, with no agency or reason, denied each and every one of the enumerated freedoms—gave daily shape to the confines of a new identity just cohering at the end of the eighteenth century: white, free, citizen. It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World; if it could be Blacks, it wouldn’t have to be whites.

Today, the racial zero-sum story is resurgent because there is a political movement invested in ginning up white resentment toward lateral scapegoats (similarly or worse-situated people of color) to escape accountability for a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few. For four years, a tax-cutting and self-dealing millionaire trumpeted the zero-sum story from the White House, but the Trump presidency was in many ways brought to us by two decades of zero-sum propaganda on the ubiquitous cable news network owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone. In a sense, that’s what government is. I can’t create my own electric grid, school system, internet, or healthcare system—and the most efficient way to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly.

When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.

Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as Black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a Black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government. The idea tapped into an old stereotype of Black laziness that was first trafficked in the antebellum era to excuse and minimize slavery and was then carried forward in minstrel shows, cartoons, and comedy to the present day. The welfare trope also did the powerful blame-shifting work of projection: like telling white aristocrats that it was their slaves who were the lazy ones, the Black welfare stereotype was a total inversion of the way the U.S. government had actually given “free stuff” to one race over all others.

The racial polarization of our two-party system has forced a choice between class interest and perceived racial interest, and in every presidential election since the Civil Rights Act, the majority of white people chose the party of their race. That choice keeps a conservative faction in power that blocks progress on the modest economic agenda they could support.

I discovered that if you try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the counter-message that does talk, even implicitly, about race. Racial scapegoating about “illegals,” drugs, gangs, and riots undermines public support for working together. Our research showed that color-blind approaches that ignored racism didn’t beat the scapegoating zero-sum story; we had to be honest about racism’s role in dividing us in order to call people to their higher ideals.

Looking at these numbers, one could be tempted to minimize the role of racism and chalk it up to greed instead. […] But history might counter: What is racism without greed? It operates on multiple levels. Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded. Lenders, brokers, and investors targeted people of color because they thought they could get away with it. Because of racism, they could.

The public conversation and the media coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis started out racialized and stayed that way. We’ve had so much practice justifying racial inequality with well-worn stereotypes that the narrative about this entirely new kind of financial havoc immediately slipped into that groove. Even when the extent of the industry’s recklessness and lack of government oversight was clear, the racialized story was there, offering to turn the predators themselves into victims. After the crash, conservatives were quick to blame the meltdown on people of color and on the government for being too solicitous of them.

And all of it was preventable, if only we had paid attention earlier to the financial fires burning through Black and brown communities across the nation. Instead, the predatory practices were allowed to continue until the disaster had engulfed white communities, too—and only then, far too late, was it recognized as an emergency. There is no question that the financial crisis hurt people of color first and worst. And yet the majority of the people it damaged were white. This is the dynamic we’ve seen over and over again throughout our country’s history, from the drained public pools, to the shuttered public schools, to the overgrown yards of vacant homes.

It was jarring to hear auto plant jobs described this way, as everybody knows that manufacturing jobs are the iconic “good jobs” of the American middle class. But the truth is factory jobs used to be terrible jobs, with low pay and dangerous conditions, until the people who needed those jobs to survive banded together, often overcoming violent oppression, to demand wholesale change to entire industries: textiles, meatpacking, steel, automobiles.

At the worker center, I asked Melvin about how unions are perceived where he lives. “The people that we see, as soon as they see UAW, and even if you bring up union, they just think color. They just see color. They think that unions, period—not just UAW—they just think unions, period, are for lazy Black people….And a lot of ’em, even though they want the union, their racism, that hatred is keeping them from joining.”

Johnny agreed with Melvin’s assessment of his fellow white workers. “They get their southern mentality….‘I ain’t votin’ [yes] because the Blacks are votin’ for it. If the Blacks are for it, I’m against it.’ ”

The company was able to redraw the lines of allegiance—not worker to worker, but white to white—for the relatively low cost of a few perks.

The scale of their organization is as large as a political party, but they use front groups and shell companies to keep their funding mostly secret. The core philosophy that unites their economic aims with their attacks on a multiracial democracy is that a robust democracy will lead to the masses banding together to oppose property owners’ concentration of wealth and power.

Who your neighbors, your co-workers, and your classmates are is one of the most powerful determinants of your path in life. And most white Americans spend their lives on a path set out for them by a centuries-old lie: that in the zero-sum racial competition, white spaces are the best spaces.

White people are the most segregated people in America.

That’s a different way to think about what has perennially been an issue cast with the opposite die: people of color are those who are segregated, because the white majority separates out the Black minority, excludes the Chinese, forces Indigenous Americans onto reservations, expels the Latinos.

Public policy created this problem, and public policy should solve it. Because of our deliberately constructed racial wealth gap, most Black and brown families can’t afford to rent or buy in the places where white families are, and when white families bring their wealth into Black and brown neighborhoods, it more often leads to gentrification and displacement than enduring integration. The solution is more housing in more places that people can afford on the average incomes of workers of color.

Compared to students at predominantly white schools, white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Why? Of course, white students at racially diverse schools develop more cultural competency—the ability to collaborate and feel at ease with people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds—than students who attend segregated schools. But their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.

White children “who learn the prejudices of our society,” wrote the social scientists, were “being taught to gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive way.” They were “not required to evaluate themselves in terms of the more basic standards of actual personal ability and achievement.” What’s more, they “often develop patterns of guilt feelings, rationalizations and other mechanisms which they must use in an attempt to protect themselves from recognizing the essential injustice of their unrealistic fears and hatreds of minority groups.” The best research of the day concluded that “confusion, conflict, moral cynicism, and disrespect for authority may arise in [white] children as a consequence of being taught the moral, religious and democratic principles of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”

Perhaps it makes sense, if you’ve spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of a zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal; that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the players’ skill and merit. You might also learn that if there are problems, you and yours are likely to be spared the costs. The thing is, that’s just not the case with the environment and climate change. We live under the same sky.

If a set of decision makers believes that an environmental burden can be shouldered by someone else to whom they don’t feel connected or accountable, they won’t think it’s worthwhile to minimize the burden by, for example, forcing industry to put controls on pollution. But that results in a system that creates more pollution than would exist if decision makers cared about everyone equally—and we’re talking about air, water, and soil, where it’s pretty hard to cordon off toxins completely to the so-called sacrifice zone. It’s elites’ blindness to the costs they pay that keeps pollution higher for everyone.

Over the years that I have sought answers to why a fairer economy is so elusive, it has become clearer to me that how white people understand what’s right and wrong about our diverse nation, who belongs and who deserves, is determining our collective course. This is the crux of it: Can we swim together in the same pool or not? It’s a political question, yes, and one with economic ramifications. But at its core, it’s a moral question. Ultimately, an economy—the rules we abide by and set for what’s fair and who merits what—is an expression of our moral understanding. So, if our country’s moral compass is broken, is it any wonder that our economy is adrift?

In the absence of moral leadership, there are just too many competing stories. For every call to become an activist for racial justice, there’s a well-rehearsed message that says that activists are pushing too hard. For every chance to speak up against the casual racism white people so often hear from other white folks, there is a countervailing pressure not to rock the boat. If you want to believe that white people are the real victims in race relations, and that the stereotypes of people of color as criminal and lazy are common sense rather than white supremacist tropes, there is a glide path to take you there.

Equality, freedom, liberty, justice—who could possibly love those ideals more than those denied them?

For all the differences among the world’s major religions, they all hold compassion and human interconnectedness as central values; they all subscribe to a sacred vision of a world without racism.

“I didn’t even know at the time that we had Africans in the city who spoke French. I had no clue, none.” The first man she spoke with, Edho, had just followed his wife and children to Lewiston from Congo. After a timid “Bonjour” from Cecile, she and Edho launched into the longest French conversation Cecile had had since her childhood, with Edho helping her recall long-gone words and phrases. By the end of the first session, she was exhausted but thrilled. “Just as an interested and curious person, when I was meeting these people, I just fell in love with them.” She laughs, knowing what that sounds like. “Not that I really fell in love with them, but I felt like I belonged with them.”

The big and small public works our country needs now should be designed explicitly to foster contact across cultural divides, sending urban youth to rural areas and vice versa, and explicitly building teams that reflect the youth generation’s astonishing diversity. An analysis Demos did in the middle of the Great Recession found that one hundred billion dollars spent directly hiring people could create 2.6 million public service jobs; spending the same amount on tax cuts trickles down to just one hundred thousand jobs.

Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born.

“It’s a powerful, liberating frame to realize that the fallacy of racial hierarchy is a belief system that we don’t have to have. We can replace it with another way of looking at each other as human beings. Then, once you get that opening, you invite people to see a new way forward. You ask questions like ‘What kind of narrative will your great grandchildren learn about this country?’ ‘What is it that will have happened?’ Truthfully, we’ve never done that as a country. We’ve been dealing with the old model, patching it over here, sticking bubble gum over there.”

Everything depends on the answer to this question. Who is an American, and what are we to one another? Politics offers two visions of why all the peoples of the world have met here: one in which we are nothing more than competitors and another in which perhaps the proximity of so much difference forces us to admit our common humanity.