The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Name: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Author: Heather McGhee
ISBN: 9781782839408

Heather McGhee

awards won

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Heather McGhee

awards won

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#3452 of 3,809 books · #206 in Politics & Current Affairs

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest (2021).

The Sum of Us won the National Book Award longlisting and was a Financial Times Summer Books selection. What would make a society drain its public swimming baths and fill them with concrete rather than opening them to everyone? Economics researcher Heather McGhee sets out across America to learn why white voters so often act against their own interests. Why do they block changes that would help them, and even destroy their own advantages, whenever people of colour also stand to benefit? Their tragedy is that they believe they can't win unless somebody else loses. But this is a lie. McGhee marshals overwhelming economic evidence, and a profound well of empathy, to reveal the surprising truth: even racists lose out under white supremacy. And US racism is everybody's problem. As McGhee shows, it was bigoted lending policies that laid the ground for the 2008 financial crisis. There can be little prospect of tackling global climate change until America's zero-sum delusions are defeated. The Sum of Us offers a priceless insight into the workings of prejudice, and a timely invitation to solidarity among all humans, 'to piece together a new story of who we could be to one another'.

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