Book: The Sum of Us

Another guest author on TRMS, Heather McGhee describes the costs of racism in the nation.  Racism is not a zero-sum game.  McGhee uses the example of public swimming pools in the south -- rather than integrate them, many communities instead chose to fill them in with dirt and close them permanently.

Everybody loses.

The book promises to be full of examples like that, where the talents and innovations that minorities bring are shut out of the system to everyone's detriment.  A valuable lesson for this time & place.

In the introduction, Heather relates a story of advising Obama's economic advisors. They're talking about scaling back the size of the government, of stimulus, of initiatives designed to grow the economy. Because "now is not the time."

She points out that after WWII massive government spending was undertaken to create the middle class, bring people out of poverty, and revitalize the war-shaken economy. It worked. The economy roared for forty years.

For white people.

People of color were largely shut out of the programs for white citizens: VA home loans. College discounts. Etc.

She points out, to these advisors, that the demographics of the country are changing, have changed. Now that the "middle class" that would be helped by economic stimulus is Black and Latino instead of white, suddenly "it's not the time."

Yet the result would be exactly the same.

Startling insight.

Enjoying this book a lot. Very smart writing.

Chapter 3 deals with student debt, and how a whole generation is dealing with delayed adulthood (home buying, starting a family) because of crushing student loans with interest rates that make paying them off nearly impossible.

There was a lot of talk about student loan (federal student loan) forgiveness during the campaign. I don't know if any of that made it into the COVID relief bill or the infrastructure bill. It would be $1.3 trillion well spent.

But here's the thing. In 1973 my parents pulled my school funding (my grandmother had set up a trust, that my parents controlled) because I'd chosen to share housing with my soon-to-be wife. I looked at all my options for continuing my education, and it was clear to me even then that taking out loans in the hope of higher paying jobs in my future was not only uncertain, it was foolhardy. I put myself through six years of community college night school, and became an electronics tech. I ended up making a lot more money than either of my two Ph.D. sisters.

How many people of my generation went hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a literature degree, or a fine arts degree?

I did not know Lincoln was assassinated by a White Supremacist because of his granting citizenship to African-Americans.

Texas requires ID before allowing a person to vote.

But not just any ID: a student ID is not acceptable. A gun owners license is, though.

Twice as many Americans die each year from gun suicides as from gun violence.

That statistic boggles my mind.  85% of all attempted suicides with a gun are successful, versus only 3% of drug-related suicides.

White males make up 33% of the population, but 75% of all gun suicides.

Astonishing.

If guns become harder to get, how will all us white men kill ourselves?