“The plutocrats have always known that #solidarity is the answer, that the sum of us can accomplish far more than just some of us.”

This quote summarizes Heather C. McGhee’s book The Sum of Us, in which she makes the case that #racism has benefited “some of us”, while costing us the benefits of solutions that help all of us. She suggests that “the sum of us” could be far greater if we united in solidarity to work together for what all of us need: safety, belonging, education, and a living wage. Instead, corporations and capitalists have used racism to turn us against each other so that we don’t notice how they continue to enrich themselves by exploiting us.

She uses the rise and fall of American public swimming pools as a concrete story to make this pattern visible. They were built by the government in the early 20th century as delights for (white) families of all ages, with elaborate slides and diving boards. But when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was no longer allowed in government-supported facilities, many towns closed the pools entirely and filled them in, rather than let Black families join. So everybody in the community suffered because of racism – the town’s families who had enjoyed the benefits of the pool no longer had them, and the Black families never got access.

She then traces out how this pattern has played out in situation after situation in America, where the government offered a program to support citizens, but that benefit was removed after the Civil Rights movement meant that Black people could potentially use the benefit. I had known bits and pieces of this history, but McGhee’s book brings it all together in a powerful and educational narrative to show the cost that racism has on all of us.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than take a zero-sum mindset where more for you means less for me, we could unite and work together in solidarity to grow new possibilities and create more for everyone. McGhee writes: “Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.” When we stop treating people as resources to be exploited, but as people like ourselves, we become more whole ourselves, and that wholeness translates into different thinking and different results.

If you want to learn more, you can read my longer summary at https://lnkd.in/gn63YR-H but I highly recommend reading the whole book.