53 pages • 1 hour read
Heather McGheeThe Sum of Us
Heather McGheeNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
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Socio-Historical Context
The Sum of Us was published in 2021, amid a global pandemic and an accelerating climate crisis, and on the heels of a presidential election. The book serves as an exploration of some of these tensions, as well as the history and policies that have led to the present moment.
Since the founding of the United States, racism has undermined the country’s ability to live up to its promise as a representative democracy. As McGhee notes, the writers of the Constitution crafted the document to allow for the ongoing existence of slavery; this opened the door for the distorting effect of the Electoral College, which in turn led to the election of Donald Trump, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote—a state of affairs that gives white-majority states a disproportionate influence on the election. The franchise of people of color has been eroded across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries by policies that make it harder for Black people to vote, like the denial of voting rights to convicted felons.
McGhee notes that the historical roots of these voting obstacles must be understood in order for the scale of the problem to be grasped: “I would argue that all are a product of the same basic tolerance for a compromised republic that was established at our founding, in the interest of racial slavery” (147). In the same passage McGhee asserts that every citizen can cite one contemporary example of how voting could be made easier. Significantly, the whitest states also have the lowest barriers to voting. McGhee’s discussion of voting is given a greater sense of urgency by the fact that new obstacles continue to evolve; between 2013 and 2018, 23 states created new barriers to voting, and in 2015, Ohio purged hundreds of thousands of names from its voter rolls—a practice echoed by other states in the same time period, with 15 million voters being purged as a result.
Another significant aspect of the novel’s socio-historical context is the increasing impact of climate change. In Chapter 8 McGhee notes that the United States has a particularly important role to play in addressing climate change, as the biggest polluter in history and the home of some of the staunchest opposition to taking action on climate change, with many conservative voices refusing to recognize the problem. McGhee suggests that this resistance comes from an iteration of the zero-sum paradigm, whereby privileged individuals (particularly white males) resist change because they believe it will undermine their dominant position in society, and because they see themselves as relatively insulated from a given issue’s effects. McGhee challenges the framing of climate action resistance that is popular among many big environmental nongovernmental organizations, who see greed and corruption as the main culprits. In her view, understanding the challenges of the present moment—which include rising sea levels, worsening wildfires and extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and increased risk from disease—requires understanding racism’s role in exacerbating these challenges.
Ideological Context
The Sum of Us challenges many of the conventional understandings around economic policy. As such, it interrogates some of the core principles of economic theory—including that people, in making decisions in public life, are rational, self-interested actors—to explain some of America’s most intractable issues.
Rational self-interest is an economic principle dating back to 18th-century theorist Adam Smith; it holds that individuals use rationality to make choices that are in their own best interests. But as McGhee explores, this theory doesn’t explain the voting patterns of many white Americans. Despite broad support among Republican voters for policies like government health care and increased taxes on the wealthy to pay for infrastructure projects, these voters nonetheless elect politicians whose policy priorities are almost diametrically opposed to their own. To understand this, rational choice theory is not sufficient; evidently, people do not always act in their own best interests. Instead, McGhee looks to the distorting effect of racism, which powerful groups and people use to advance their own interests. As she writes, “priming white voters with racist dog whistles was the means; the end was an economic agenda that was harmful to working- and middle-class voters of all races, including white people” (34).
McGhee also challenges the framing of issues in American life that serves the interests of elites while undermining the well-being of everyone else. This framing is based on stereotypes that portray Black people as lazy and undeserving. For instance, regulators and legislators responding to the 2008 financial crisis suggested that the problem was the mortgages had been granted to borrowers—many of them Black—who were irresponsible or too inherently risky to have reasonably been given a loan. McGhee challenges this framing, noting that many borrowers were specifically targeted for subprime loans that increased the likelihood they would default. In other words, it was the loan, not the borrower, that was risky. In challenging this stereotype and others, McGhee shows the flaws in the ideological underpinnings of US government policy—such as the idea that borrowers’ risky behavior helped cause the 2008 financial crisis, which weakened the government’s response. She also paves the path for a new way forward, unencumbered by stereotypes that reinforce racial hierarchy.
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