The Sum of Us (Adapted for Young Readers) | McGhee, Heather

Lange Beschreibung
The New York Times bestseller, now adapted for a new generation of young readers, leaders, thinkers, and activists. A groundbreaking call to action that examines how racism affects and harms all of us and how we need to face it head-on, together.

The future can be prosperous for everyone, but only if we address the problems of racial and economic inequality.

McGhee believes that all people, of all ages and all backgrounds, need to rethink their attitude toward race and strive together to create opportunities that benefit everyone. 

This book is a call to action. McGhee examines how damaging racism is, not only to people of color but also to white people. She offers hope and real solutions so we can all prosper. An expert in economic policy, McGhee draws lessons both from her work at a think tank and from her travels around the country talking to everyday Americans fighting for a more just and inclusive society.

The people she meets prove how the stories we tell ourselves about race and belonging influence the policies that determine our shared economic future.

The Sum of Us provides hope that with understanding and open-mindedness, the world can be more united and equitable than it is today.

Rezensierung
  Concisely and bitingly written with broad appeal and usefulness to researchers and general readers alike. A first and necessary purchase. School Library Journal, starred review
 
  Of great value to anyone who values straight-to-the-point, thorough writing on race in America. Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
  A thought-provoking next read after Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped (2020). Booklist, starred review

Buchausschnitt
Chapter 1

An Old Story: The Zero-­Sum Hierarchy

When I was growing up, my family and my neighbors were always hustling. My mother had the fluctuating income of a person with an entrepreneur s mind and a social worker s heart. My dad, divorced from my mom since I was two, had his own up-­and-­down small business, too, and soon a new wife and kids to take care of. If we had a good year, my mom, my brother, and I moved into a bigger apartment. A bad spell, and I d notice the mail going unopened in neat but worrisome piles on the hall table. I now know we were in what economists call the fragile middle class, all income from volatile earnings and no inherited wealth or assets to fall back on. We were the kind of middle class in the kind of community that kept us a stone s throw from real poverty, and I think this shaped the way I see the world. My mother took us with her to work in Chicago s notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects while she gave health lessons to young mothers, and some of my earliest playmates were kids with disabilities in a group home where she also worked. (It seemed she was always working.) We had cousins and neighbors who had more than we did, and some who had far less, but we never learned to peg that to their worth. It just wasn t part of our story.

I did learn, though, to ask why, undoubtedly to an annoying degree. In the backseat of the station wagon facing the rear window, I asked why there were so many people sleeping on the grates on Lower Wacker Drive downtown, huddled together in that odd, unsunny yellow lamplight. Why did the big plant over on Kedzie have to close, and would another one open and hire everybody back? Why was Ralph s family s furniture out on the curb, and where did their landlord think Ralph was going to live now?

My father turned eighteen the year the Voting Rights Act was signed, 1965; my mother did when the Fair Housing Act was signed three years later. That meant that my parents were in the first generation of black Americans to live full adult lives with explicitly racist barriers lowered enough for them even to glimpse the so-­called American Dream. And just as they did, the economic rules changed to dim the lights on it, for everyone. In the mid-­1960s, the American Dream was as easy to achieve as it ever was or has been since, with good union jobs, low-­cost homeownership, strong financial protections, a high minimum wage, and a high tax rate that funded American research, infrastructure, and education. But in the following decades, rapid changes to tax, labor, and trade laws meant that an economy that used to look like a football, fatter in the middle, was shaped like a bow tie by my own eighteenth birthday, with a narrow middle class and bulging ends of high-­ and low-­income households.

This is the Inequality Era. Even in the supposedly good economic times before the COVID-­19 pandemic that began in 2020, 40 percent of adults were not paid enough to reliably meet their needs for housing, food, health care, and utilities. Only about two out of three workers had jobs with basic benefits: health insurance, a retirement account (even one they had to fund themselves), and paid time off for illness or caregiving. Upward mobility, the very essence of the American idea, has become stagnant, and many of our global competitors are now performing far better on what we have long considered to be the American Dream. On the other end, money is still being made: the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-­to-­1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-­to-­worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

I learned how to track these numbers in my early day