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

She wrote a book by the same name.

You wrote this amazing book, come on the show, you geeked out about it, you decided to get into the podcast game and you were like higher ground.

The whole idea of the Some of Us the podcast is to kind of pick up where the book left off.

And check out Whataday this week to hear the team break down news around restrictive voting laws in Texas and the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

Abdul is joined by our friend Heather McGee to talk about her fantastic book The Sum of Us and how race has affected the pandemic.

Everyone should go check it out.

In The Sum of Us, I talk about the way in which that this country has turned its back on the formula that helped create the greatest middle class the world had ever seen because we had a social contract that said that it was the government's job to make sure that our people have a high standard of living.

This racial resentment piece is at the core.

This zero sum story that I point out in The Sum of Us that is so much like the biggest impediment to our progress, this idea that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people.

Everyone go by if you haven't already, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. It is a brilliant book. I'm so glad you wrote it.

It's a fantastic book. It's officially out today.

It's a classic divide and conquer, which is the central sort of analysis and indictment in my book, The Sum of Us, that Republicans have tried to cleave white working class people away from their brothers and sisters in the broader multiracial working class by resentment politics, by saying that it's either a dollar in your pocket or it's a dollar in the pocket of brown and black people.

I think that there are a lot of political books that people say you should read because really what they mean is they think other people who don't already agree with us should read them. Like, I agree so heartedly with this book, so you should read it. But this is a book that I think does something rare, which is it puts together a lot of pieces about what is broken in our system and helps you have a way to think about it that you might not have seen before.

The book is The Sum of Us, and I really hope everybody buys it.

She's currently working on a book called The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

She wrote a book by the same name.

You wrote this amazing book, come on the show, you geeked out about it, you decided to get into the podcast game and you were like higher ground.

The whole idea of the Some of Us the podcast is to kind of pick up where the book left off.

The book left off with this idea that because racism and our politics and our policymaking has a cost for everyone, that people coming together across race to actually put aside our divisions and gain from the collective power that comes with collective action is going to be the ticket to us winning big things.

And check out Whataday this week to hear the team break down news around restrictive voting laws in Texas and the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

Everyone should go check it out.

In The Sum of Us, I talk about the way in which that this country has turned its back on the formula that helped create the greatest middle class the world had ever seen because we had a social contract that said that it was the government's job to make sure that our people have a high standard of living.

This racial resentment piece is at the core.

This zero sum story that I point out in The Sum of Us that is so much like the biggest impediment to our progress, this idea that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people.

Everyone go by if you haven't already, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. It is a brilliant book. I'm so glad you wrote it.

It's a fantastic book. It's officially out today.

It's a classic divide and conquer, which is the central sort of analysis and indictment in my book, The Sum of Us, that Republicans have tried to cleave white working class people away from their brothers and sisters in the broader multiracial working class by resentment politics, by saying that it's either a dollar in your pocket or it's a dollar in the pocket of brown and black people.

I think that there are a lot of political books that people say you should read because really what they mean is they think other people who don't already agree with us should read them. Like, I agree so heartedly with this book, so you should read it. But this is a book that I think does something rare, which is it puts together a lot of pieces about what is broken in our system and helps you have a way to think about it that you might not have seen before.

The book is The Sum of Us, and I really hope everybody buys it.

And all of this, I will just say, is explored so brilliantly by my friend Heather McGee in her book, The Sum of Us, which is like the idea of if someone else is doing better, that means you're doing worse. And in fact, like in the example she uses is during segregation, in lieu of having black kids and white kids swim at the swimming pool together, some communities shut down the pool entirely.

Heather McGhee is the author of the remarkable book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

When I was traveling the country for what would become my book, The Sum of Us, I spent a lot of time talking to people about aspects of their lives that they're experiencing as increasingly unaffordable private costs.

There's this really incredible groundbreaking book called The Sum of Us that I really highly recommend.

Heather McGhee is the author of the remarkable book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

When I was traveling the country for what would become my book, The Sum of Us, I spent a lot of time talking to people about aspects of their lives that they're experiencing as increasingly unaffordable private costs.

There's this really incredible groundbreaking book called The Sum of Us that I really highly recommend.

Marissa Baradaran's book, Color of Money, Alexis Harris's book, Pound of Flesh, and Heather McGee's The Sum of Us.

the most important part of this is Heather McGhee's in her book, The Sum of Us, right? Her opening example of people filling the swimming pool with concrete rather than desegregating the swimming pool.

Heather McGee recently demonstrated in her new book, The Sum of Us, that structural racism has not just harmed people of color. It's also harmed white people.

I would recommend Heather McGee's The Sum of Us.

The metaphor at the center of the book is this idea of the drained public pool.

I wrote this book because I think it's important to talk about the benefits of moving beyond drained pool politics for all people, including white people.

And your book, of course, is The Sum of Us. And everybody, including Joe Biden, should read it. It's really fantastic.

Ladies and gentlemen, Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us.

I wrote this book, The Sum of Us. And the central story was when many white townspeople officials decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them.

Heather McGee, author of the sum of us.

Heather McGee is an expert in economic and social policy and the author of the best-selling book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

Your book, The Sum of Us, is the type of book that I learned from, that I think many Americans and many people around the world can learn from.

I wrote this book because I felt like we were missing something.

the core question at the heart of the some of us is why does it seem like we can't have nice things in America nice things like not like flying cars but nice things like universal health care and paid family leave and childcare in a great school in every neighborhood

it's this zero-sum story this old story that says that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people that we can't all sort of share in well-being that we're in this competition for dominance and status

the sum of us is about we all do better when we all do better

the hopeful part...they want to hear that we can fix this and I truly believe that everything about the world that we see now all the dysfunction it's because people made decisions to make the world as it is and so people can make better decisions

through collective action people coming together across lines of race finding solidarity recognizing that we all do better when we all do better and that we all want big beautiful public pools we can really win and take on powerful interests but we can't if we're divided

The Sum of Us is about how race intersects with economic inequality. And it became an instant New York Times bestseller.

And now you've done a book that's for school children, for middle schoolers.

We really didn't dumb it down. That was the lesson I got.

The core question at the heart of The Sum of Us is why does it seem like we can't have nice things in America?

And the sum of us is about we all do better when we all do better, which is what Paul Wallstone used to say.

So I wrote The Some of Us in many ways to answer the question for myself and for so many of the advocates that I had spent nearly 20 years in the field of progressive advocacy with, which is the question of why can't we have nice things and why is it so hard for this country to get its act together and provide for the basics of a decent standard of living for its people.

And in many ways, the answer that I discovered on this journey was that racism is the underlying driving force behind most of the dysfunction of our country's most vexing public problems. And the central metaphor for the book grew to be the story of the drained public pool.

Everything we believe comes from a story we've been told and all of the stories we have are told by some people for a certain purpose and so I wanted to go back and look at our history and really it became totally clear to me that the zero sum story was a justification for the original economic model in this country of stolen land and stolen people and stolen labor.

And I think that if it weren't for racism we would not have had the financial crisis and eight million jobs and 19 trillion dollars in household wealth could have been saved.

I think we have to deal with the story level right? It's a story that white parents have about the inferiority of black and brown children does not change over generations.

Her book, 'The Sum of Us,' examines a question at the heart of American life: Why do so many Americans believe that progress for one group means loss for another?

Her book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, came out in 2021, but it reads like it was written for this exact moment.

The economists at Citigroup found that the black-white economic divide had cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion over the course of 20 years.

I really recommend to everybody listening that they read the book. There's your book, there's Adam Jendelson's book, Killswitch, about the Senate. There's Heather McGhee's book, The Sum of Us.

I mean, that was just the most moving moment of the inauguration by far. So the parable at the heart of my book, The Sum of Us, is the story that actually probably both of our parents might remember that happened all across the country where in towns that had large resort-style public swimming pools, and there were over 2000 of them in the country, many of them were segregated or whites only.

And when the civil rights movement gained legal decisions integrating them, many in every single region of the country, towns decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than integrate them.

And they would actually just destroy a public resource rather than sharing it. And so I start my book with that story because it really is the question of why America can't have nice things.

If we're divided, we're conquered.

The book is The Sum of Us. Everybody should read it and just do whatever Heather says as a rule, as a good rule of thumb.

She also is the author of the bestselling book titled The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

Heather McGhee is a long time political strategist and author of the bestselling book, The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

Heather McGhee a long time political strategist author of the fantastic bestselling book of the sum of us what racism costs everyone how we can prosper together

Heather McGee, longtime progressive strategist, author of the bestselling book, The Sum of Us