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She goes to Montgomery, Ala., where in 1959, white citizens decided to drain the public pool rather than integrate it. “I was like, ‘What is happening?! This is amazing!'” McGhee says.įor her book, McGhee journeyed around the nation, interviewing people to illustrate how that zero-sum game hurts everyone. There, in her kitchen, she heard the President of the United States-an older white man-telling Americans that they shouldn’t fear the success of Black people, using some of the very phrases she had used in her book. But as Biden spoke, she realized it might be coming at exactly the right time. McGhee had worried that The Sum of Us, coming after the death of George Floyd and the country’s reckoning with race, was being published too late. McGhee uses the book to explain that racism actually costs all Americans, by allowing wealthy conservatives to take away resources from all of us. “The logical extension of the zero-sum story is that a future without racism is something white people should fear, because there will be nothing good for them in it,” she writes. The book argues that Americans have been fed a “zero-sum story” that says progress for people of color will take away what white Americans already have. McGhee’s first book, The Sum of Us, was about to hit shelves in February, and she’d shared copies of it with some Biden advisers.