The Sum of Us (Adapted for Young Readers)

Chapter 1

An Old Story: The Zero-­Sum Hierarchy

When I was growing up, my family and my neighbors were always hustling. My mother had the fluctuating income of a person with an entrepreneur s mind and a social worker s heart. My dad, divorced from my mom since I was two, had his own up-­and-­down small business, too, and soon a new wife and kids to take care of. If we had a good year, my mom, my brother, and I moved into a bigger apartment. A bad spell, and I d notice the mail going unopened in neat but worrisome piles on the hall table. I now know we were in what economists call the fragile middle class, all income from volatile earnings and no inherited wealth or assets to fall back on. We were the kind of middle class in the kind of community that kept us a stone s throw from real poverty, and I think this shaped the way I see the world. My mother took us with her to work in Chicago s notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects while she gave health lessons to young mothers, and some of my earliest playmates were kids with disabilities in a group home where she also worked. (It seemed she was always working.) We had cousins and neighbors who had more than we did, and some who had far less, but we never learned to peg that to their worth. It just wasn t part of our story.

I did learn, though, to ask why, undoubtedly to an annoying degree. In the backseat of the station wagon facing the rear window, I asked why there were so many people sleeping on the grates on Lower Wacker Drive downtown, huddled together in that odd, unsunny yellow lamplight. Why did the big plant over on Kedzie have to close, and would another one open and hire everybody back? Why was Ralph s family s furniture out on the curb, and where did their landlord think Ralph was going to live now?

My father turned eighteen the year the Voting Rights Act was signed, 1965; my mother did when the Fair Housing Act was signed three years later. That meant that

Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos, McGhee has drafted legislation, testified before Congress, and contributed regularly to news shows, including NBC s Meet the Press. She now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation s largest online racial justice organization. McGhee holds a BA in American studies from Yale University and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

  Concisely and bitingly written with broad appeal and usefulness to researchers and general readers alike. A first and necessary purchase. School Library Journal, starred review
 
  Of great value to anyone who values straight-to-the-point, thorough writing on race in America. Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
  A thought-provoking next read after Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped (2020). Booklist, starred review