The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, mentioned in this space earlier, is a big book, which I am still reading, in advance of placing it in our Little Free Anti-racist Library. I am led to share this quotation from page 205 in the chapter entitled The Same Sky today:
Perhaps it makes sense, if you’ve spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of a zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal; that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the players’ skill and merit. You might also learn that if there are problems, you and yours are likely to be spared the costs. The thing is, that’s just not the case with the environment and climate change. We live under the same sky. . . The cash crops at the base of the American agribusiness economy are threatened by more frequent droughts. The majority of white Americans are skeptical or opposed to tackling climate change, but the majority of white Americans will suffer nonetheless from an increasingly inhospitable planet.
This passage really underscores the fact that “racism costs everyone.” It is clearly in everyone’s best interest that we work hard to reverse it. –– Kate Hood Seel