McGhee discusses ‘lie of the zero sum’ at MLK address

New York Times bestselling author Heather McGhee discussed what she called the “lie of the zero sum hypothesis” in her Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration keynote address on Feb. 28.

McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” talked about the racial divide in the United States — a divide, she said, that benefits none and hurts all. She called the zero sum hypothesis, which refers to the belief that one group of people cannot excel without bringing down another, a “game where there cannot be mutual progress.”

“The global narrative of the zero sum is that, in this country as a white nation that is growing more diverse, means that in the hierarchy of human value, white people will now be on the bottom. And that’s marketed as an existential threat to white folks. And we here in Buffalo know the very human cost of people believing that,” McGhee said, referring to the May 14, 2022, racially motivated mass shooting at the Tops market on Jefferson Avenue.

McGhee, who helped build Demos, the non-partisan “think and do” tank, explained that white Americans are “sold” this lie by politicians and outspoken radicals, and it ultimately costs all Americans the progress that would bring the U.S. back to its “former glory.”

“I began to explore this idea that we could actually win by coming together across race, a solidarity dividend,” McGhee said. “For example, I can recycle all I want, but I can’t do anything to address global climate change on my own. That takes collective problem-solving. It takes the action of the people in motion … and so this understanding about the power of collective action in a society like ours. It’s going to take a multiracial collective action. That’s a superpower that we simply haven’t tapped enough.”

McGhee further explained her work using the analogy of “America’s lost grant, resort-style public swimming pools,” of which there used to be nearly 2,000 in the U.S. during the “age of progress” in the 1950s.

While traveling in an RV with her husband and infant son, McGhee said she became acquainted with public parks all over the U.S. One of those parks, Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama, provided much-needed running space for her son. McGhee said she was so enamored with the sheer size of the park that she began to research its history.

“I discovered that buried 10 feet under the grass that my son was running across was what used to be one of the largest public swimming pools in the South. Now the mystery of what happened to the Oak Park pool became an obsession for me,” McGhee said.

She wondered why this pool, once a thriving community center in the South, was filled in with gravel and soil. The reason, she discovered, was that the pool was for whites only, and whites didn’t want to share the pool with Blacks when towns and cities across the country began issuing basic desegregation orders in the late 1950s.

“When the Civil Rights Movement began to empower Black families and their allies to take to the courts, they demanded access to the public goods that their tax dollars were funding. In the case of the swimming pools, they said ‘we want our babies to swim, too.’

“But instead of complying with those integration orders, many towns and cities just drained their public pools. Literally drained all the water, backed up trucks of dirt and gravel, and in Montgomery, Alabama, right where I was running with my son, effective Jan. 1, 1959, they closed Oak Park and drained the pool.”

McGhee used this example to explain that, because white communities could not grapple with the “threat” of integration, all community members — both white and Black — lost access to these grand, resort-style public swimming pools.

She applied this reasoning to other public policies, like universal health care and a universal basic income. McGhee explained that, in the late 1950s, these benefits were supported by a majority of white Americans. But following the Civil Rights Act of 1965, this support dropped. The only difference, McGhee noted, was that Black Americans would also benefit from these policies.

But McGhee is hopeful. She views “unthinkable attacks” on racial literacy, like book bans in elementary schools, as “acts of desperation and an attempted sabotage of what’s already been built and is already in motion, which is the mass consciousness-raising. People don’t go back to sleep after they’ve woken up,” she said.

The question-and-answer segment of McGhee’s talk was moderated by LaGarrett King, director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education, and associate professor of learning and instruction in the Graduate School of Education.