On the dedication page of Heather McGhee’s bestselling book, “The Sum of Us,” are three words that illuminate the rest:
For My Mother.
You may have encountered McGhee or her book recently. She’s appeared on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” “CBS This Morning” and NPR’s “Fresh Air.” Her book, which explores the idea that American racism has had economic costs for white people too, has been extolled in newspapers. She’s given a TED Talk.
Everywhere she goes, she’s introduced with her impressive credentials: B.A. from Yale University, J.D. from University of California at Berkeley School of Law, former president of the think tank Demos.
But before all that, she was a girl growing up on Chicago’s South Side, and to understand “The Sum of Us,” it helps to understand where she came from. I called her the other day to talk about Chicago, as well as her book, in advance of her appearance Tuesday in a livestream conversation hosted by the Chicago Humanities Festival.
McGhee lives in Brooklyn now, but Chicago remains her touchstone.
“In many ways,” she said, “‘The Sum of Us’ is my journey home to the insights my mother had a long time ago about race and racism and our society.”
When McGhee was born, in 1980, her family lived in the middle-class South Side neighborhood of Chatham. From an early age, she wondered about things. Like why people were living on the pavement in the downtown netherworld of Lower Wacker Drive. And why a kid in her class got evicted and his family’s stuff was set out on the street. And why illness seemed to stalk so many families.
“I had a sense that the world was very harsh for people in our community,” she said. “On the other hand, there was a fierce pride in being Black.”
McGhee’s mother, Dr. Gail Christopher, was a holistic health care practitioner who sometimes took her daughter to work. That meant trips to the Robert Taylor Homes housing project, or to her office in Hyde Park. From her mother, McGhee heard about the shortage of jobs for people on the South Side, and the dangers of lead paint, and how problems rippled into other problems.
“My mother always pointed me toward the structural reasons for the illness we were seeing, the poverty we were seeing,” she said. “She never let me blame individuals, but taught me to ask: Why is this happening?”
When McGee was 8, several years after her parents divorced, her mother moved the family to the suburb of Evanston.
“I saw an entirely different relationship to money,” she said. “Friends who had fridges full of snacks and food, everything that was on the commercials.”
By the time she finished Yale, she moved in a very different world. On the East Coast, she said, Black community feels “thin,” as opposed to the “thick” Black culture of Chicago. But the education from her mother and her hometown stuck with her.
McGhee often uses the word “journey” to describe her thinking. Part of her journey was to marry a man — her best friend from high school — whose father was white and whose mother was an immigrant from Pakistan, meaning her children would have grandparents who were Black, white and South Asian.
Her marriage is only a sentence in the book, but on the phone she said she included it as a “revelation of our common humanity.”
On her research journey, McGhee traveled around the country to understand how race infuses questions of “belonging, competition and status,” and how restrictive policies aimed at Black people can also hurt white people.
For example, she went to Montgomery, Alabama, where in the late 1950s, city leaders drained a public swimming pool rather than integrate it, leaving everybody, Black and white, without the public pool. Many other cities, North and South, did the same.
Through her trips and interviews, she refined an idea she calls “racial zero sum.”
“The zero sum is a very old story that tells people that there’s an us and a them and progress for them has to come at our expense,” she said. “And the racial zero sum tells white Americans that the biggest impediment to their progress is racialized others — Black people, brown people, immigrants — and that they should resent anything that could benefit people of color even if it could also benefit them.”
That thinking has turned many white Americans away from government programs that would improve health care, wages and school funding for all.
“It convinces white people to choose their race over their class,” she said. “By cleaving the working class in half — or thirds — it diminishes the collective power of the working class to change the rules.”
McGhee chronicles how the racial zero sum reaches back into the days of slavery, when wealthy plantation owners had no incentive to invest in their communities. They had what they needed — free labor. Meanwhile, poor white people were left with a sense of social superiority, but shabby wages, schools and roads.
Once slavery was abolished, zero sum thinking continued to thrive.
“In the nineteenth century,” she writes, “employers’ ability to pay Black workers a fraction of white wages made whites see free Black people as threats to their livelihood. In the early twentieth century, new immigrants were added to this competitive dynamic.”
Even the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s wasn’t unalloyed progress. Once Black people had more access to public goods — schools, swimming pools — white support for those things dwindled. Many white Americans, fueled by white politicians, turned against government-funded programs for the “undeserving.” Never mind that those programs — schools, health care — could help white people too.
On her book journey, McGhee met hundreds of people. One was a white man in Texas, who talked to her of how a lack of social solidarity among people of different colors harmed his community. His remark inspired her to coin the term “solidarity dividends.”
“If we had more of a sense that we are all in this together,” she said, “if we could join across lines of race, we could have a higher minimum wage, better funded schools, family leave and elder care, better air and water.”
McGhee’s ideas are too nuanced to fit into this small space, but she’ll elaborate on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in her Chicago Humanities Festival YouTube livestream. It’s free. Registration is here: https://www.chicagohumanities.org/events/heather-mcghee-sum-us/
McGhee’s ideas are complex and yet as straightforward as the answer she offered when I asked her why she thought people have responded so strongly to her book:
“I think people are sick of being divided.”
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
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