A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Policy scholar Heather McGhee investigates the social and economic costs of racism through reporting on public pools, schools, housing, unions, environmental policy, health care, voting, and the 2008 financial crisis. She argues that a zero-sum story—progress for people of color must mean loss for white people—has repeatedly enabled the destruction or neglect of public goods, while multiracial cooperation can produce a ‘solidarity dividend.’
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
McGhee connects moral concern about racism to institutions travelers encounter in ordinary civic life. Her drained-pool image makes visible how white resistance to integration can damage shared resources, including for white communities, without reducing justice to self-interest. The book belongs as a reported, policy-minded invitation to multiracial democracy and collective provision. It is neither a complete history of U.S. racism nor a promise that solidarity eliminates conflict or unequal cost.
Good starting place if…
You want an accessible, evidence-rich account of how racism shapes public goods and economic policy—and how multiracial cooperation can create shared gains.
Know before you begin…
The book includes racial violence, exploitation, segregation, environmental harm, financial loss, and political backlash. Its national synthesis necessarily compresses local histories and disagreements over policy evidence. The language of shared benefit can broaden coalitions, but racial justice is not justified only when every group receives an immediate material return, and ‘solidarity’ should not conceal unequal risk or demand optimism from harmed communities. Pair it with work centered more fully on Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, disability, gender, and global political economy.