ONLINE: Heather McGhee

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Andreas Burgess

Heather McGhee's new book is "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together."

Racism meets the economy in Heather McGhee’s groundbreaking work The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021). Persons of color and whites alike suffer from the inequalities of the system, which McGhee examines. Racism contributes to everything from the loss of the power of unions to the broken healthcare system, McGhee finds. Presented in partnership by the Wisconsin Book Festival with Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, and The Loft's WordPlay, Heather McGhee will appear live in conversation with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All. Register here.

media release: Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?

Presented in partnership with Black Mountain Institute, Literary Arts, and The Loft's WordPlay, Heather McGhee will appear live in conversation with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All,

McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Mississippi to California to Maine, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own.

The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to paint an irrefutable story of racism’s costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy’s collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than zero-sum.