#heather mcghee

[blondebrainpowered]

[thoughtfulfangirling]

...the systems set up to exploit one part of our society rarely stay contained. Once the financial industry regulators were able to let racist stereotypes and indifference justify massive profits from demonstrably unfair and risky profits, the brakes were off for good. The rest of the mortgage market, with its far more numerous white borrowers, was there for the taking. Having learned how profitable various rates and payments could be by testing them out on borrowers of color in the 1990s, lenders created a new version for the broader market.

—The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

[gwydionmisha]

Illegal Military Occupation of Washington D.C. Round Up: Published 8/21/25 PM

Rightwing podcaster Tim Dillon slammed Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., saying it is “everything Alex Jones has warned us about.

Donald Trump announces he will personally patrol the ‘dangerous’ D.C. streets for ‘crime’ with the military

"I'm going to be going out tonight with the police and with the military," the president said on a conservative radio show.

Trump's Hostile Takeover of DC Backfires - The Hero We Need

[redshift-13]

Waiting at the garage to get my car fixed, I got into a conversation with the other person in the waiting room. As I was moving my book to make way for a cat that was trying to sit on my lap (yes, the garage is home to 4 cats), she said, "Your book is on inequality?"

Yes, it is. I showed her the cover of Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen, and expanded a bit on the book's thesis. (Everyone should read this.)

Turns out she was a lead organizer for Ilhan Omar's campaign, and she's a heavy reader. We launched into what could have been a marathon conversation but before we parted ways she strongly recommended the above book.

[ausetkmt]

Heather McGhee - “The Sum of Us” & The True Cost of Racism

Heather McGhee talks about examining the economic impact of racism in America in her new book “The Sum of Us,” and underlines the importance of having honest conversations about past and present racism at a community level.

[aliteraryprincess]

November Wrap Up:

Is the year over yet? I feel like this month lasted six years. I just want the semester to end. I want to sleep. I don’t want to write or grade papers. Ugh.

Books Read - Goal: 8  Total: 4

And I’m back to being in a bit of a slump. Hopefully that will end once I have free time. (I think I also said that this summer and proceeded to read basically nothing.) My favorite of the month was Jill and my least favorite was Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit. I actually really enjoyed aspects of it, but there were several uncomfortable things that I just couldn’t overlook. 

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee - 4 stars

Jill by Amy Dillwyn - 4 stars

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, & the Limits of Law by Dean Spade - 3 stars

Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown - 2 stars

On Tumblr:

There hasn’t been this much here in ages! 

Book Quotes: These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

Book Quotes: These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

Book Quotes: Jill by Amy Dillwyn

Book Quotes: The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed

Book Quotes: Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown

Reblogged: Adult WLW Recommendations (but it’s really just Sarah Waters)

Reblogged: Cat Photography

Reblogged: African Literature Recommendations

Tagged: Witchy Picrew

Tagged: 7 Covers in 7 Days

On the Blog:

And in contrast there’s barely anything here. Literally one review. Oops. School isn’t leaving me with much time for blogging. Hopefully the break will change that.

Review: Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen

September & October Wrap Up

[higherentity]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_McGhee

[aowski]

Changing the Narrative

It seems that death is coming at us from all sides these days. Police shootings, mass shootings, road-rage shootings, COVID deaths, and the execution spree of the last administration.  

What most of us know about the death penalty in America, we probably gleaned from movies like “The Green Mile”. In our minds, we confine it geographically and historically to the old South. I propose that it encompasses more of our lives than we care to admit. We just don’t see it and recognize it as such. The sentence of death hangs over all of us. We’ve become numb to all the ways this is true, especially if it doesn’t directly affect us or our demographic today. But executions are happening daily in this country. It might help if these executions were categorized:

Judicial Execution - Death administered by the State, as a punishment for a capitol crime, usually for being too poor to afford a proper defense.

Civil Execution - Death administered by law enforcement as punishment for  no reason at all except being a poor person of color. 

Stochastic Execution - Death administered randomly in a public place by another person by reason of their own uncontrolled rage and easy access to military-grade firearms.

Domestic Execution - Death administered by a significant other, usually an aggrieved spouse or lover. Again rage combined with easy access to firearms. May result in stochastic execution of others.

Policy Execution - Death administered by state austerity that neglects human well-being. Reverend Barber’s “Policy Violence”.

Economic Execution - Death administered by poverty. Holes in the social safety net coupled with grievous inequality depriving people of access to food, water, shelter, and healthcare.

Environmental Execution - Death by industrial pollution, its toxic effects on food, water, or air, and climate change.

Epidemiological Execution - Death by a communicable virus that spreads like wildfire because of government negligence,  politicization, assertion of personal freedom, and utter disregard for the well-being of others.

Self Execution - Death caused by our own hand. More than the act itself. The culmination of untreated depression, bi-polar illness, or hopelessness, i.e. the psychic death that precedes it.

Taken together, the result is...

Actuarial Execution - The reduced lifespan resulting from living in the United States. With a life expectancy of 78.5 years (per a WHO 2019 report), we have fallen to 40th among the world's nations in life expectancy! These are Life-years stolen! How did we get here? What is it about America that has made 39 others countries a better place, a place to live longer?

We have accepted a "culture of death", a phrase coined by Pope John Paul II. The Psalmist called it “the Shadow of Death”. In this country, the culture of death began with genocide of the indigenous, but gained an enduring foothold with slavery.

Slavery was the foundation of the economy at our country’s inception and was well-represented at the Constitutional Convention: 

Let us consider the first fifty years of our national history. There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.— John Jay Chapman

Much of our Constitution was an agreement made by compromising with slave-holding states and interests. The most notorious artifact was the “three-fifths” clause which counted slaves as 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of apportionment, thus giving the slave-holding states disproportionate representation. The Second Amendment is another concession to the interests of slavery. By the time of the Convention, “Slave Patrols” were well established in the South. There was concern that Article 1, Section 8, giving Congress the power to form and finance armies could gain control of state militias. Virginia would not ratify the Constitution unless the Second Amendment was included. 

The cohesion (and fragmentation) within our society is based on identity. Too often this identity is not based so much on common interests, but on caste.

Identity is not who we define ourselves to be, but who we define ourselves to not be. More to the point, we understand ourselves to be in a hierarchy, so we define ourselves by who we are above. 

They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.—James Baldwin

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." —Lyndon B. Johnson

It is a human failing that we need a scapegoat to blame others for our shortcomings and vulnerabilities. White people impugn our shadow on Black people and other minority groups. Everything White America refuses to believe about itself, hates about itself, is projected onto people of color.

The white man's unadmitted and apparently, to him, unspeakable-private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. —James Baldwin

Of all the things we want to push away from ourselves, the certainty of our death is chief among them. Yet...

Mortality the reality that we are most adept at denying. 

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

—James Baldwin

And, again, White America, finds it convenient to avoid  the reality of death by projecting it on others:

White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.  

—James Baldwin

Is this is why White America has been so indifferent to the suffering and death of Black Americans? Per CDC data, life expectancy for Black Americans is approximately five years less than the population as a whole. Indifference may not be imputation, but it does translate into the lack of political will to change things.

Racism is the Poison. Although inequality disproportionately affects people of color, all working and middle-class people are struggling to survive. Compared against other wealthy Western nations, America’s systemic ills are dragging us all down into the shadows of death. 

...racism is a poison first consumed by its concocters. What's clearer now in our time of growing inequality is that the economic benefit of the racial bargain is shrinking for all but the richest. The logic that launched the zero-sum paradigm-I will profit at your expense-is no longer sparing millions of white Americans from the degradations of American economic life as people of color have always known it.

—Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us)

Solidarity is the alternative and people are waking up to it:

Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a "Solidarity Dividend," from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action. And the benefits weren't only external. I didn't set out to write about the moral costs of racism, but they kept showing themselves. There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don't know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but I met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial healing in their communities.

—Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us)

A New Way, a way of life, a way of economic security is possible, but only if we seize the moment we are in. A moment of crisis is also a moment of opportunity. As we come out of a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, more people are facing the bankruptcy of 40 years of trickle-down Reaganomics.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced —James Baldwin

The politics and messaging of racial scapegoating is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Race-baiting and fear are the tools used against solidarity. The answer is a new story, a race-class narrative. 

If we lead with a shared value, that means race and class, for example, ‘Whatever your race, gender, or religion, most of us work hard for our families. Every child, regardless of where they come from, deserves a chance to pursue their dreams.’ Reminding us of our common humanity (that’s a good place to start) and then saying that racial scapegoating is a weapon that economically harms all of us. You’re actually putting a shot in your listeners’ arm, inoculating them, so the next time they hear that racial scapegoating, they have antibodies for it. —Heather McGhee

This is the pivotal moment we find ourselves in. Our choices are to continue with the old story of racism, division, and death or to embrace a new story, a story of solidarity and an abundance. This can happen when we realize we are more than "The Sum of Us" (McGhee).