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Summary
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
Heather McGhee begins by asking, “Why can’t we have nice things?” The U.S. government fails to provide Americans with many basic services, from public health insurance and fair wages to functioning schools and infrastructure. As a young woman, McGhee observed the nation’s worsening economic inequality. But working at the think tank Demos in her 20s showed her that information could actually transform policy. So she went to law school, then returned to Demos to dedicate her career to economic policy research.
McGhee explains the basic premise of her book, which is also the guiding mission behind her career in policy research. She wants to understand why the U.S. is so unequal, and why the U.S. government struggles to implement public policies that benefit the majority of its population. After all, the U.S. is the richest country in the world, but lags far behind its peers. Yet McGhee deeply believes that knowledge is power: she thinks that politicians can pass better policies if they understand why current policies are failing and how better ones could succeed.
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Themes
McGhee used to believe that bad economic policies disproportionately harm Black communities because structural racism already puts those communities at a disadvantage. But while working at Demos, she had an experience that changed her mind.
McGhee sets the reader up for the central insight in her book: just as policy exacerbates racism, racism also leads to bad policy. And this has major implications for McGhee’s work. Namely, it suggests that better research alone will not get political leaders to pass policies that help the people who need it, because those leaders often do not believe that those people are worth helping.
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In the 1990s and 2000s, Americans started carrying far more debt, which led to a wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies. The problem was especially pronounced in Black and Latinx communities. Demos published a report on this trend and received significant media attention. But lenders spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress, which passed a bill making it much harder for consumers to escape debts.
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One day at the Capitol, McGhee overheard a senator complaining that “deadbeat” dads declare bankruptcy to avoid paying child support. She realized that Congress’s attitude towards indebted consumers wasn’t just about class: it was also about “coded racial stereotypes.” Of course, McGhee has always known that white people “assume the worst” about Black people—she just didn’t think it would affect policy.
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McGhee had a similar experience on a conference call with several white economists in 2010. She remarked that politicians wanted to stop investing in the U.S. middle class because, in a generation, it would be mostly people of color. The economists replied that her idea was true but not “persuasive.” After all, “the unspoken conventional wisdom” is to avoid talking about race in Washington, since most of the people in power are white. But perhaps racism is already behind their thinking—and perhaps it leads them to reject policies that help white people, too.
Similarly, white Americans did not act in their “rational economic self-interest” by electing Donald Trump. Instead, they voted based on powerful assumptions about how American society works. After Trump’s inauguration, McGhee decided to quit her job running Demos and start researching how factors like “belonging, competition, and status” drive people’s political behavior. In the U.S., these factors usually come down to people’s beliefs about race, and those beliefs are the source of our laws.
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Psychologists have found that, when white Americans read about how the U.S. will become majority-nonwhite in the 2040s, they start to favor more conservative policies. They assume that different racial groups are competing, so their own status will go down when there are more people of color around. Conservative politicians and media have long pushed this “zero-sum paradigm.” In fact, even McGhee used to believe a version of it: she thought that racism led to policies that benefited white people. But her research has shown her that, on a range of issues, “racism is actually driving inequality for everyone.”
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This book is about McGhee’s “journey to tally the hidden costs of racism to us all.” She traveled around the U.S. to understand how white people have hurt themselves by supporting racist policies. (But these policies have always been far worse for people of color.) To build a true multiracial democracy, Americans must abandon the zero-sum paradigm. More and more white Americans believe in this paradigm, but most Black Americans don’t. Ultimately, it only serves the rich and powerful, who profit from dividing the majority. But when ordinary people work together across racial lines, they can build better policies and overcome animosity. McGhee calls this the “Solidarity Dividend.” Indeed, millions of white voters helped oust Trump in 2020, and they give McGhee hope for the future of the U.S.
