5 minute read
Well Read
WELL READ By: Hon. Chuck Cerny
Knox County General Sessions Court, Division I
“You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.” The idiom has intrigued me since the first time I heard it. People can make decisions which they think will give them some advantage over others, but the decision actually harms the person who made it.
That’s why Heather McGhee’s book, “The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” seemed so compelling. The marketing for the book described McGhee’s denouncement of “drained pool politics.” The book debuted at number three on the New York Times Best Seller list.
McGhee makes a very convincing argument that we make some of our policy (and voting) decisions based on the assumption that the advancement of one group of people comes at the expense of another, and that this “zero sum” assumption is not just false, but it is hurting both groups. Sometimes these votes against our own interests are responses to false and over-simplified “race neutral” rhetoric. She argues instead for a “Solidarity Dividend” that occurs when diverse demographic groups vote for what is actually in their mutual best interest.
“Why can’t we have nice things?” It’s McGhee’s first sentence in her introduction. The “nice things” aren’t mere baubles. She’s referring to “the more basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics.” And the “we” that we are talking about “includes the white Americans who are the largest group of the uninsured and the impoverished as well as the Americans of color who are disproportionately so.”
There was a time in our history when government provided a “nice thing” that we don’t see very often anymore: huge, beautiful, clean, well maintained public swimming pools. “By World War II, the country’s two thousand pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free . . . Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand resort pools as ‘social melting pots.’”
But persons of color didn’t get to blend in the “melting pot”. As segregation was becoming illegal, every region of the country dealt with the requirement to integrate the public pools by defiantly forming private associations or clubs that provided pools to whites only, or by informal “policing” by whites through intimidation (and violence) and even by filling in pools and not providing this benefit altogether.
McGhee’s “drained pool” and “zero sum” premises are freshly presented and well-reasoned, but they are not completely unheard of. Martin Luther King, Jr. espoused a similar concept in his speech at the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama, after the march from Selma, on March 25, 1965, saying “…the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land…” Both King and McGhee rely on historian C. Vann Woodward for support of these arguments.
It’s not just swimming pools. Ms. McGhee looks at higher education. The U.S. government offered the states over ten million acres of land to build institutions of higher learning in the 1860’s. And in 1947, the GI Bill offered more free money, and veterans made up fifty percent of U.S. college admissions. But Blacks were almost completely excluded from these opportunities, until desegregation.
Ms. McGhee also takes on redlining. “Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to Black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between Black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of Black and white homes in those communities.” But McGhee also describes whole towns that have had economic and social revivals based on interracial co-operation.
With topics so potentially inflammatory, you might expect the tone of the book to be strident, caustic or angry. But Heather McGhee just sounds logical, well informed, and even kind. (Ok, I admit I listened to the book on my “Audible” app.) I feel like she and I (and you) could be very good friends, and we might disagree about some things, but that she would always call me out when my reasoning is faulty.
I recently had the good fortune to meet Avice Reid, who moderated the Knoxville Bar Association event “Difficult Conversations”. (You can see the program on YouTube.) Ms. Reid is the Senior Director of Trinity Health Foundation. I couldn’t keep quiet in the question and answer time. I spouted off about how I had just read Heather McGhee’s book. I expressed frustration: “I know we have made some progress as a society, but unless persons of color acquire more political and economic power, these conversations will always be intellectual gymnastics.”
After the gathering, I spoke to Ms. Reid. She literally told me that she was not allowed to swim at the Concord Pool on Northshore Drive when she was a girl. She had to go across Northshore Drive to Carl Cowan Park. My wife’s mother used to take her to the Concord Pool. We now exercise our dogs at the dog park that used to be the pool, which has since been filed in with dirt. It’s amazing how close to home and relevant McGhee’s thesis is.
It won’t shock you that Ms. McGhee’s political and economic viewpoints are a little left of my own. But McGhee’s book makes me wonder: are we guilty of very low level, superficial analysis of difficult problems? Are we (liberals and conservatives) buying into simplistic sound bites and dog whistles to formulate our economic policies, to the point where we have ostensibly race neutral policies that actually have racist consequences, and also hurt poor whites? Are we cutting off our nose to spite our face?
