Larry Massaro

“The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“For all my efforts to enumerate the costs of segregation, the loss is incalculable. “The most profound message of racial segregation for whites may be that there is no real loss in the absence of people of color from our lives,” wrote Robin DiAngelo. “Not one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that there was loss to me in segregation; that I would lose anything by not having people of color in my life.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to Black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between Black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of Black and white homes in those communities. Richard Rothstein, author of the seminal book on segregation, Color of Law: How the Government Segregated America, reminds us that there is no such thing as “de facto” segregation that is different from de jure (or legal) segregation. All segregation is the result of public policy, past and present.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“I learned that although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them—they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen—segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all. For all the ways that segregation is aimed at limiting the choices of people of color, it’s white people who are ultimately isolated.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together