Top Quotes: “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” — Heather McGhee

Introduction

“In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift order for outcomes to change. When policies change in advance of the underlying beliefs, we are often surprised to find the problem still with us. America ended the policy of enforced school segregation two generations ago, but with new justifications, the esteem in which many white parents hold black and brown children hasn’t changed much, and today our schools are nearly as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education. Beliefs matter.”

“The civil rights victories that were so bitterly opposed in the South ended up being a boon for the region, resulting in stronger local economies and more investments in infrastructure and education. The old zero-sum paradigm is not just counterproductive; it’s a lie. I started my journey on the hunt for its source and discovered that it has only ever truly served a narrow group of people. To this day, the wealthy and the powerful are still selling the zero-sum story for their own profit, hoping to keep people with much in common from making common cause with one another.”

“”It turns, out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for black people, it must be at the expense of white people.”

“But that’s not the way black people see it, right?” I asked.”

“By the time war loomed, New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy — 40 percent of the city’s exporting businesses through warehousing, shipping insurance, and sales were Southem cotton exports — that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the South.”

“A 1669 Virginia colony law deemed that killing one’s slave could not amount to murder, because the law would assume no malice or intent to “destroy his own estate.””

“The colonies would not have been able to afford their War of Independence were it not for the aid provided by the French, who did so in exchange for tobacco grown by enslaved people. Edmund S. Morgan, author of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, wrote “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor.”

“Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free — when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have. And in selective college admissions, any given white person is far more likely to be competing with another white person than with one of the underrepresented people of color in the applicant pool.”

“Helper had taken it upon himself to count how many schools, libraries, and other public-serving institutions had been set up in free states compared to slave states. In New Hampshire, for instance, he counted 2,381 public schools; in Mississippi, just 782. Maine had 236 libraries; Georgia, 38. The disparity was similar everywhere he looked.

Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southerers. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of wealth, land, and political power. “Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live,” Helper wrote. And without a voice in the policy making, common white southerners were unable to win much for themselves.”

“Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic; counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.”

Public Pools

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. In the 1920s, towns and cities tried to outdo one another by building the most elaborate pools; in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration put people to work building hundreds more. By World War Il, the country’s two thousand pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free. A particular social agenda undergirded these public investments. Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand public resort pools as “social melting pots.” Like free public grade schools, public pools were part of an “Americanizing” project intended to overcome ethnic divisions and cohere a common identity — and it worked. A Pennsylvania county recreation director said, “Let’s build bigger, better and finer pools. That’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swimsuit, and we’re all the same.” Of course, that vision of classlessness wasn’t expansive enough to include skin color that wasn’t, in fact, “all the same.” By the 1950s, the fight to integrate America’s prized public swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public goods.”

“Eventually, the exclusion boomeranged on white citizens. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Oak Park pool was the grandest one for miles, the crown jewel of a Parks Department that also included a zoo, a community center, and a dozen other public parks. Of course, the pool was for whites only; the entire public parks system was segregated. Dorothy Moore was a white teenage lifeguard when a federal court deemed the town’s segregated recreation unconstitutional. Suddenly, black children would be able to wade into the deep end with white children at the Oak Park pool; at the rec center, black elders would get chairs at the card tables. The reaction of the city council was swift-effective January 1, 1959, the Parks Department would be no more.

The council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. “It was miserable,” Mrs. Moore told a reporter five decades later. Uncomprehending white children cried as the city contractors poured dirt into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. It even sold off the animals in the zoo. The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after it reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.”

“Even in towns that didn’t immediately drain their public pools, integration ended the public pool’s glory years, as white residents abandoned the pools en masse.

Built in 1919, the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest in the country and probably the world, with a sandy beach, an elaborate diving board, and a reported capacity of ten thousand swimmers. When a new city administration changed the parks policy in 1949 to allow black swimmers, the first integrated swim ended in bloodshed. On June 21, two hundred white residents surrounded the pool with “bats, clubs, bricks and knives” to menace the first thirty or so black swimmers. Over the course of the day, a white mob that grew to five thousand attacked every black person in sight around the Fairground Park. After the Fairground Park Riot, as it was known, the city returned to a segregation policy using public safety as a justification, but a successful NAACP lawsuit reopened the pool to all St. Louisans the following summer. On the first day of integrated swimming, July 19, 1950, only seven white swimmers attended, joining three brave black swimmers under the shouts of two hundred white protesters. That first integrated summer, Fairground logged just 10,000 swims — down from 313,000 the previous summer. The city closed the pool for good six years later. Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world. Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme

Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only. Black citizens sued, but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm. “There was no evidence of state action affecting Negroes differently from white,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. The Court went on to turn a blind eye to the obvious racial animus behind the decision, taking the race neutrality at face value. “Petitioners’ contention that equal protection requirements were violated because the pool-closing decision was motivated by anti-integration considerations must also fail, since courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.” The decision showed the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit and forecast the politics of public services for decades to come: If the benefits can’t be whites-only, you can’t have them at all. And if you say it’s racist? Well, prove it.

As Jeff Wiltse writes in his history of pool desegregation, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America, “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real.”

Government Spending

“According to the authoritative American National Elections Studies (ANES) survey, 65 percent of white people in 1956 believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country. White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however — from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent — and has stayed low ever since.”

“As of the latest ANES data in 2016, there was a sixty-point difference in support for increased government spending based on whether you were a white person with high versus low racial resentment. Government, it turned out, had become a highly racialized character in the white story of our country.

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.”

“We could eliminate all poverty in the United States by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.”

“Republican politicians have thoroughly communicated their positions on these issues to their base through campaign ads, speeches, and the conservative media echo chamber, so one would think that their voters would get the message. That message is: cut taxes whenever possible and oppose government involvement in healthcare. But 46 percent of Republicans polled in the summer of 2020 actually supported a total government takeover of health insurance, Medicare for All — even after a Democratic primary where the idea was championed by a Democratic Socialist, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Zero Republican politicians support this policy, and almost all voted in 2017 to repeal the relatively modest government role in healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. On taxes, nearly half of Republican voters support raising taxes on millionaires by 4 percent to pay for schools and roads, but the Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy. In the Inequality Era brought to us by racist dog whistle politics, white voters are less hostile to government policies that promote economic equality than the party they most often vote into power. But vote for them they do. Racial allegiance trumps.”

“Political scientists Woojin Lee and John Roemer studied the rise of antigovernment politics in the late 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s and found that the Republican Party’s adoption of policies that voters perceived as anti-black (opposition to affirmative action and welfare, harsh policing and sentencing) won them millions more white voters than their unpopular economic agenda would have attracted. The result was a revolution in American economic policy: from high marginal tax rates and generous public investments in the middle class such as the GI Bill to a low-tax, low-investment regime that resulted in less than 1 percent annual income growth for 90 percent of American families for thirty years. According to Roemer and Lee, the culprit was racism. “We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18 percentage points.” They conclude, “Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.””

Education

“Yes, student loans enable Americans to pay their college bills during enrollment, but the compounding interest means they must pay at least 33 percent more on average than the amount borrowed. Millions of students are also paying double-digit interest on private loans.”

“In fact, white high school dropouts have higher average household wealth than black people who’ve graduated from college.”

“In 1978, a ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes. Property tax revenue from corporate landowners and homeowners in the state dropped 60 percent the following year. The impact was felt most acutely in public K-12 schools; California went from a national leader in school funding to forty-first in the country. But Prop 13 also swiftly destroyed the local revenue base for California’s extensive system of community colleges and put them in direct competition for state funding with the more selective state schools and universities. The resulting squeeze accelerated the end of the free college era in California. Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.

Dog-whistling was ever-present in the campaign to win Proposition 13, from flyers claiming that lower property taxes would put an end to busing for integration purposes to messaging questioning why homeowners should pay for “other people’s children.” Conservative columnist William Safire put it most directly, however, when he endorsed the proposition in The New York Times: “An underlying reason is the surge in the number of illegals — aliens fleeing poverty in Mexico — who have been crossing the border by the hundreds of thousands…As one might expect, property taxpayers see themselves giving much more than they are getting; they see wage-earners, both legal and illegal, getting more in services than they pay for in taxes.” A decade later, voters in Colorado, another state with a growing Latinx immigrant population, passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes. TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) has forced Coloradans to go without a long list of public services, including for two years children’s vaccines when the state couldn’t afford to purchase them — and the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.”

Criminal Justice

“These are not kingpins or high-level dealers; more than four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as for selling drugs, often in amounts so tiny they can only be intended for personal use. In 2016, the number of arrests for marijuana possession exceeded the total number of arrests for all violent crimes put together.”

Healthcare

“Tester also ran an experiment to try to disassociate health reform proposals from Obama. “The experiments…revealed that health care policies were significantly more racialized when they were framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they were for respondents told that these exact same proposals were part of President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts.””

“Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692-these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020; adults without children are usually ineligible. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, it expanded qualification for Medicaid to 138 percent of the poverty level for all adults (about $30,000 for a family of three in 2020) and equalized eligibility rules across all states. But in 2012, a Supreme Court majority invoked states’ rights to strike down the Medicaid expansion and make it optional.”

“Park found “as the percent of the black population increases, the likelihood of adoption decreases.” The zero-sum story again. As with the public swimming pools, public healthcare is often a benefit that white people have little interest in sharing with their black neighbors. Grogan and Park’s model found that it didn’t matter whether a state’s communities of color supported the expansion if the white community, with its greater political power and representation, did not. “State adoption decisions are positively related to white opinion and do not respond to nonwhite support levels,” they concluded.”

Housing

“The loans are called subprime because they’re designed to be sold to borrowers who have lower-than-prime credit scores. That’s the idea, but it wasn’t the practice. An analysis conducted for the Wall Street Journal in 2007 showed that the majority of subprime loans were going to people who could have qualified for less expensive prime loans. So, if the loans weren’t defined by the borrowers’ credit scores, what did subprime loans all have in common? They had higher interest rates and fees, meaning they were more profitable for the lender, and because we’re talking about five- and six-figure mortgage debt, those higher rates meant massively higher debt burdens for the borrower.

If you sell someone a prime-rate, 5 percent annual percentage rate (APR) thirty-year mortgage in the amount of $200,000, they’ll pay you back an additional $186,512–93 percent of what they borrowed — for the privilege of spreading payments out over thirty years. If you can manage to sell that same person a subprime loan with a 9 percent interest rate, you can collect $379,328 on top of the $200,000 repayment, nearly twice over what they borrowed. The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy — and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out. The refinance loans stripped homeowners of equity they had built up over years of mortgage payments. That’s why these diseased loans were tested first on the segment of Americans least respected by the financial sector and least protected by lawmakers: black and brown families.”

“At the closing, Janice saw that her interest rate was high, but the sales rep reassured her. “She told me..that I could come back in and we could lower the interest rate once I had paid on it for a certain amount of time. [It was like a perk for me; the interest rate will be lower. So, I thought, Well, this is good. It sounds like she’s doing everything on my behalf.’”

Then there was the God part. Janice’s sweet voice grew an edge as she said, “She had figured me out.” Janice had told the broker that they were looking to refinance in order to free up money to pay for their children’s Christian schooling. “And so, she talked about her Christian faith, which resonated with me. I remember the crosses that she had in the office.”

The sales rep had touched Janice’s hand and told her, “I know that God must have sent you to us. We’re here for you.”

Janice shook her head at the memory of “this person who is talking about God.and is trying to show me that she’s giving me probably the best deal that I can get…I wasn’t taught to doubt people who presented themselves as God-fearing people. So, I didn’t doubt.”

She and Isaiah signed the paperwork.”

“In 1933, during the Great Depression, the U.S government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Debby explained, “Its role was to buy up mortgages that were in foreclosure and refinance them, and put people back on their feet. It did a huge amount of that activity — billions of dollars’ (worth] within a short period of time in the thirties.”

Perhaps this agency’s most lasting contribution was the creation of residential security maps, which used different colors to designate the level of supposed investment risk in individual neighborhoods. A primary criterion for defining a neighborhood’s risk was the race of its residents, with people of color considered the riskiest.

These neighborhoods were identified by red shading to warn lenders not to invest there — the birth of redlining. (A typical assessment reads: “The neighborhood is graded ‘D’ because of its concentration of negroes, but the section may improve to a third class area as this element is forced out.”)

The redlining maps were subsequently used by the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934. In its early years, Goldberg explained, the FHA subsidized the purchase of housing “in a way that made it very easy for working-class white people, who had previously been renters and may never have had any expectation of becoming a homeowner, to move to the suburbs and become a homeowner because it was often cheaper than renting.

Both the structure and the interest rate of the mortgage made it possible for people to do that with very little savings and relatively low income. “But the FHA would not make or guarantee mortgages for borrowers of color,” she said. “It would guarantee mortgages for developers who were building subdivisions, but only on the condition that they include deed restrictions preventing any of those homes from being sold to people of color.”

“Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed racially discriminatory practices by banks, it would take another twenty-four years for the Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States, to monitor and (spottily) enforce the law.

It is little wonder, then, that a fringe lending market flourished to offer credit and reap profits from people of color who were excluded from the mainstream financial system. These included rent-to-own contracts for household appliances and furniture and houses bought on contract. These contracts enabled black people to buy on the installment plan — and lose everything if they missed a single payment. Unlike a conventional mortgage, land contracts did not allow buyers to build equity; indeed, they owned nothing until the final payment was made. And because the loans were unregulated, peddlers of these early forms of subprime mortgages could charge whatever exorbitant rates they chose. My great-grandmother bought the apartment building where I was born on a predatory contract.”

“From 1998 to 2006, the majority of subprime mortgages created were for refinancing, and less than 10 percent were for first-time homebuyers.”

“Of families who lost their houses through dire events such as job loss or foreclosure, over two-thirds will probably never own a home again. Because of our globally interconnected economy, the Great Recession altered lives in every country in the world.

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.”

“The biggest bankruptcy in American history, in 2008, was the final chapter of a story that began in 1845 with the brothers Lehman, slave owners who opened a store to supply slave plantations near Montgomery, Alabama. The brothers were Confederate Army volunteers who grew their wealth profiteering during the Civil War, subverting the cotton blockade, buying cotton at a depressed price in the Confederacy and selling it overseas at a premium. They first appeared on what would become Wail Street by commodifying the slave crop, cofounding the New York Cotton Exchange.”

Unions

“”Legacy workers,” who started at Nissan when the company first came to Canton, [received] a pay and benefits package that was generous by Mississippi standards. A few years later, the company contracted out those exact same jobs to subcontractors like Kelly Services, at about half the pay, a practice I still can’t believe is legal. Kelly is a temporary employment agency, and Nissan classifies the jobs as such — but I spoke to workers who had been full-time “temps” for more than five years. These workers, earning about $12 an hour with no benefits, were on the bottom tier. In between the top and bottom tiers were workers on a program Nissan called “Pathway,” where temp workers were put on a path to full-time status, though never at the Legacy level of pay and benefits. The result was that thousands of workers did the same job with the same skill, side by side on the line, but management kept the power to assign workers to different categories — meaning different pay, different benefits, different work rules.

Labor experts call this kind of stratification a tactic: create a sense of hierarchy and you motivate workers to compete with one another to please the bosses and get to the next category up, instead of fighting together to get rid of the categories and create a common, improved work environment for everyone. Though the company has been reluctant to publicly release exact numbers about its staffing, estimates put the number of non-employee “Pathway” and temporary workers at the plant as high as 40 percent. The non-employee workers were not allowed to cast a ballot in the union drive, which silenced the voice of the lowest-paid and most precarious workers.”

“Other countries have also faced globalization and automation and still maintained high rates of unionization. So, why did Americans allow their government and corporations to collude on attacking unions and depleting union membership? As it turns out, it wasn’t all Americans. Somewhere along the line, white people stopped defending the institutions that, more than almost any other, had enabled their prosperity for generations. According to Gallup, public approval of unions was the highest in 1936, the year the question was first asked, and in 1959, but it began to trend downward in the mid-1960s. The era of declining support was one in which one of the country’s most visible unions, the United Auto Workers, was staking its reputation on backing civil rights, supporting the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963 and using its political clout to press the Democratic Party for civil rights. The unionized capital of American manufacturing, Detroit, had also become an epicenter of black cultural and economic power, and white people were abandoning the city for federally subsidized and racially exclusive suburbs.”

“In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status. Norton and his colleagues used games where they gave participants the option to give money to either people who had more money than they had, or those who had less. In general, people gave money to those who had less except for people who were in the second-to-last place in the money distribution to begin with. These players more often gave their money to the people above them in the distribution so that they wouldn’t fall into last place themselves. The study authors also looked at real-world behaviors and found that lower-income people are less supportive of redistributive policies that would help them than logic would suggest. Even though raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum “and thus those most likely to ‘drop’ into last place” alongside the workers at the bottom expressed less support. “Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,” the study authors wrote.”

“Many of the signs that workers carried in their Stand Up KC rallies and strikes made it clear that cross-racial solidarity was the point. RACIAL UNITY NOW: WE WON’T FIGHT EACH OTHER, read one sign. BLACK, WHITE, BROWN: WE FICHT WAGE SLAVERY AND RACIAL DIVISION, read another. And another, BLACK, WHITE, BROWN: DEFEAT MCPOVERTY, DEFEAT HATE.”

“Nationwide, the majority of African Americans and Latinos earn less than $15 an hour. But white people are still suffering from that same economy, and in great numbers. While only a third of white workers earn less than $15 an hour, they are still the majority of under-$15 workers, and thus will be the largest group to benefit from the organizing spearheaded by workers of color.”

Voting

“Poll taxes, usually in the range of one to two dollars (two dollars in 1890 being almost fifty-seven dollars in today’s money), required cash of poor white, black, and Indigenous people who were often sharecroppers with little cash to their names. In some places, grandfather clauses exempted whites whose grandfathers could vote before the war; in others, candidates or party officials would pay white voters’ taxes for them in exchange for their loyalty. But in many places, the poll tax continued to work almost as effectively to disenfranchise poor white people as it did black people, and the result was a slow death of civic life. After several southern states adopted the menu of voter suppression tactics, turnout of eligible white voters throughout the region plummeted. In the presidential election of 1944, when national turnout averaged 69 percent, the poll tax states managed a scant 18 percent.”

“Over six million Americans are prohibited from voting as a by-product of the racist system of mass incarceration. (The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote even while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.)”

“In reaction to Amendment 4, Florida’s Republican governor and legislature passed a state law that required people with a felony history to pay all outstanding fines and fees before voting. This move — redolent of the poll tax — is particularly troubling in Florida, where it is nearly impossible for returning citizens to find out what the state thinks they owe and where “there is no database to be able to check all the different court costs that might be outstanding,” as one county supervisor of elections testified. The restrictive new law was challenged in court but upheld by a federal appeals court in September 2020.”

“These policies were targeted primary to disadvantage people of color, but such broad brooms have swept large numbers of white people into the democratic margins as well. In general, about 5 percent of white people in the United States lack a photo ID. Within certain portions of the white population, however, the numbers increase: 19 percent of white people with household incomes below $25,000 have neither a driver’s license nor a passport. The same is true of 20 percent of white people ages 17–20. Of the fifty thousand already-registered Alabama voters estimated to lack proper photo ID to vote in 2016, more than half were white.

Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names.”

“Here’s how the purge process worked. If an Ohio voter failed to vote during a two-year period — say, he voted in the presidential election but sat out the midterms — the state mailed the voter a postcard to verify his address. If the voter didn’t return the postcard, the state launched a process that, unless the person cast a ballot within the next four years, would result in his name being purged from the rolls: no longer considered a valid voter in the state. There are a number of problems with this approach, starting with the fact that in the United States, voting is not a use-it-or-lose-it right. What’s more, as Secretary Husted knew perfectly well, the vast majority of people who receive these address-verification postcards in the mail do not return them. In 2012, Ohio went to the trouble and expense to send out 1.5 million address-verification notices to people who hadn’t voted in 2011–out of a total of only 7.7 million registered voters. Presuming a change in registration for almost one out of every five registered voters is a remarkably wasteful effort, given that only about three out of every one hundred people move out of a registrar’s jurisdiction in any given year.

Of the 1.5 million postcard recipients, 1.2 million never responded. This should have been a clue that something was wrong with the state’s notification process, not with the voters. Or perhaps the process was working precisely as intended: people of color, renters, and young people are significantly less likely to respond to official mail than are white people, homeowners, and older people, as the Census Bureau had discovered.”

“”They also moved polling sites away from campuses,” said MacLean. “A really egregious example of that was in Boone, North Carolina, which is a predominantly white community in the western mountains…The Republicans in charge moved the polling place from the campus, which is right in the city and very convenient to lots and lots of people…. They moved it halfway down the mountain to a place where there was no parking, no public transportation, and it was dangerous to walk along the road to get to this place.”

“”When you talk about the effects of the Voting Rights Act and political participation, just going to the ballot and casting your vote is only one step,” economist Gavin Wright told me. He’s the author of Sharing the Prize, which details the economic benefits the civil rights movement brought to the entire South, whites included. “What the black political leadership got, and economic leadership, was a seat at the table.” With that seat, they won investments in public infrastructure, including hospitals, roads, schools, and libraries that had been starved when one-party rule allowed only the southern aristocracy to set the rules. More voters of all races meant more competitive elections; for the first time since the end of Reconstruction, a white supremacy campaign wasn’t enough. Candidates had to promise to deliver something of value to southern families, white and black. In Sharing the Prize, Wright writes that “after the Voting Rights Act…southern…gubernatorial campaigns increasingly featured nonracial themes of economic development and education.”

Pre-civil rights Alabama was a quintessential example of racist inequality starving the public. Nearly half the state’s citizens over age twenty-five had no more than an elementary school education in 1960. This was the case for two out of three black Alabamians, but also for two in five white Alabamians. After the Voting Rights Act swelled the electorate, Gov. Albert Brewer faced arch-segregationist. George Wallace and hoped to appeal to a modern-day Fusion coalition of the white middle class, newly enfranchised black Alabamians, and working-class whites outside the retrograde former plantation counties in the black Belt. So, he called a 1969 Special Session on Education that passed twenty-nine bills and appropriated an unprecedented one hundred million dollars toward education in the state. Brewer narrowly lost in a runoff, but the impact of the educational investments he spearheaded continued.”

“The Reconstruction reforms after the Civil War should have ended segregation. Congress passed a broad Civil Rights Act in 1875, banning discrimination in public accommodations. During Reconstruction, many southern cities had “salt-and-pepper” integration, in which black and white people lived in the same neighborhoods and even dined in the same restaurants. Multiracial working-class political alliances formed in North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia.”

Affordable Housing

“After the Supreme Court invalidated city ordinances banning black people from buying property in white neighborhoods in 1917, over a thousand communities rushed to adopt “exclusionary zoning” laws to restrict the types of housing that most black people could afford to buy, especially without access to subsidized mortgages (such as units in apartment buildings or two-family homes).

These rules remain today, an invisible layer of exclusion laid across 75 percent of the residential map in most American cities, effectively banning working-class and many middle-income people from renting or buying there. Exclusionary zoning rules limit the number of units constructed per acre; they can outright ban apartment buildings; they can even deem that a single-family house has to be big enough to preserve a neighborhood’s “aesthetic uniformity.” The effect is that they keep land supply short, house prices high, and multifamily apartment buildings out.”

“What about the costs we’re already paying? Frustrated by the usual hand-wringing over the costs of reform in Chicago, Marisa Novara and her colleagues at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute decided to flip the ledger. They asked instead, what is the cost of segregation to Chicago? They analyzed quality-of-life indicators that were correlated with segregation in the one hundred biggest cities and compared them to Chicago’s, which allowed them to see how their city would benefit from not even eliminating segregation — but just from bringing it down to the not-very-good American average.

The findings are stark. Higher black-white segregation is correlated with billions in “lost income, lost lives, and lost potential” in Chicago. The city’s segregation costs workers $4.4 billion in income, and the area’s gross domestic product $8 billion. As compared to a more integrated city, eighty-three thousand fewer Chicagoans are completing bachelor’s degrees — the majority of whom (78 percent) are white. That means a loss of approximately $90 billion in total lifetime earnings in the city. Reducing segregation to themnational median would have an impact on Chicago’s notoriously high homicide rate — by an estimated 30 percent — increasing safety for everyone while lowering public costs for police, courts, and corrections facilities; raising real estate values; and preserving the income, tax revenue, and priceless human lives of the more than two hundred people each year who would be saved from a violent death. By reducing the segregation between white and Latino residents, the researchers found, Chicago could increase life expectancy for both.”

“Less well known is the fact that segregation brings more pollution for white people, too. It turns out that integrated communities are less polluted than segregated ones. It’s a classic racial divide-and-conquer, collective action problem: the separateness of the population leaves communities less able to band together to demand less pollution in the first place, for everyone. An environmental health scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, Rachel Morello-Frosch, conducted a major study examining pollutants that are known carcinogens and found that more segregated cities had more of them in the air. As she explained it to me, “In those segregated cities, white folks are much worse off than their white counterparts who live in less segregated cities, in terms of pollution burden.”

I marveled at the force of the finding: segregated cities have higher cancer-causing pollutants — for white people, too — than more integrated ones. Professor Morello-Frosch was quick to add: “And it’s not explained by poverty…. That effect remains even after you’ve taken into account the relative concentrations of poverty.”

Schools

“Real estate data firm ATTOM Data, which looked at 4,435 zip codes and found that homes in zip codes that had at least one elementary school with higher-than-average test scores were 77 percent more expensive than houses in areas without. Paying a 77 percent premium may be fine for white families with plenty of disposable income and job flexibility, but it’s a tax levied by racism that not everyone can afford. That’s why so many families feel like they’re in an arms race, fleeing what racism has wrought on public education, with the average person being priced out of the competition. ATTOM Data calculated that someone with average wages could not afford to live in 65 percent of the zip codes with highly rated elementary schools. (CNN covered that study with a blunt headline that would be surprising to few people: YOU PROBABLY CAN’T AFFORD TO LIVE NEAR GOOD SCHOOLS.) Families who can afford a house near a “good” school, in turn, get set up for a windfall of unearned cash: a 2016 report found that homeowners in zip codes with “good” schools “have gained $51,000 more in home value since purchase than homeowners in zips without ‘good’ schools.”

In order to chase these so-called good schools, white families must be able and willing to stretch their budgets to live in increasingly expensive, and segregated, communities. This is a tangible cost both of systemic racism and of often unconscious interpersonal racism: fear itself. These white parents are paying for their fear because they’re assuming that white-dominant schools are worth the cost to their white children; essentially, that segregated schools are best.”

“But what if the entire logic is wrong? What if they’re not only paying too high a cost for segregation, but they’re also mistaken about the benefit? Here’s where things get interesting. 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.”

“Integrated Schools is a nationwide grassroots effort to empower, educate, and organize parents who are white and/or privileged like Ali, parents who want to shift their priorities about their children’s education away from centering metrics like test scores or assumptions about behavior and discipline and toward contributing to an antiracist public educational system. The movement acknowledges that “white parents have been the key barrier to the advancement of school integration and education equity.” Through resources including reading lists and guides for awkward conversations along with traditional community organizing and coalition building tactics, the movement encourages parents not to view “diversity primarily as a commodity for the benefit of our own children” and not to view schools that serve primarily students of color as “broken and in-need of white parents to fix them.” Rather, the goal of leveraging parents’ choices about schools should be to disrupt segregation because of the ways it distorts our democracy and corrodes the prospects of all our children. The group offers tools and tips to enable parents to live their values and to raise antiracist children who can help build an antiracist future.”

The Environment

“They compared pollution levels by neighborhood in cities and found that the sacrifice zones had more spillover than one might expect. I reached out to one of the study’s authors, Professor Michael Ash at the University of Massachusetts, to talk about what the researchers had discovered. “We wanted in particular to focus on places that had very unequal exposure,” he explained to me. In places where it was “easier, for reasons of the power structure, to displace environmental bads onto vulnerable communities [we wanted to know| are those [the] places that tend to rack up a higher environmental bill across the board?”

He went on: “Not shockingly, places that are unequal are much worse for the socially vulnerable party, but they also turn out to be worse for at least some members of the socially less vulnerable classes.”

Environmental racism, in other words, was bad for better-off white people, too. I asked Professor Ash how it worked. While the study proved correlation, not causation, he believed it was a question of power. He described the elite mindset: “Don’t worry, this pollution can be displaced onto the Other, onto the wrong side of the environmental tracks. So…put on blinders, don’t pay too much attention to the gross amount of pollution that is being produced.”

It made sense. 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.”

Conclusion

“Inside prison, her all-white world was gone. “Oh, shit,” she recalls saying aloud. “Now I’m the minority.” One day, Angela was smoking by herself in the recreation yard when a black woman looked over at her. Angela, who was covered in racist tattoos, thought, “Oh, she’s gonna start something.’

But instead, the woman invited her to play cards. “And from that point on, we started a friendship,” Angela said.

“We didn’t really talk about why we were there for a long time…about the fact that I came in there as a skinhead for a hate crime…. Even knowing that, this group of women treated me as a human being. I had no idea how to react to that. I couldn’t find justification in the usual aggression and violence that I used.

“They didn’t let me slide for long, though. Eventually, the very hard conversations started to happen.” The woman who had first befriended her “would just out of the blue ask me questions like, “So, if you met me before we came to prison, and I was with my daughter, what would you have done to us? Would you have called me the N-word? Would you have tried to kill my daughter? Would you have tried to hurt me?’ And being in prison, and with the friendship I [had] forged with some of them, I couldn’t get up and run away and not answer the questions. So, I was forced into not only being honest with them, but.…with myself.”

When she was released from prison at age twenty-six, Angela put her former life behind her and threw herself into education, She ended up earning three degrees. “I learned a great bit about history and systemic racism and oppression and got a clear understanding of the true history of our country. When I was growing up, I didn’t get facts about how this country really began. I got the white version.”

Angela became an activist, giving speeches around the country to share her story and cofounding an organization called Life After Hate, which helps people get out of violent white-supremacist groups.”

“The overwhelmingly white categories of children of alumni, faculty, donors, or athletes made up 43 percent, for example, of students admitted to Harvard from 2010 to 2015.”

“An estimated 15 to 26 million people demonstrated to protest police brutality in the summer of 2020, a tidal wave of recognition about the reality of systemic anti-blackness that prompted dozens of laws reforming police practices.”

“Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while black people are dramatically overrepresented.”

“Lewiston is not alone in this new wave of new people; for the past twenty years, Latinx, African, and Asian immigrants have been repopulating small towns across America. Pick a state, and you’ll find this story in one corner or another. Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is now 50 percent Latinx, mostly from Mexico, and it’s a community given new life by the families of migrant workers at the local mushroom farms. In Storm Lake, Iowa, the elementary school is 90 percent children of color. Towns across the Texas Panhandle have been drying up and losing population for years, but the potato farming stronghold of Dalhart grew by 7 percent from 1990 to 2016 because of Latinx families. Low-paid farm and food processing work is what draws foreign-born people to these small towns at first, for sure. But once there, immigrants have, as European immigrants did a century ago, started businesses, gained education, and participated in civic life (though the Europeans’ transition to whiteness offered a glide path to the middle class unavailable to immigrants of color today). Even in the face of anti-immigrant policies and the absence of vehicles for mobility such as unions and housing subsidies, today’s immigrants of color are revitalizing rural America. A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.

In many of these communities, longtime residents — who are overwhelmingly white — have chosen not to feel threatened by these new people of color. The temptation is there, and the encouragement from anti-immigrant politicians is certainly there, but the growth and prosperity the new people bring give the lie to the zero-sum model. Locals know that the alternative to new people is compounding losses: factories, residents, then the hospitals and schools and the attendant jobs. So, the residents are putting aside prejudices in order to grow their hometowns, together. If they don’t, wrote Art

Cullen, the local newspaper editor in Storm Lake, Iowa,”there will be nobody left to turn out the lights by 2050" in towns like his. “Asians and Africans and Latinos are our lifeline,” he declared flatly in 2018.

These small-town success stories are full of local gestures, both big and small, to integrate the newcomers, ranging from free ESL classes to community college partnerships to help new immigrants get degrees. One of these gestures changed the life of Lewiston resident Cecile Thornton, but it wasn’t she who offered the education to her new neighbors; they gave it to her. A quarter of Maine citizens, like Cecile, have Franco-American heritage — mostly descendants of French-speaking Canadian immigrants who came to work the cotton mills and shoe factories a hundred years ago — but only 3 percent of the state speaks French regularly at home, and Cecile is among the many “Francos” who have lost their French. Cecile was born in 1955 to French-speaking parents and did her best to forget the French she’d learned at the dinner table, escaping to the living room once the family got a TV set and repeating the words of Walter Cronkite to learn how “real” Americans spoke. The “Francos” were the butt of schoolyard jokes, so by high school, Cecile made sure to suppress her accent altogether and held on to very few words of her native French.

When I met her, she’d also lost the closeness of her family. “All of my family is away, including my kids,” she told me. “They’re all out of state. And my aunts and uncles, my parents, all of those people are dead.” The kind of isolation that Cecile faced when she retired to an empty home in Lewiston has become a growing epidemic among older people in rural and suburban America. The former U.S, surgeon general has linked it to the “diseases of despair” that are disproportionately haunting white Americans facing economic decline: alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide. Social isolation has been found to lower life expectancy by a degree comparable to smoking almost a pack of cigarettes a day.

But a few years ago, Cecile made a decision that turned her story around. She got in her car to drive to the Franco Center downtown. She went looking for a connection — to other people, to her community, to the language that had filled her home as a child. What she found on the first day at the center, however, was a roomful of elderly people who had long ago traded away French for belonging — to become no longer “Francos,” but simply, white. It was a cultural assimilation that happened in time to every group of white-skinned immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Italians to the Poles. What America offered for the price of assimilation was inclusion in the pool of whites-only benefits that shaped the middle class, but we don’t talk much about what they left behind.

The Franco Center had a rule: put a quarter in a jar every time you spoke English. The maximum penalty was one dollar, though, so when Cecile looked around, all the tables had jars full of dollars and conversations carrying on in English. She couldn’t hide her disappointment: even here at the Franco Center, her community’s language seemed lost. In her isolation, the idea of reclaiming her French had become a lifeline, so she wasn’t giving up — she found the most talkative person in the room and complained. He told her, “You should go to the French Club at Hillview.” Hillview is a subsidized housing project in Lewiston. When Cecile arrived at one o’clock on a weekday afternoon for the advertised French Club, she was shocked to see that she was the only white person there.

“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!

Over the next year, Cecile would make the Francophone African community of Lewiston the center of her life. When she noticed that it became hard for Hillview folks to attend French Club once they enrolled in community college downtown or got a job, she launched a new French Club, at the more convenient Franco Center downtown, but she heavily recruited her new African friends to come. With Cecile’s encouragement, soon the two populations of French speakers were mixing: elderly white Mainers with halting vocabularies learning from new black Mainers who spoke fluently. Francophone Africans like Edho, once seen as strange folks from far away, were now teachers. Today, Cecile volunteers to help asylum seekers, doing winter coat drives and connecting new arrivals to services, but she’d be the first to say that what she gives pales in comparison with what she has received.”

“If the United States adopted policy interventions to close the racial disparities in health, education, incarceration, and jobs, the economy would be eight trillion dollars larger in 2050, the year at which people of color are projected to be the majority. Generic, color-blind plans and policies can never achieve this.”

“She and her researchers created three-person teams, half of which were all white and half of which contained one person of color, and tasked the groups with solving a murder mystery. Each participant was given one important clue known only to them, but otherwise, the groups all had the same information. “The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity,” Phillips reported. “Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.”

The power of diversity can help real-life juries find their way to justice as well. One of the professors I visited at Harvard Business School, Samuel Sommers, borrowed real jurors from a Michigan court and asked them to reach a verdict in mock trials he conducted. Of the six-person juries Sommers organized, some were composed of four white and two black jurors, and some had exclusively white people. The diverse juries deliberated longer and performed better, in part because the white people upped their game in mixed company. White people in the diverse teams “cited more case facts, made fewer errors, and were more amenable to discussion of racism when in diverse versus all-White groups.””

“To launch a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort, community leaders must gather a representative group of people, both demographically and in terms of the sectors in the community. The framework involves a process of relationship-building and healing by sharing personal stories about race and racism, but it doesn’t just help people “talk about race — TRHT groups also identify community decisions that have created hierarchy in three areas: law, separation, and the economy. Bridging between the individual stories and the desired policy change is narrative change, accomplished by identifying manifestations of the belief in human hierarchy in our stories, be they school curricula or media portrayals or monuments, and replacing them with “complete and accurate stories that honor the full complexity of our humanity as the country forges a more equitable future.” The TRHT guidebook lays out instructions for communities, making an idea that can seem lofty and abstract appear manageable but powerful.”

“Jerry was hired and is now the executive director of the Dallas TRHT. The multiyear process has solicited the input of hundreds of Dallas residents: civic leaders, businesspeople, police officers, and grassroots organizers, but also high school students and the general public, in community visioning sessions at public libraries across the city. The group published an illustrated report that, when I read it for the first time in 2019, made me gasp more than once. In the opening pages, bold orange words bleed to the edges of a two-page spread: DALLAS IS ON STOLEN LAND. A few pages later, again: DALLAS WAS BUILT WITH STOLEN LABOR. For all that I know and have written about these truths, I had never seen them stated so vividly in print, in a document that spoke for a city. In our conversation, Jerry called stolen land and stolen labor the first two public policies in Dallas.

A few pages later, I came upon a black-and-white photograph of a smiling group of white high school girls in poodle skirts talking to a cowboy hat-wearing Texas Ranger leaning nonchalantly against a tree. I almost turned the page before I noticed something in the background: at the top of the school building hung a life-size stuffed doll, an effigy of a black man, as a warning against families who had tried to enroll in 1956. A few pages later, a photo of a smiling twelve-year-old Mexican American boy, Santos Rodriguez, whom a police officer “shot and killed Russian roulette style in the back of a police car with Rodriguez’s] thirteen-year- old brother next to him” in 1973. Toward the end of the book is a present-day photo of a black woman standing in front of what appears to be a mountain, but the caption reads, “Marsha Jackson and the Shingle Mountain” — as in, a hill created when a plant illegally dumped seventy thousand tons of toxic roof shingle ma- trial in the backyard of Jackson’s neighborhood. The report, “A New Community Vision for Dallas,” reads like a graphic novel of the racial history of the city in fewer than fifty pages. It has been an eye-opener for most people, Jerry said, white, black, and brown lifelong Dallas residents. “Ninety-nine percent of people who I talk to don’t know what happened.””

“Jerry proceeded to list off multiple points of impact. The Dallas school district now has an Office of Racial Equity. The city does, too. “That’s something that the city of Dallas has never had, right? But it has it now,” he said with some pride. A conservative city councilwoman — “one of the few council people who voted after Charlottesville to not remove Confederate monuments in Dallas. So that’s the kind of person I’m talking about” — attended a TRHT National Day of Racial Healing event and decided to issue a city proclamation to recognize it officially, “which had never happened before.” Jerry has joined the Dallas County Historical Commission, so he will have influence over the historical markers in. the city. He and colleagues have trained most of the top city administrators. Jerry taught the students at Southern Methodist University Engineering School about redlining, blockbusting, and why there are such racial divides in the city’s built environment — in the hope that they’ll know how to plan for infrastructure equity over their careers.

After a white policewoman mistakenly walked into Botham Jean’s apartment and killed him, the local media began to fall into the trap of denigrating the black victim — but this time, twenty groups organized through the TRHT process sent a letter to the local papers “saying that the narratives that are coming out of the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Morning News were racist.” Jerry attributes this swift coordinated response — which resulted in a meeting with the publisher of the paper about how the paper could atone for racist narratives and do better in the future — to the emphasis on narrative in the TRHT framework.”