When a court decreed that Boston schools desegregate in the 1970s, white parents responded with fight and flight. Some children from low-income white families left classrooms and never returned - effectively cutting themselves off from achieving the American dream of living more economically secure lives than their parents. I heard some of those whites interviewed 50 years later, and they were still blaming busing for their straitened circumstances.
The central idea of Heather McGhee's "The Sum of Us" -- that racism costs everyone -- wasn't new to me because of what I knew about busing in Boston and other aspects of American history. McGhee looked to more recent developments than Boston busing. She argues, for example, that opponents of Obamacare exploited white fears that a government program that would benefit everyone would give Blacks something they didn't deserve. McGhee saw this at work even in the mainly white state of Maine, where the governor refused to expand Medicaid after the Affordable Care Act's passage. "In Maine," McGhee writes, "white people constitute about 95 percent of the population, and 11.5 percent of them were in poverty in 2016 - twice as many white people in poverty as there were people of color of all incomes in the whole state. The people who needed government services were overwhelmingly white."
I was well into "The Sum of Us" when my daughter gave me a Christmas present, a copy of "We Cast a Shadow," by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Gifts from kids come first, so I paused McGhee's nonfiction to read the Ruffin novel set in the not-too-distant future. In "We Cast a Shadow," the white wife of the Black protagonist is accidentally hit and killed by a security officer who's cruising their neighborhood in his patrol car expressly to police Black residents.
Ruffin's protagonist has responded to racism by hating himself - he had defended the need for the neighborhood patrols, and spends much of "We Cast a Shadow" trying to earn enough money to put his son through an arduous and expensive medical procedure that lightens skin and narrows noses and lips. "We Cast a Shadow" ends on a warily hopeful note, with the son escaping his father's plot to change his race, and the protagonist learning to at least love his son, if not himself.
When I returned to “The Sum of Us,” I found that McGhee, like Ruffin, is a cautious optimist. She also is among many researchers who attribute rising white anxiety to demographics. According to census projections the United States will become “minority white” in 2045, when whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population, Hispanics 24.6 percent, Blacks 13.1, Asians 7.9 and those who claim more than one race or ethnicity 3.8 percent.
McGhee cites the work of the late Columbia Business School Vice Dean Dr. Katherine W. Phillips to make the point that growing diversity should be embraced, not feared. Phillips concluded after decades of research that "members of a homogenous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another; that they will understand one another's perspectives and beliefs; that they will be able to easily come to consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes."
In addition to describing the heavy cost of racism in "The Sum of Us," McGhee offers examples of people reaching across America's racial divide to work together to solve such problems as industrial pollution or low wages. She concludes that "we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the 'We' in 'We the People' is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us."
McGhee writes, "We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our shared history -- both the pain and the resilience."
As Columbia scholar Phillips noted, turning the page will be hard work. And novelist Ruffin shows how crucial the work is for all of us.