Narrator: Imagine it’s the 1950s. Across America, towns and cities are building magnificent public swimming pools. These aren't just holes in the ground; they are grand, resort-like destinations, seen as symbols of a prosperous, democratic society. They are social melting pots where everyone can come together. But this vision had a fatal flaw: "everyone" didn't include Black Americans. When the Civil Rights movement brought legal challenges and courts ordered these pools to integrate, communities faced a choice. Instead of sharing, many towns across the country did something that seems utterly baffling: they drained their pools. They filled them with concrete, sold them for scrap, and chose to have no pool at all rather than a pool for everyone. Why would a community destroy a public good that benefited all of its citizens?

This question is at the heart of Heather McGhee’s groundbreaking book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. McGhee argues that this "drained-pool politics" is not an isolated historical curiosity but a central, destructive pattern in American life. It reveals how a false, zero-sum story about race has convinced millions of Americans to oppose policies that would help them, simply because those policies might also help people of color.

Narrator: At the core of America’s dysfunction is a pervasive and deeply ingrained belief McGhee calls the zero-sum paradigm. It’s the lie that progress for one racial group must come at the expense of another. If people of color gain, white people must lose. This idea, McGhee shows, is not a natural human instinct but a story that was deliberately constructed to justify the exploitation that built the nation.

From the country's colonial beginnings, the U.S. economy was built on a zero-sum relationship: the theft of land from Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans directly enriched white colonizers. To rationalize this brutality, a racial hierarchy was invented, elevating even the poorest white person with what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "public and psychological wage" of whiteness. This story has been revived and retold for centuries, especially by economic elites who benefit from a divided populace.

The power of this lie persists today. McGhee points to stunning research by scholars Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers, who found that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. They perceive that as anti-Black bias has decreased, anti-white bias has increased, even though all data on wealth, health, and power shows the opposite. This flawed perception is the engine of resentment, driving political decisions that are ultimately self-defeating.

Narrator: The story of the drained public pools is the book's central metaphor for how the zero-sum lie plays out. When public goods have to be shared across racial lines, a powerful impulse emerges to destroy them for everyone. This isn't just about swimming pools; it’s about the "nice things" a wealthy society should be able to provide for its citizens.

McGhee provides a powerful example with the decline of public funding for higher education. For decades, states like California built world-class, tuition-free public university systems that fueled economic mobility. But as these campuses became more diverse, the public commitment to funding them withered. In 1978, California passed Proposition 13, a ballot initiative that drastically cut property taxes, the primary funding source for public schools. The campaign was fueled by racially coded dog whistles about not wanting to pay for "other people's children."

The result was predictable. California’s public school system, once a national leader, plummeted in the rankings. Tuition at public universities skyrocketed, shifting the cost from the state to individual students and their families. This created the "debt-for-diploma" system that now burdens millions of Americans of all races. Just like the swimming pools, a fantastic public good was effectively drained because of a zero-sum fear that the "wrong" people were benefiting from it.

Narrator: The zero-sum mindset doesn't just drain public goods; it makes the entire economic system more fragile and prone to collapse. McGhee argues that communities of color often serve as the "canary in the coal mine," experiencing the toxic effects of a deregulated, predatory economy first. When their warnings are ignored, the disaster eventually spreads to everyone.

The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis is a perfect case study. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, predatory lenders began aggressively targeting Black and Latinx homeowners with high-cost, deceptive loans designed to fail. These communities were stripped of their home equity, the primary source of wealth for most American families. Because this was seen as a "minority problem," regulators and lawmakers did nothing.

But the financial instruments were too profitable to be contained. The same predatory practices were soon marketed to white working- and middle-class families. The toxic loans infected the entire financial system, leading to the Great Recession. Millions of people, including white homeowners like Amy Rogers from North Carolina, lost their homes, jobs, and life savings. The canary had died, but because no one paid attention, the whole mine collapsed. The cost of racial predation was ultimately borne by the entire nation.

Narrator: The zero-sum game also corrodes the foundations of democracy itself. McGhee demonstrates that efforts to limit the political power of people of color inevitably end up harming democracy for everyone. This is most evident in the relentless assault on voting rights.

She tells the story of Larry Harmon, a white, middle-aged Navy veteran from Ohio. Harmon, who mostly voted in presidential elections, was shocked to find he had been purged from the voter rolls in 2015. He was a victim of a state policy that removed voters for infrequent voting—a policy designed to target transient, lower-income, and minority voters, but which swept up thousands of others in its net.

This is just one tactic in a broader strategy to make voting harder, which also includes strict voter ID laws and felony disenfranchisement. These rules are promoted with racially coded fears of "voter fraud," but their effect is to create a smaller, whiter, and more conservative electorate. This, combined with the overwhelming influence of wealthy donors, creates a system where, as McGhee puts it, "the majority does not rule." The pool of democracy is drained, leaving political power in the hands of a select few.

Narrator: After diagnosing the problem, McGhee offers a powerful and hopeful solution: the Solidarity Dividend. This is the name she gives to the enormous gains—in wages, health, democracy, and more—that can be unlocked when people come together across racial lines to demand a better society for everyone.

The most compelling example is the Fight for $15. The movement was started in 2012 by a small group of fast-food workers in New York City, mostly Black and brown, who walked off the job to demand a $15 minimum wage and a union. They were told their demands were impossible. But the movement grew, building a powerful, multiracial coalition of workers who recognized their shared struggle.

McGhee introduces us to people like Terrence Wise, a Black father in Kansas City, and Bridget Hughes, a white mother in the same city. They came from different backgrounds but were united by the same economic precarity. By organizing together, they and millions of others created a political force that has won wage increases in cities and states across the country, putting an estimated $68 billion into the pockets of low-wage workers. This is the Solidarity Dividend in action. It proves that when people reject the zero-sum lie, they can refill the pool and create a society with "nice things" for the sum of us.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Sum of Us is that the zero-sum story—the idea that progress for people of color must come at a cost to white people—is a lie. It is a poison that has not only caused immeasurable harm to communities of color but has also crippled America’s ability to solve its most pressing problems, costing everyone in the process. From our healthcare system to our schools to our response to climate change, racism has left all Americans with less than they could have.

The book's most challenging and hopeful idea is that the path to a more prosperous future is not color-blind; it is race-conscious. The Solidarity Dividend is not an abstract theory but a practical outcome that emerges when we finally recognize that our fates are linked. The question Heather McGhee leaves us with is both simple and profound: What could we all gain if we stopped draining our pools and started filling them together?