Book on Racism Vying for a National Book Award Draws From Nonprofit Leader’s Work

Nonprofit leader Heather McGhee is stepping into the literary limelight. Her new bestseller, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, was selected last week to the long list for the 2021 National Book Award for nonfiction.

In the book, McGhee — who led the progressive think tank Demos from 2014 through 2018 and now chairs Color of Change — argues that that racism has impeded progress and prosperity for all Americans — people of color as well as white people. The book features “shared fate” examples drawn from health care, voting-rights battles, the environment, financial regulation, and more. In one of the most powerful case studies, she shows how communities in the 1960s drained and paved over public pools rather than integrate, stealing a resource from Black and white residents alike except for those who could afford private swim and country clubs.

Racism, she said in a Chronicle interview before the award’s long list was announced, “is the common thread in our most vexing public problems.”

McGhee began to explore this flip side of history while at Demos, where she took an entry-level job as a 22-year-old out of Yale. “As I grew up with the organization, I learned the orthodoxy in progressive economics, which saw class and race as somewhat distinct and which saw economic policy as a driver of inequality and racism as an accelerator,” she said. Over time, however, as she worked on issues related to wages, welfare, and economic fairness, she came to believe that racism was the key factor in some of America’s most intractable problems.

Later, in conversations with leaders in such fields of housing, the environment, and education, McGhee made the case that racism was influencing their issues and work in ways they hadn’t yet recognized. Those discussions, she says, helped her formulate the book, which she hopes will help progressive advocates build coalitions.

“The ideas did not come from some academic research but by being in the trenches with leaders across the movement,” she said.

Since its release in February, the book has been widely praised for its analysis but also for the warmth of its prose and approach. “There is a striking clarity to this book,” wrote the New York Times in its review of the book earlier this year. “There is also a depth of kindness in it that all but the most churlish readers will find moving.”

Before the book, McGhee was known in the nonprofit world for leading a transformation of Demos that put racial equity at the center of its mission. Named president at the age of 33, she began the work as the only person of color on the five-person executive team and with a staff that was nearly three-quarters white. Over four years, the organization did extensive training with staff, developed new systems and practices, and elevated race in all its programming work, among other things. When she left the organization four years later, people of color made up 60 percent of the staff.

With Lucy Mayo, then the Demos vice president of operations, and consultant Angela Park, McGhee wrote a report outlining the group’s transformation steps and its lessons “to help other organizations create their own unique racial-equity transformation plans.”