America’s economy has been breaking the people it is supposed to serve

From the 2008 financial collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth to the mountain of student debt that crushes young borrowers before they can buy a home, the pattern is unmistakable. Public roads crumble. Hospitals close in rural counties. And the richest nation on Earth still cannot guarantee a doctor’s visit for every citizen.

This is not a run of bad luck. It is not a failure of the free market or the inevitable cost of global competition.

The common denominator, laid out in a sweeping new body of research and reported from Maine to Mississippi to California, is something more corrosive: racism.

Not just the obvious indignities. Not just the police stops or the job interviews never called back. The deeper cost of white supremacy in America has been paid by white people, too.

About five years ago, Heather McGhee, an economist and policy analyst who spent years traveling the country, compiled what she calls “the sum of us” — a ledger of losses that no single race has escaped. As Donald Trump seeks to mobilize support by dividing people, it is worth revisiting The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee.

The zero‑sum paradigm, the belief that progress for one group must come at the expense of another, has poisoned the American well.

And the water is bitter for everyone, despite the contradiction of these realities with our national values.

In towns where a public swimming pool was drained rather than integrated, white children lost a place to learn to swim. In factories where unions were torn apart by racial resentment, wages for white workers fell alongside those of their black colleagues.

In state after state, McGhee found white families who confided their own unraveling: a lost home, a shattered dream, a shot at a better job that evaporated because the cost of solidarity was measured in skin color.

The numbers are stark. Union membership has collapsed from more than 20 percent of workers in the 1980s to barely 10 percent today. The decline tracks almost perfectly with the deliberate racial wedge politics of the same era.

As public goods — parks, schools, transit — were redefined as private luxuries, the wealthy bought their way out of the common good. The rest fought over scraps.

America remains the only wealthy nation without universal health care. The reason is not a lack of resources. It is a politics repeatedly stoked by the fear that “those people” might benefit.

The same fear gutted public housing. The same fear turned the post‑war promise of affordable college into a debt trap now exceeding $1.7 trillion. The scourge of racism is like a loaded gun that society has turned upon itself.

McGhee calls the way out the “Solidarity Dividend.”

She found it in unlikely places: a multiracial church in rural Kentucky, a union hall in Los Angeles where janitors of every background bargained together, a community land trust in Mississippi where Black and white families share ownership of affordable homes. The dividend is the gain that comes when people refuse the zero‑sum lie.

McGhee shares examples of people from diverse racial backgrounds joining forces to do things they couldn’t accomplish on their own, showing that working together brings greater benefits for everyone.

The evidence is not sentimental. It is arithmetic. When communities pool resources across racial lines, they build better schools, safer streets, and stronger economies. When they splinter, the cost shows up in bankruptcies, foreclosures, and shorter lives.

The tragedy is that white Americans have been the primary victims of the very hierarchy they were promised would protect them. The mansion of white supremacy, McGhee writes, was always a trap door. Beneath it lies a common basement.

The path out requires something harder than policy. It requires a recognition that progress for any American is not a loss for another. It requires the admission that the economy has failed, not because of scarcity but because of a choice — a choice to divide rather than unite.

That choice has a name. And its costs are paid in full, every day, by people of every color. We’re all in this together, so we might as well start behaving like we need each other, because we do.