The Sum of Us, Heather McGee

 

The Sum of Us:  What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together by Heather McGee was on a list of books about racism.

Started: 2/28/2021
Completed: 3/6/2021
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: A list

Words for which I sought help:

quickallusion -- a metaphor

Review:

Segregation is something that I have always thought of as adversely affecting non-white people.  When you think about it, this perspective suggests that everyone benefits from being around white people and that not being around white people hurts others.  Wow.  Put like that, my previous position sounds racist--and it was.  Segregation is bad for everyone.  It is bad for white people and  non-white people because the problem is that a lack of diversity results in an assumed "group think."  When amongst a diverse group, people do not assume that everyone else holds the same view on a particular issue and most people take care to articulate their views fully which is a benefit to everyone.  The person articulating a view has to think it through more carefully and the person hearing it gets the opportunity to understand how the view is constructed.

Sure, this book focuses on race, but this kind of diversity is needed on all kinds of levels.  A diversity of religion, economic position, culture, and race are needed to cripple "group think" and that makes our society better.  What makes America great, at least in part, is the melting pot of ideas.  This is another metaphor that I had incorrectly--I kind of thought of the melting pot as taking different pieces of different cultures and tying those pieces sort of together.  That isn't it at all, everyone has their own piece of the puzzle and we all interact highly--that is the melting pot.  Not me taking part of something else and adopting it as my own, necessarily, which is more accurately called, "appropriation," but me sharing what is important to me with others and accepting what others are sharing with me.  The United States should not have one idea of the direction forward cobbled together into some kind of haphazard collection of parts.  The United States should have a wide array of ideas that interact and grow the realm of the possible.  "Our differences make us stronger, more creative, and fairer."

Framing our interactions with others as a zero sum game (in which whenever one person does better, someone else does correspondingly worse) is not only a false narrative (as Kennedy said, for the most part a rising tide raises all boats) but it puts everyone in competition with everyone else and everyone on a hierarchy of sorts.  This type of framing ignores the possibility that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts and, further, that if I reach out and help others, we all can do better together without anyone doing worse.  When we view the world through the zero sum game, we only see others as competitors (the GOP calls this "makers and takers").  If we view each other as help mates, then we waste far less energy on false competition and focus on raising the floor.  That is the real meaning of community.  It is the sum of us.