Here’s why you should add this to your reading list
by BikePGH Staff Contributor – Christine Yockel, Business & Sponsor Manager
NYT bestselling book The Sum of Us puts into cogent prose the thoughts and feelings that spiral through my head every time I read a sociopolitical article, listen to NPR’s news roundups, or when I am having trouble sleeping at night. Further, it quantifies these thoughts and feelings with specific examples, percentages, dollar values..
A rising tide lifts all ships. Period.
This book pokes holes at the false notion of what’s known as the ”zero sum theory” with facts, figures, history, and interviews. Perpetuating this myth that if one person succeeds it must have been at a loss or detriment to someone else has kept our country from progressing toward living up to our ideals, to our potential, to the promises the nation is founded upon. Because the United States was founded upon great ideals: freedom, equality, justice, social mobility and the American Dream; that you can work hard and make the life you wish. But these ideals are not reality because we do not live in a meritocracy, by design.
In The Sum of Us, author Heather McGhee uses her experience as a policy advocate well versed in the stats and figures from her work at the nonprofit progressive think tank Demos. She sets up a damn near irrefutable case for how racism has permeated even the least suspecting aspects of our existence and, ultimately, is costing the country — and all its citizens! — money, time, comfort, and lives.
Practices rooted in racist exclusion first created and then perpetuated stereotypes and that led people to question who is and is not deserving of help / empathy, shrinking the middle class and contributing to widening economic disparity. The zero sum theory is what allows executives to pit workers against each other rather than establishing a united front that might enable employees to leverage their time to demand the pay and conditions they all deserve. She discusses predatory loans and traces the lineage of the early 2000s housing bubble burst back to the practices of redlining and, farther still, all the way to slavery.
We can, and will, do better.
Hope, heart, and warmth permeate this book in spite of the uncomfortable truths it sheds bright light upon, and I am amazed at the dexterity with which McGhee walks that line of getting across the full weight and impact that hundreds of years of oppression have created while still maintaining an air of optimism that we can and will do better. I don’t always know that I can tap into that optimism. Either we are working to create a more perfect union that sets everyone up to be safe, healthy, and flourish, or we’re actively working against that outcome. Preserving the status quo results only in the latter.
The Sum of Us is a great “next step” for people who, as I did, devoured Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson (which you should absolutely read if you have not yet). And I hope it motivates those who have benefitted from the privilege they were born into by simply being born white in America (like myself) to see the vision laid out by McGhee for holding true to our ideals as a nation, so that we may continue to chip away at dismantling the systems that led us to this point. The very systems that were created to dehumanize people so that plantation owners didn’t feel as bad about building an empire on the backs of enslaved people… The very systems that perpetuate racial discrimination in our everyday lives. We need to dismantle those systems, so that we may all succeed, together.
Buy this book! –>
NEWSLETTER