The democratic ideals of early America were also zero-sum: “freedom” meant not being enslaved, and “rights” meant whatever enslaved people didn’t have. economy really was zero-sum-white people’s wealth came from enslaving Black people and stealing Indigenous land. This kind of thinking has a long history in the U.S. This is because of zero-sum thinking: when they see people of color making progress, they think that white people are being discriminated against. In her first chapter, McGhee explores the paradoxical finding that many white Americans view themselves as the main victims of racism today. politics, because the majority of Americans will soon be people of color. This dynamic is key to the future of U.S. After Donald Trump’s election, she realized that it isn’t enough to just analyze how bad economic policies cause racial disparities we also need to understand how racism drives people to choose bad economic policies in the first place.

In her introduction, McGhee explains why she quit her job leading the economic policy think tank Demos to write this book. Meanwhile, conservative politicians, media figures, and billionaires deliberately stoke white fear to win power, and when they do come to power, they continue with the same political agenda that has economically devastated the American middle class since the 1970s: cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating corporations, privatizing schools, defunding social programs, and suppressing labor unions. Thus, these white voters reject policies that help nonwhite people, even when those policies would actually benefit everybody. Specifically‚ she argues that many white voters view the world through a zero-sum paradigm: they see politics as a competition between themselves and people of color, and they think that, in order for themselves to win, people of color must lose. lags far behind other developed countries in fields like healthcare, education, pollution, and voting rights because of the way that racism shapes American politics. In The Sum of Us, policy researcher Heather McGhee argues that the U.S.

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