The Sum of Us

While growing up in America, McGhee had plenty of experience being among the few Black individuals—if she was not the only Black person—in school and work environments. But at the beginning of Chapter 7, she notes that the persistence of white-dominated or exclusively white environments isn’t typically considered a form of segregation that harms white people as well as people of color.

Segregation was supposed to end after the Civil War, as communities became more integrated during the Reconstruction era. But as the resulting solidarity between Black and white working-class communities came to pose a threat to white elites, these elites sought ways to sow division. These came in the form of public policies that enforced segregation, like government loans that required developers to put racial covenants in housing contracts, and like single-family zoning in neighborhoods, which restricted developers to building housing beyond the means of many Black households rather than more affordable multi-unit developments.

Consequently, many white people had very little contact with people of color, though the reverse was rarely true. This situation persists today, even as more people come to see diversity and integration as positive phenomena. But white people’s unconscious biases often run counter to their stated commitment to diversity; one study found that while Black, Latinx, and white people all wanted to live in neighborhoods in which their group constituted about a third of the ethnic makeup, white people ended up choosing neighborhoods that were 74% white.