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NY Times Review
‘The Sum of Us’ Tallies the Cost of Racism for Everyone” “The Sum of Us” is predicated on the idea that little will change until white people realize what racism has cost them too. Hinton Rowan Helper was an unreserved bigot from North Carolina who wrote hateful, racist tracts during Reconstruction. He was also, in the years leading up to the Civil War, a determined abolitionist.
His 1857 book, “The Impending Crisis of the South,” argued that chattel slavery had deformed the Southern economy and impoverished the region. Members of the plantation class refused to invest in education, in enterprise, in the community at large, because they didn’t have to. Helper’s concern wasn’t the enslaved Black people brutalized by what he called the “lords of the lash”; he was worried about the white laborers in the South, relegated by the slave economy and its ruling oligarchs to a “cesspool of ignorance and degradation.
"McGhee, a descendant of enslaved people, is very much concerned with the situation of Black Americans, making clear that the primary victims of racism are people of color who are subjected to it. But “The Sum of Us” is predicated on the idea that little will change until white people realize what racism has cost them too."
This discussion will be held on Saturday, October 19, at 10:30 am. If you are interested in participating, please email racialequitybuddies@fhcpresb.org. They will send a zoom link the week of the discussion.
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