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


Heather McGhee


THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Soon to be adapted by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground podcast

'With intelligence and care (as well as with a trove of sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes heart-opening true stories) Heather McGhee shows us what racism has cost all of us' - Elizabeth Gilbert

Picked for the Financial Times Summer Books by Gillian Tett

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'.

 

Heather McGhee designs and advances policy solutions to inequality. The former president of the think tank Demos, McGhee drafted legislation, testified before Congress, and became a regular contributor on news shows including NBC’s Meet the Press. Now the chair of Color of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization, McGhee holds a BA in American Studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her twenty year-old cat and their chatty toddler.

Category:  Social & Cultural History
ISBN:  9781788169653
Publisher:  Profile books
On sale:  May 2021
Format:  Paperback
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