Heather McGhee > Quotes

“Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“For when a nation founded on the belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief then and only then will we have discovered a new world. That is our destiny. To make it manifest, we must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class. We must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom. Rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more, when the we in we the people is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than and greater for the sum of us.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“The profound love for America's ideals should unite all who call it home, of every color - and yet America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it. We've tried a do-it-yourself approach to writing the racial narrative about America, but the forces selling denial, ignorance, and projection have succeeded in robbing us of our own shared history--both the pain and the resilience. It's time to tell the truth, with a nationwide process that enrolls all of us in setting the facts straight so that we can move forward with a new story, together.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“They are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“In the absence of moral leadership, there are just too many competing stories. For every call to become an activist for racial justice, there is a well-rehearsed message that says that activists are pushing too hard. For every chance to speak up against the casual racism White people so often hear from other White folks, there is a countervailing pressure not to rock the boat. If you want to believe that White people are the real victims in race relations and that the stereotypes of people of color as criminal and lazy are common sense rather than White supremacy tropes, there is a glide path to take you there. And when your life trajectory has taught you that the system works pretty ok if you do the right things, then its easy to wonder why whole groups of people can’t seem to do better for themselves. Whichever story you choose to believe, nobody wants to be the villain. So there is an available set of justifications as to why your view is morally right.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“We've got to get on the same page before we can turn it.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the 'We' in 'We the people' is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Gordon Cakes”
― Heather McGhee, Black And White Rainbows

“Inequality and climate change are the twin challenges of our time, and more democracy is the answer to both.”
― Heather McGhee

“Then, in the mid-sixties, there's a commotion at the door. Women and people of color are demanding a seat at the table, ready to join the contract for shared prosperity. But no longer able to see themselves reflected in the other signatories, the leaders of government and big business walk out, leaving workers on their own --- and the Inequality Era was born.”
― Heather McGhee

“And again we confront the problem of history: it's usually the powerful who get to write it.”
― Heather McGhee, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“If you're in a society where you've already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it's okay for people to suffer, then it's okay for people to suffer. And if your wealth has protected you from that suffering, then your wealth can probably protect you from another kind of suffering.”
― Heather McGhee

“If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown”
― Heather McGhee

“Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else....

Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.”
― Heather McGhee, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Refilling the pool will require us to believe in government so much that we hold it to the highest standard of excellence and commit our generation's best and brightest to careers designing public goods instead of photo-sharing apps. When we do, the potential is boundless.”
― Heather McGhee

“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree.

The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”
― Heather McGhee, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“There is a better way, it’s called targeted universalism. A concept developed by law professor and critical race scholar john a. powell, who currently directs the Haas Other and Belonging Institute at the University of California Berkeley. With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal, and then develop strategies to achieve that goal that takes into account the varied situations of the groups involved.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“The politicians will try to separate us.”
― Heather McGhee

“So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class and they paid for themselves in economic growth...and now these guys are trying to fundamentally reneg on the deal for a future middle class. That would be majority people of color?”
― Heather McGhee