On the environmental front, we do not all live under the same sky (chapter 8) when the poor inhabit sacrifice zones or neighborhoods situated near polluted waters, chemical factories, and power plants operated by large corporations. We live apart, opines the author, thanks to public policy having enshrined segregation in schools, housing, and exclusionary zoning laws. In the post-Obama era, mass incarceration and voter suppression (seen as extensions of post-Civil War tactics to disentitle Black voters) became increasingly tolerable in our ailing democracy. McGhee uses Canton, Miss., to chronicle deeds of solidarity in cross-racial unionizing efforts among workers, as well as the rise of anti-union discourse among Southern White conservatives. Despite fair housing laws, practices such as redlining, subprime mortgages, predatory lending, and widespread foreclosures further excluded People of Color and White people from achieving mainstream economic gains. Racialized politics reduced the availability of affordable healthcare. When college education proved out of reach for the working class, it created a “debt-for-diploma system” (so called by McGhee’s former Demos colleague Tamara Draut) and retarded entry into the middle class. public policy has failed to advance the public good. Throughout the book, draining the pool serves as an apt metaphor for how U.S. Race-based actions-some court-sanctioned-also victimized White people, contends McGhee. In “Racism Drained the Pool,” the author discerns the 1950s struggle to integrate public swimming pools at a time when White communities elected to close, drain, and pave over pools rather than desegregate them.
McGhee argues that the lingering zero-sum paradigm is both personal and political, and is manifested in economic and social relationships. The first of ten chapters treats the zero-sum hierarchy from colonial times to the present, referencing (among other matters) war, slavery, and theft of Indigenous lands.
There are two Americas: one Black, one White, competing in a zero-sum game. In the United States, one of the most vital and economically rich countries in the world, how do we reform public policymaking that professes to be colorblind yet disenfranchises so many? Reflecting on the products and services that once defined the American Dream, Heather McGhee, activist lawyer, political analyst, and former president of the think tank Demos, asks “Why can’t we have nice things?” In search of answers, she undertook a personal and professional research journey to learn the extent to which public policy is bound up in racial, social, and political practices that have resulted in inequality.
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