I began this book on a motive common these days to many—not enough, but many—of my white brethren (speaking, obviously, in a generic, not religious, sense), a hope to own, understand, and confront our personal dose of racism. To that end, the book is a blessing indeed. What I found in addition, though, is myself coming to an opinion about Heather McGhee, a Black American lawyer and scholar, as a writer. And that opinion is this: she is among the most brilliant authors of our time. I’ll venture a step, a large one, further: I believe her book to be among the most distinguished in the history of American letters, literally one of our country’s proudest achievements. I have been introduced to concepts (and felt the emotions that mark their value to me) which I have never before gotten hold of so firmly.
Have a look at some very brief excerpts. With them, I’ll rest my case, one caveat only: the following are mostly of the summarizing species; McGhee along the way toward and among them supplies a riveting degree of documentation via factual evidence, interviews, and keenly reasoned argument.
- p21 “A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.”
- p97 “I saw how money can obscure even the most obvious of truths. I learned that in order to exploit others for your own gain, you have to first sever the tie between yourself and them in your mind—and racist stereotypes are an ever-ready tool for such a task.”
- p125 “Norton and his colleagues would call the psychology behind DeAngelo’s mother’s warning ‘last place aversion.’ In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status.”
- p135 “This fight for decent pay has, like many labor struggles before it, exposed the fact that workers of color suffer the most acute economic injustices, but most of the people harmed in a wage structure built on racism are white. And like every truly successful labor movement, it has found its reach and its strength because of cross-cultural solidarity.”
- p200 “But what dawned on me, when I read the research showing that conservative white men tended to justify a system that had served them well, was that ‘the economy’ being defended was not the textbook definition I’d learned: the sum total of our population’s consumption, goods, and services. That definition of the economy is one that could go quite well and even flourish without white men being such lopsided beneficiaries. ‘The economy’ that they were referring to was their economy, the economic condition of people like them, seen through the lens of a zero-sum system of hierarchy that taught them to fear any hint of redistribution.”
- p205 “It all seemed to come back to the zero-sum story: climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action.”
- p230 “Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.”
- p232 (Note the just-preceding commentary taken from James Baldwin and Wendell Berry, the former’s phrase “personal incoherence” for what whites suffer as a consequence of bearing their racism, and the latter’s phrase “hidden wound” for the same thing—both focusing on the cost of racism for the whites who bear and, intentionally or [usually] not, propagate it.)
“… I thought about what it means to like to be part of the dominant group in an unfair ‘meritocracy’ that denies its oppressiveness and pathologizes the oppressed. ‘I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,’ says the scholar Catherine Orr. The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others. Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system.”
9. p241 “Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes… It’s the moral upside down of racism that simultaneously extolls American virtues in principle and rejects them in practice.”
10. p279 “For nearly two decades in public policy, I saw how the fear of what white people would think held back the ambitions of some of the best policy thinkers in the business. Our politics have operated in the shadow of white disapproval my whole life.”
11. p281 “Once we abandon the false idea of zero-sum competition, the benefits of diversity become evident, from the classroom to the courtroom to the boardroom.”
12. p288 “We have not touched the root because the laws we make are expressions of a root belief, and it is time to face our most deep-seated ones: the great lie at the root of our nation’s founding was a belief in the hierarchy of human value. And we are still there.”
13. p289 “—for when a nation founded on a belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief, then and only then will we have discovered a New World.”
14. p289 “… 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.”
