In this essay, James Taylor raises many questions about the familiarity of McGhee’s work as well as its reception in the public. In his essay, The Dilemma of The Sum of Us, Taylor ponders why McGhee’s work is so widely embraced and critically acclaimed when there have been many researchers and writers who have shared similar arguments before. His analysis covers works by Gunnar Myrdal among others and he explores how mainstream writers often succeed through “intellectual appeals to white liberal sentimentality”

Taylor, James

English

University of San Francisco

The Dilemma of The Sum of UsJames L. TaylorDepartment of Politics, University of San FranciscoHeather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We CanProsper Together (2021) has been critically acclaimed and widely embraced bymainstream US society and yet these important arguments seemed very familiar. In fact,the groundwork for many of McGhee’s findings have been long established by previousresearchers and writers in this field. For example, the 1944 publication of Swedisheconomist Gunnar Myrdal’s massive book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problemand Modern Democracy, set the foundation for liberalism in the modern DemocraticParty and the liberal intellectual establishment in media, the academy, and the policyand legislative arenas of U.S. politics. An American Dilemma was developed during theNew Deal and World War II and both benefited from and shaped the post-warintellectual milieu on democracy, race, and the contradictions inherent in “theAmerican Creed”and the reality of anti-black Jim Crow laws and sentiment in U.S.society.Moreover, leading African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and political scientistRalph Bunche played significant roles as researchers and influenced the work’sreception among prominent intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois—who was excluded inpart due to his black Marxist radicalism—and Ralph Ellison, who pointedly respondedto Myrdal’s opus in a critical review. Ellison found Myrdal’s work to be a conversation toand for American whites about American blacks, where Myrdal locates “the Negroproblem” in the “heart of [white] America”, North and South. Myrdal effectivelyhighlights that “he Negro’s strongest weapon in pressing his claims [is] his hold uponthe moral consciousness of Northern whites.” Ellison further insists, the “main virtue ofAmerican Dilemma lies in its demonstration of how the mechanism of prejudiceoperates to disguise the moral conflict in the minds of whites produced by the clash onthe social level between the American Creed and anti-Negro practices”. WhereMyrdal’s Swedish background betrayed him, was evident in the insistence that black lifeand culture are “pathological” creatures of white men’s making, and mimetic in nature.In turn, Ellison famously notes, “men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs;why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma”.Ellison asks a pertinent question about the timing of Myrdal’s work: why did theCarnegie Foundation fund the study in 1937, and “why this sudden junk of ideologicalfixtures?” If this brief review of Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us, has alreadyspent too much space on another book, the reader should know that the origins of themoral sentiment that undergirds Myrdal’s study traces back further, at least to HarrietBeecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the second religious Great Awakening beforethe Civil War. But modern political liberalism and related liberal intellectual appeals tothe moral sensibilities of American whites has its origins in An American Dilemma.Martin Luther King, Jr.’s generation was socialized in the New Deal and influenced bythe liberal ethos of Myrdal’s work. King mastered Myrdal’s charge that America “live outthe true meaning of its Creed”, even at the March on Washington in 1963.The intellectual offspring of Myrdal’s work scarcely recognizes its influence. And that is,to me, the most curious thing about the reception and acclaim awarded to McGhee’sbook, The Sum of Us. But also the acclaim granted to other books, like it, such as thepopular works of Ta-’Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Michelle Alexander(The New Jim Crow), Isabella Wilkerson (Warmth of Other Suns and Caste), Ibram XKendi (How to be an Anti-Racist, Anti-Racist Baby), and even Nikki Hannah Jones (The1619 Project), all, more or less, make Myrdalian moralist intellectual appeals to whiteliberal sentimentality on behalf of black folks, as though Malcolm X in the Nation ofIslam and Black Power had not previously disabused American liberalism of its moralhigh ground in matters concerning race, relative to conservative thought. E. FranklinFrazier and Ralph Bunche’s generation educated many of their teachers at HowardUniversity. There, both men moved from Left radical to black social criticism anddiscourse because they were spent on liberalism’s inability to understand the racialnature of U.S. society, politics and policy, economic relations, and intellectual life.The acclaim of McGhee and her colleagues—from the New York Times and liberalacademic establishment, to speakers’ bureaus and policy think tanks—could bethrough hiring savvy book agents. But as Ellison asks of Myrdals’ study, we can also askof the recent popular reception of these works, “why this sudden junk of ideologicalfixtures?” The subject material of each neo- Myrdalian study, whether police violenceand the drug war, post-1960s incarceration rates, the black migration and migration ofblacks to American cities, race as caste, anti-racism, and the moral evil of slavery, arewell documented in the writings, art, and scholarship of at least two previousgenerations of women and men writers and intellectuals. Mary Church Terrell inWashington, DC, Dr. Jewell Prestage (“Mother of Black political science”), ShirleyGraham Du Bois, Zora Neal Hurston, Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry (andlater Toni Morrison), among others, represented black women’s writing and knowledgeproduction. Each woman promoted black independence from white institutions andnorms, in writing, spiritual and cultural life, and politics (recall, for instance, Ella Bakerand Fannie Lou Hamer formed a black political party in 1964 Mississippi) and weremore reluctant than their male counterparts to embrace liberal appeals to whiteaudiences, or concern themselves with white audiences. But the New Deal-CivilRights-Great Society liberal regime prevailed among the men and would shape theremaining decades of black intellectual production, which edged ever more toward theNegro cultural “pathology” and white moral dilemma of racism, original to Myrdal.Which suggests the celebration and criticism of McGhee’s work (and the others) ringsof little that is new, or reflective of black women writers’ reluctance toward moralliberalism, except the most recent headline it takes on. Each writer, especially Coates,Kendi, and McGhee, appeals to white conscience based on their personal, anecdotalencounters with everyday racism. Each writer pulls the audience under the weight ofthe “American Dilemma” and asks for white-led reform and recognition, even if itsounds “revolutionary” to conservative ears. Even their appeals to reparations, forinstance, offers nothing more than the appeal to it itself, without a program; a programthat is the full logic of The Sum of Us, as it is in the work of William Darity and KirstenMullen.It is not a sin for any work to be unoriginal; we all “stand on the shoulders” ofintellectual and academic “giants”. But the wide, popular reception of repackagedwine in the new wineskins of an empty, though data driven, morally heavy appeal, towhite liberal conscience, consciousness, and sentiment in the post Reagan era thatproduced, first, Jesse Jackson, but at last, Trumpism and MAGA reaction, feels like along delayed academic dissertation finally reaching publication before it couldadequately take on the implications of racial balkanization that exploded with whiterage, resentment, and anger in the present era, as McGhee’s work almost tone deaflyappeals to non “zero-sum” racial reasoning. This is music to some ideological ears,while the works of a prolific historian like Gerald Horne, which extends far beyond “theone hit wonder” character of some of the noted works, goes largely unacclaimed—likeThe Wire TV series. Harold Cruse (2005), author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectualis largely ignored in the academy of today; his Harlem grade school classmate, JamesBaldwin, however, is widely celebrated. Baldwin, angrily highlighted white Christianand liberal policy limits and contradictions; Cruse advocated independent blackcultural knowledge production and institutions and had little use, theoretically, forwhite liberalism or appeals to it. But if one does an unscientific search of GoogleScholar and Amazon book reviews of the respective works, as I did, one will notice thatthese popular works, like Coates and McGhee, enjoy multiple thousands of reviewsthrough the latter and receive very few academic citations on Google Scholar.Academics tend not to take these works as substantial enough, to replace thepublished social science research on which these studies build. In the end, McGhee’sguiding question, “Why can’t Americans have nice things” is answered, for instance inthe social science studies of Edsall and Edsal (1992)l in their definitive study on theracial dimensions of public policy choices, but also, it advances the cause for socialjustice little further than a more pressing rhetorical one bellowed by Frederick Douglassin 1852, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, that gets to the heart of theirproblem.ReferencesCruse, H. (2005). The crisis of the Negro intellectual: A historical analysis of the failureof Black leadership. New York Review of Books.Edsall, T. B., & Edsall, M. D. (1992). Chain reaction: The impact of race, rights, andtaxes on American politics. WW Norton & Company.McGhee, H. (2022). The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we canprosper together. One WorldMyrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma; the Negro problem and moderndemocracy.(2 vols.).James Lance Taylor is Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. He is fromGlen Cove, Long Island. He is author of the book Black Nationalism in the UnitedStates: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama, which earned 2012 "Outstanding AcademicTitle" - Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.

The Dilemma of The Sum of Us

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The Dilemma of The Sum of Us

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