Is Racism Good for White People?

In her brilliant new book, "The Sum of Us," a Black social scientist demonstrates how some whites have been suckered into thinking so, and proves they are wrong.

“If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.”

—Wendell Berry

In her new book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee often quotes from the prolific white American writer and activist Wendell Berry, especially from his 1968 book “The Hidden Wound.” Written at a time when protests against war and racism were rocking the United States—and when a new generation (mine, the much maligned baby boomers) was not only seeing through the myths we had been fed by our parents, teachers, religious institutions, and political leaders, but often acting on those revelations—Berry’s book gave no quarter to racism, but still insisted that this twisted ideology hurt everyone except those who used it to divide whites from people of color.

The idea that racism hurts white people, even if they are not the greatest victims of it, cuts across the grain of many current discussions of bigotry and white supremacy. For many or even most liberals, whites benefit from “white skin privilege,” giving them all kinds of advantages that people of color do not have. Only if whites give up their supposed privilege, the logic goes, can people of color take their rightful place in society and prosper as equals.

But as McGhee’s title suggests, and as she argues persuasively in her book, society and the economy are not zero sum playing fields, where advances for people of color can only be achieved if whites are willing to give up things up. That, indeed, is the myth that those who would seek to divide us have fostered for generations, and it is a myth that must be dissected and dismantled if real progress is to be made.

Heather McGhee / Lavin Aency

As an old 60s radical, this is precisely the message that so many of us tried to put forward decades ago: Whites should fight racism not just because it is wrong, evil, cruel, and brutal, but because it is in the interests of everyone—whites and people of color alike—to, as we would cry, “Smash Racism!”

In more recent years, however, the idea of solidarity among people of different colors has been somewhat supplanted by the more liberal notion of “white skin privilege,” which implicitly invokes the “zero sum game” assumptions that McGhee in her book argues against. More on that in a few minutes. First, let’s look at the arguments.

“Racism got in the way of us all having nice things”

One of the great services of McGhee’s book is the number of examples given of just how whites lose out too when they embrace racism and its zero sum assumptions. In her Introduction, McGhee summarizes the reality underlying those myths, for example in the Great Recession that began in 2008:

“Black people and other people of color certainly lost out when we weren’t able to invest more in the aftermath of the Great Recession, or tackle climate change more forcefully under President Obama, or address the household debt crisis before it spiraled out of control—in each case, at least partly because of racist stereotypes and dog whistles used by our opposition. But did white people win? No, for the most part they lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.” (p. xix of the hardback edition.)

McGhee makes it clear that when she talks about “white people,” she is not referring to billionaires like Jeff Bezos, or racist, Republican state governors who try to convince white voters that Medicaid and other benefits that help nearly everyone are giveaways to lazy people who don’t want to work. But she is referring to the vast majority of white, working class and middle class people, who have allowed themselves to be fooled into thinking they have a stake in keeping people of color down.

As historians have long pointed out, racism was effectively used by Southern slave owners and their political puppets to convince poor whites that despite their poverty they were still were still “superior” to Black people, with whom—especially after the Civil War and the end of slavery—they began to have to compete. Or did they? McGhee points out, as have others, that there were many acts of solidarity between white and Black workers, including organizing drives against terrible wages and working conditions, even if we don’t hear about them much today.

In some of the strongest sections of McGhee’s book, she describes trips she took all over the United States while researching it, meeting people of all backgrounds, including activists—white and Black alike—who realized that racism was very self-defeating for everyone. And throughout, McGhee elegantly sums up her findings in the most powerful terms, ones that should give inspiration to anyone fighting for racial solidarity:

“Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a ‘Solidarity Dividend,’ from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action. And the benefits weren’t only external. I didn’t set out to write about the moral costs of racism, but they kept showing themselves. There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don’t know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but I met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial healing in their communities.”

Two kinds of racism: Overt white supremacy, and the liberal variety. Two cheers for good intentions, but…

In a chapter entitled “The Hidden Wound,” after Berry’s book, McGhee discusses what she calls “the most powerful morally inverting force in our society: white fear of people of color, particularly Black people.”

I think that any white person who is honest with themselves knows this fear. Many readers will remember the notorious quip by the late conservative writer and editor Irving Kristol that “a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality.” What he really meant, of course, is mugged by a Black person. And, of course, whites have oh so many fears where Black people are concerned: Fear of being the victim of a crime, fear of their housing values being lowered if Blacks move into their neighborhoods, fears of a worse education for their kids if they go to school with people of color, fears, fears, fears.

For white supremacists, the main fear, as we have seen so much lately, is fear that people of color will supplant them, replace them, gain greater privileges, and so forth. And of course we just had a president who spent four years either telling whites that explicitly or dog whistling others who did—along with the entire Republican Party, which in the modern era has made stoking fears its number one message.

For liberal whites, on the other hand, there are also fears: Fear of being labeled racist by both whites and people of color if they say the “wrong thing,” fear of being ostracized if they don’t say the “right thing,” and so on.

One way this fear of people of color manifests itself—and I know some will not agree with me here—is substituting deference for real engagement with people of color as equals. I see this nearly every day, especially in academia, where whites are admonished to “listen” to Blacks and other people of color without argument. Of course whites should listen, especially to anyone who, by their own experiences, knows racism and related issues inside out.

Indeed, what many middle class, intellectual whites think is showing respect for people of color amounts to a thinly disguised form of liberal racism, where fear rules the day and tough discussions are avoided.

One of the best recent examples, in my opinion, was the case of the artist Dana Schutz’s controversial 2016 painting “Open Casket,” based on a photograph of Emmet Till, the 14 year old Black boy who was killed and mutilated by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. (Till’s mother insisted that his funeral be held open casket, because she wanted the world—the world—to see what had been done to him.)

As readers will recall, when the painting was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 2017, some—but certainly not all—African-Americans protested its display as “cultural appropriation” of Black suffering, and insisted that it be taken down. Many white liberals were quick to either support this position or run the other way; fortunately, the Whitney Museum stood by the artist, and initial reports that she planned to take it down (and even destroy it) turned out to be based on hoaxes.

To me, at the time, this episode represented an excellent opportunity for both Black and white artists and cultural commenters to engage in a dialogue about how whites can best support the anti-racist movement from a position of solidarity rather than deference and white guilt, which works against alliances and effective action. The same discussions can be had over the myriad of controversies over cultural appropriation, ranging from white musicians playing jazz to white girls braiding their hair.

Emmett Till, by Dana Schutz

To put it as bluntly and as clearly as I can: While liberal anti-racists are often well-intentioned, the inevitability that white people growing up in American society will harbor at least subtle and underlying racist attitudes means that the liberal anti-racist is also a liberal racist at the same time—most often unconsciously and unintentionally. And liberal racism consists of opposing bigotry not because it is in everyone’s best interests to do so, but out of a sense of condescension that often leads to thinly disguised patronizing attitudes and actions.

If Blacks and whites are equals, then Blacks and whites can and should argue, discuss, debate, the best way to fight racism; both groups bring critically important experiences to the discussion.

If racism hurts whites, then that is the most effective basis on which to fight it. Liberal guilt is not.

This, then, is the great strength of McGhee’s book, her realization that we are—or should be—in the fight together. And it’s a message she is sending to people of all colors. If a Black woman has understood better than most what whites have to gain by abandoning the illusions and delusions that racism provides them, that should be no surprise.

Moreover, McGhee provides hope that racism really can be fought, not so much by accusing white people of being racists but pointing out to them this very fundamental truth.

“When you believe the dominant story that you’re on your own, responsible for all your own successes and failures, and yet you’re still being paid $7.25 an hour, what does that say about your own worth?” McGhee writes.

Recognizing that truth should help whites, especially some of the poor and working class whites who seem to be especially susceptible to the racist message of the Trumps of this world and their lackeys, to see that Blacks and other people of color have something they need, the key to understanding what is really going on.

“It’s become fashionable to say ‘trust Black women,’” McGhee writes. “But the truth isn’t that there’s some innate magic within us; it’s that the social and economic and cultural conditions that have been imposed on people at the base of the social hierarchy have given us the clearest view of the whole system. We can see how it’s broken and all those who are broken by it.”

I have hope that McGhee’s message is catching on, and will catch on much more as time goes on. We saw glimpses of it during the protests against the murder of George Floyd, when the very faces and the body language of the demonstrators suggested that they were not marching just for George Floyd, but for themselves, for something in themselves that knew deep down another kind of society, another kind of life was possible.

We saw it in the faces of the jurors who found Derek Chauvin guilty, and in the judge who did not hesitate to remand him to prison without even waiting for Chauvin’s lawyer to try to object. We see it in all the posters of George Floyd on so many walls in so many American households, that he was us and we are him and nobody should dare to try to come between us.