The Sum of Us: Heather McGhee Writes How Racism Has Cost All America 

In 1941 over 2,000 public swimming pools dotted the American landscape.

Cities and towns across the country built lavish public swimming facilities that allowed recreation for children and adults. They were free and gave Americans of all ages a chance to reap the benefits of taxpayer dollars. They were touted as democratic as people of varying economic incomes could enjoy them.

However, in large sections of the country, public pools were off limits to Black Americans.

Things began to change in 1953 after a young African American boy, Tommy Cummings, drowned in the Patapsco River in Baltimore, Maryland, while swimming with three friends, two white and one Black.  None of Baltimore’s seven public pools were open to Black swimmers, who instead swam in the sometimes dangerous waterways of Baltimore. Tommy Cummings was one of three Black kids to drown that summer in those waters.

Those three preventable tragedies prompted the NAACP to successfully sue the city of Baltimore. The ruling forced public pools in the South and Midwest to integrate.

Few of them did.

Rather than comply with the court order while not breaking the law, many of the public swimming pools closed.

Many were chained, padlocked, and filled with cement. Some were privatized. White children stopped going to public pools in some Baltimore neighborhoods. In others, white parents “policed” pools in white neighborhoods keeping them segregated by intimidation.

In Montgomery, Alabama, the city closed all Parks Department Pools, depriving all of its children a summer swim. Dorothy Moore, a white lifeguard at what was a majestic Montgomery pool tersely reflected on the pool’s closing 50 years later. “It was miserable,” she said. She became one of millions of whites as well as Black kids denied water recreation in what surely were hot, humid summers.

To keep from integrating, Montgomery went further, closing all public parks and community centers, their doors also chained shut with padlocks. Even the zoo was closed, its animals sold off. Montgomery was not alone as pools throughout the South and parts of the Midwest closed rather than let Black Americans swim in them.

The pool anecdote is one of many used by author Heather McGhee in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, illustrating how racism against Blacks had damaging, negative effects on whites throughout the country’s history.

The draining of the pools at a great cost to all served as a metaphor in her book for the closing of schools, keeping workers’ wages low, restricting voting, and denying health care to millions of Americans of all races.

The Zero Sum Theory, from which McGhee derived her book’s title, is a long held thought that when one group is given rights it is at the expense of another. It’s that false perception, McGhee demonstrates throughout her book, that has kept white folks (primarily in the South) from embracing policies that would benefit them as well as their Black countrymen and women.

The other postulate McGhee weaves throughout the book is that the policies that have hurt Americans of all races were put in place by appealing to racial fears and prejudices.

Nowhere were these two thoughts more prevalent than in America’s decades long debate over universal healthcare.

When President Harry S. Truman and Florida Senator Claude Pepper tried to get  government-run, universal healthcare into law, both faced stringent opposition. First from the American Medical Association whose advertising blitz labeled plans for universal health care as “socialism”, a term long associated with opposition to white supremacy. Pepper’s opponents ran newspaper ads showing him with various African Americans, including famed actor and singer Paul Roberson who had ties to the Communist Party. Pepper was defeated in 1950.

Truman’s plan was crushed by Southern Democrats, thus denying health coverage to millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom were white.

Six decades later, McGhee notes, the same scenarios played out in the fight over a more modest healthcare proposal, the Affordable Care Act, or as its Republican opponents labeled it, Obamacare, tying it exclusively to the country’s Black president.

McGhee cited research that showed white voters more opposed to Obama’s plan in large numbers than they were to a similar plan offered by the Clinton administration. Right wing media hammered it. Rush Limbaugh said of the ACA, “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it.”

After President Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010, 26 states’ Republican attorneys general sued, in part, over the law’s Medicaid expansion. The Supreme Court ruled, giving states the right to accept or decline Medicaid expansion. Ten Southern states declined. Texas was one of them. By refusing almost 100% free federal Medicaid funds, Texas has seen 28 rural hospitals either close or significantly reduce services since 2010, leaving predominantly white Texans to suffer. Texas currently has half the hospitals it had in the 1960’s.

“Why wouldn’t a state’s representative take free money to have such an amazing health and economic outcomes in their communities?” McGhee asked. Her answer was the same zero sum story that drained the swimming pools. Medicaid expansion polled high with Black and Latino voters, and significantly less with whites who have greater representation and political power.

Although appeals to racial fears and zero sum loss have denied many Black Texans decent health care, far more white Texans have been denied the same.

McGhee writes of several other historical episodes where racist policies have resulted in great harm to white America. Most notably, she cites, were the predatory loan practices banks perfected with Black homeowners before unleashing them onto unsuspecting whites, leading to the financial meltdown of 2008.

McGhee saw the same zero sum fears when she visited a Nissan plant in Canton, Ohio where workers considered unionizing.

Zero sum concerns rose in several of her conversations with workers. One worker acknowledged them: “As soon as they (white workers) see UAW, and even if you bring up union, they just think color…even though they want a union, their racism, their hatred, keeps them from joining.” McGhee saw examples of anti-union messaging associating derogatorily stereotyped Black workers to union. The workers in voted against unionizing.

Jim Crow laws had long kept the vast majority of Blacks in the South from voting and threatening white political control.

That changed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which brought an end to complete white dominance. African Americans for the first time since Reconstruction voted in droves and elected Black officials across the South. In 2008 a Black man, Barack Obama, carried three former Confederate states in route to the presidency.

Soon after Obama’s win, what Heather McGhee called a “coterie of right-wing billionaires” funded a lawsuit, Shelby County v Holder, that resulted in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that lifted voting protections of citizens in a number of states with long histories of voter suppression.

Some Republican-led states wasted no time in instituting laws that demanded specific forms of identification to vote. North Carolina’s new voter ID law was immediately overturned in court by a judge who said the law “target(ed) African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

In other states more stringent laws were allowed to remain. Though these laws to make voting more difficult targeted and disenfranchised Black Americans, thousands of white Americans were also disenfranchised, especially whites with incomes less than $25,000.

In Texas, Sandra Watts, a long-time resident and voter of 49 years, was forced to use a provisional ballot because her married name did not match her given name at birth. College students were also targeted, as polling places near campuses were moved.

Several Republican-led states used new laws, like inactive voting, to purge hundreds of thousands from voting rolls.  Again, whites paid a price for what many saw as racist, voter suppression laws.

Larry Harmon, a white tax-paying Navy veteran in Ohio found to his dismay while trying to vote in 2015 that his name had been purged because he did not vote in the 2012 elections. “Why should I fight for my country,” he said, “if they’re gonna take away my rights?” He was the third generation of his family to serve in the military.

McGhee is not subtle in blaming racism for new laws that restrict voting and target Black Americans. And she speaks bluntly of how today’s leaders who once benefited from government programs that built a strong white middle class—subsidized higher education and home ownership, strong financial protections, good union jobs, and state of the art infrastructure—have decimated those programs and institutions since the passage of the momentous civil rights laws of the 1960’s. She does so with a multitude of facts and moving anecdotes.

And she speaks with kindness and with true empathy for the white Americans as well as her fellow African Americans who have been hurt by the zero sum fears that have resulted in keeping so many Americans apart and down for so long.

She cites racial divisions that have been stoked for political purposes but offers hope in the solidarity that was shown by fast food workers of different races that united and shocked the nation with their audacious triumph in getting a $15 minimum wage.

“We all live under the same sky,” McGhee says.

America is stronger, she contends, when the “We” in the Declaration Of Independence is not the sum of us, but of all of us.