This past Thanksgiving, while you reflected on grief and gratitude, hopefully you had a chance to reflect on abundance.

Take a minute to consider: What is abundant for you right now?

Maybe what came to mind was time for rest and recovery over Thanksgiving, abundant food on your holiday table, the abundant love of family or friends or air to breathe and water to drink. That’s what popped into my head when I was reflecting about the things for which I am most thankful.

The recognition of abundance takes us directly to Heather McGhee’s wonderful book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How we Can Prosper Together.

McGhee, formerly the director of Demos, a liberal economic think tank, starts out by asking, “Why can’t we, Americans, have nice things?” By nice things, McGhee is not referring to double cappuccinos from a drive-through. She’s referring to benefits such as a public health system that would protect all people from the ravages of a pandemic, and strong public schools for all so that all would have the opportunity for high-quality education.

How 'The Zero Sum’ holds all of us back

McGhee traces these challenges to something that she calls “The Zero Sum.” It’s a fixed mindset that suggest that when Black people, or People of Color “win” or get more power or rights, white people lose. One of the book’s most vivid examples is of public swimming pools: McGhee describes how the legal demand to integrate public swimming pools led to draining many of these pools rather than permit Black and white citizens to swim together.

McGhee traces the Zero Sum back to the economies of the South. Power was held by plantation owners and each plantation was its own self-sufficient community. There was little development of a sense of “public good” that had the responsibility to serve all people. In the South, each plantation had its own library and there was little development of public libraries.

McGhee’s argument is that every time Black people get more power and rights, it benefits white people as well.

The Zero Sum and our work on racial equity

The Sum of Us resonates with the conversations we’ve been having over the past few years.

We’ve seen the Zero Sum come up in resistance to change and beliefs that keep racism in place:

“If we bring more People of Color (on this board/into power/onto the executive team), things will feel uncomfortable, change and we (white people) will have less power.”

“We’re a fundraising board, so we can’t have too many Black people on the board, since that would hurt our fundraising.”

“I’m not racist. But I see that, due to affirmative action, there are fewer opportunities for me as a white person.”

Three Steps to move beyond the Zero Sum

McGhee suggests that white people need to see that the futures of people of all races are tied together.

A step before that is feeling a sense of abundance. Only when we feel that we have enough, and that there is enough for everyone, will we be motivated to take steps to share power and resources.
Practically speaking, increasing inequality and greater poverty rates in our country mean that millions of people feel, realistically, that they don’t have enough. Over the past year, I’ve been inspired again and again by the work of the Voting Rights Lab, which focuses on the desire by Americans across the political spectrum to build an abundant future for all. During the 2020 election, the Voting Rights Lab created messages focused on this future and shared desires for prosperity.

A second step for white people is to consciously cross racial boundaries. One of the points that McGhee makes is that our society and our neighborhoods are becoming more segregated, so there are fewer opportunities to be in multiracial spaces. When we do training on board recruitment, we talk about this explicitly: How can white people creatively and consciously make an effort to cross these boundaries and to work with or learn from the lived experiences of People of Color?

A last step is talk about and make visible experiences of race and racism. When led by a trained facilitator with the goal of moving a group towards change, talking about race builds empathy and builds motivation towards an abundant, multiracial future for our organizations and our communities.

Wishing you an abundant holiday season.

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