I was born in 1951. My childhood coincided with the most prosperous time in history for the American middle class. Harry Truman was President. He had replaced FDR, the insanely popular socialistic President. Our fathers came back from the war and used the socialistic GI Bill to go to college for free or to get low-interest loans to start businesses under the G.I. bill. The corporate tax rate was a socialistic 50.8% in 1951, and the economy grew 7.5% that year. Truman was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower, who ran on a platform that advocated civil rights, equal pay for women, free education, and collective bargaining. Ike was no FDR, but he built a socialistic national highway system, refused to raise taxes and raise defense spending, ended the Korean War, and warned us against the military industrial complex.

For the first twenty years of my life, America was booming, and the economic explosion favored—get this—the middle and lower classes. Between 1950 and 1960, the poorest fifth of all households saw the largest growth in median income. The richest 5% experienced the slowest growth. This was trickle up economics.

One out of three workers in America belonged to a union during the 1950s. The median household income in 1955 was $4,37. The average house cost $9,100—about twice the annual income. If you had a high-school education and could score a union manufacturing job, uou could buy a nice home and a car and support a family on a single paycheck. Yankee Doodle socialism had taken hold. Studies conducted in 1956 found that 65% of Americans believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.

Then, in the 1960s, everything began to go terribly wrong. So wrong that now, sixty years later, the richest 1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

So what the fuck happened in the 1960s?

Racism, according to Heather McGhee, the author of the compelling new book “The Sum of Us.”

We think of economics as a highly complex science. We study macroeconomics and analyze microeconomics. We track manufacturing, trade balances and employment. We debate monetary policy and the influence of technology. Given the multitude of financial factors, McGhee’s notion that the past seventy years of American economics has been driven by a single social problem—one that is almost never even mentioned in economic discussions—seems insanely simplistic and naïve.

It’s not. “The Sum of Us” makes a compelling case for racism being the cause of the death of the American middle class, and then goes further and proves that this demise was a suicide and not a murder. For me, the book definitively answered a multitude of questions I have been asking myself for decades. It was also a lesson in humility, because those answers should have been brain-dead obvious to me all along.

The first sentence of McGee’s book is the biggest of those questions: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

Her answer is “because then black people would have nice things, too.”

When I was born, 90% of my fellow Americans were white, and McGhee shows how black Americans were frozen out of much of the socialistic programs that were vastly expanding the middle class. As she notes, “The New Deal era of the early 1930s—a period of tremendous expansion of government action to help Americans achieve financial security—was also a period in which the federal government cemented residential segregation through both practice and regulation.” Redlining kept black segregated, and home loans favored purchases in white neighborhood. McGhee quotes a typical assessment by the government’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation: “The neighborhood is graded D because of its concentration of negroes, but the section may improve to a third class area as this element is forced out.” During the 1950s, fewer than 2% of African Americans were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority. Most black Americans were not covered by the new minimum wage and overtime laws.

In the 1950s, African Americans began using the courts to fight for their fair share. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Two years later, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ordered the desegregation of public schools. That same year, President Eisenhower sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The bill was watered down by Southern Democrats in Congress, but the act Eisenhower signed established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote, and a federal Civil Rights Commission with authority to investigate discriminatory conditions and recommend corrective measures. In 1964, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which not only outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination.

These, then were the dramatic events that should have expanded the economic boom but instead brought it to a screeching halt—at least for most Americans. The changes that explain that chart.

Whites, especially in rural areas and in the South, responded not by embracing the right of African Americans to share in the American boom, but by declaring war on it. White America adopted what McGhee calls a “zero-sum hierarchy” that holds that when black Americans win, white Americans lose. That is what changed in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was the ascendancy of this suicidal mindset that ended America’s support of socialistic programs and started the long record of white America voting repeatedly against its own economic self interest.

The central metaphor in McGhee’s book is the public swimming pool. Between the start of the twentieth century and the onset of World War II, the public swimming pool was a symbol of civic pride. More than two thousand public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands, were constructed. Then, in 1958, a federal court ordered the desegregation of the zoo, the city parks, community center, and the swimming pool run by Montgomery, Alabama’s Parks Department. The city responded by dismantling the Parks Department. It closed every single public park and padlocked the doors of the community center. The zoo was shut down and the animals sold off, and the grand public pool was filled with cement.

Of course, these actions hurt the white citizens of Montgomery, too. “The Sum of Us” musters countless examples and statistics to show how racism has boomeranged on the white Americans who have worked so hard to institutionalize it. Once the courts held that social programs must be open to black Americans, white America turned against them, even though those programs benefited far more whites than blacks. Such programs were now defined racially. Ronald Reagan, a former FDR Democrat, criss-crossed the country telling stories of the black welfare queens who drove their Cadillacs to the supermarket to purchase vodka with food stamps.

This racialization, inspired by civil rights laws, quickly defined everything that had contributed to the growth of the white middle class.

Black voting had to be suppressed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Southern states adopted poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to suppress the black vote. Those tactics worked, but the numbers of white voters plummeted as well. McGhee shares the stunning statistic that in the presidential election of 1944, when national turnout averaged 69 percent, the states that had poll taxes managed a scant 18% turnout—of both black and white voters. The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.

White workers began to abandon unions. As one white union member puts it, “The unions are for putting people on equal ground. Some people see that as a threat to their society. The view is, even without a union white people are in charge. I’m in charge.”

Healthcare was racialized. It is no accident that the right wing quickly named the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare.” “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it,” railed Rush Limbaugh. Over a dozen red states have refused to expand Medicaid to its citizens, and most of those are white. Red states have been systematically closing rural hospitals instead of investing in healthcare. Texas has half the number of hospitals that it had in the 1960s despite a population increase of more than 15 million people.

White enrollment in private school spiked and whites began reducing funding for public schools, even though this hurt white children whose parents couldn’t afford private-school tuition. Today, eight of the ten states with the lowest funding for public education—Idaho, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—are controlled by the White Supremacist QAnon Party.

 “Everything we believe comes from the stories that we’ve been told,” McGhee reminds us. The curriculum had to be racialized, too. Racism has also denied white Americans our real history. A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how enslaved people’s labor was essential to the American economy.” Only 8 percent of high school students surveyed by the SPLC across the country knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. Seventy-eight percent could not explain how slaveholders benefited from provisions in the Constitution.

The problematic history of white America has not only been suppressed, it has been cruelly and purposefully inverted in truly monstrous fashion. McGhee quotes this statement by Abraham Lateiner,  a white class activist: “Because white men have raped Black and Brown women with impunity for centuries, race comforts us with the lie that it’s Black masculinity that is defined by hypersexual predation. Because white people penned Black people in the ‘ghetto’ via redlining, race tells us that this ‘ghetto’ is an indictment of Black pathology. People of color weren’t the ones who created whiteness or violated my spirit with it. That was my own people. That is my peers. That is me, too.”

Support of the role of government has collapsed among white Americans over the past fifty years, and this in turn has led to falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Every new legal victory by African Americans increased the pathological sense of victimhood amongst whites. Today, white people are by far the whiniest and most paranoid American demographic. The majority of white moderates (53%) and white conservatives (69%) believe that African Americans take more than they give to society. Three out of four White Supremacist QAnon Party voters agree with the statement “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” and 40% of that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

“The Sum of Us” reminds us that all this hard work to institutionalize racism has made whites the most segregated people in America. “Few people today understand the extent to which governments at every level forced Americans to live apart throughout our history.” McGhee writes. “Only Apartheid South Africa and Nazi German have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the cover of law.” In a survey taken during the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown an unarmed Black teenager, the majority of white Americans said they regularly came into contact with only “a few” African Americans, and a 2019 poll reported that 21 percent “seldom or never” interacted with any people of color at all.

White America has denied itself the humanizing freedom that comes from racial understanding. As Robin DiAngelo says in the book, “It’s actually liberating and transformative to start from the premise that of course I’m thoroughly conditioned into racism. And then I can stop defending, denying, explaining, minimizing and get to work actually applying what I profess to believe with the practice of my life.”

Heather McGhee ran the liberal Demos think tank before taking time off to write this book and one of the most compelling aspects of “The Sum of Us” is how well she documents how much racism has cost the American economy. “Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet,” she writes, “where you financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born.” According to a 2020 Citigroup report, not closing racial gaps for black twenty years ago has cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion dollars.

I personally don’t believe that white America will ever willingly own up to its racism (we have proved that over and over and over again), and that real progress will only be made when whites are such a minority of the population that even the Electoral College, the Senate, and voter suppression will no longer be enough keep us in power. It saddens me that I probably won’t live to see that day.

McGhee is still optimistic. She points out how immigrants have made up nearly 85% of the population growth in rural America since 2010. (Lewiston, Maine, rebounded economically after an influx of Somali immigrants.) Several red states have voted to expand Medicaid despite rabid opposition from the White Supremacist QAnon Party. McGhee argues that there is a growing awareness that the racist zero-sum economic model has nothing more to offer and that there is a growing awareness that diversity is our greatest economic asset and that, thereby, the races truly do need each other. (She calls this the “solidarity dividence.”) McGhee understands that whites and people of color have to get on the same page before we can come out of our seventy-year tailspin, and she believes that a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) movement could play a huge role in bringing this about.

I truly hope that she is right.