Tre Giles

“I learned to expect to be the “only” Black person in white rooms, the one who would force a new racial awareness. I know that these experiences of racial proximity and distance profoundly influenced me, for good and for bad—that I had to subtly redefine myself with each move and, more important, often wildly reevaluate what I thought of others.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“I think one of the downfalls of growing up in a homogeneous setting is that the process of understanding…racial inequalities and recognizing one’s own privilege can be very uncomfortable and might take longer, but it doesn’t mean they don’t get there.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“I believe that we must have a public reckoning with the history of the full record presented to the Court in Brown, which predicted with devastating clarity the mind-warping harm of segregation on white children.” The now-lost rationale for why segregation must fall—the rationale that included the costs to us all—might have actually uprooted segregation in America. After all, arguing that Black and brown children suffered from not being with white children affirmed the reality of unequal conditions, but once the argument was divorced from the context of legal segregation, it also subtly reaffirmed the logic of white supremacy. Today, it’s that logic that endures—that white segregated schools are better and that everyone, even white children, should endeavor to be in them.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together