Heather McGhee Shamefully Links Racism to ‘Whites’, Anti-Racism to Socialism, and Capitalism to Racists

Heather McGhee, the author of a new book on race in America, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” was interviewed by New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial page editor Tom Moran on 3/14/21. There are elements of truth and policy proposals worth considering on the merits. But, overall, McGhee’s ideas shamefully link racism to ‘white’ people exclusively, anti-racism to socialism, and Capitalism to racists. She also peddles common misrepresentations of pro-liberty ideas. Below is an annotated review of Moran’s interview with McGhee. Here are some excerpts, starting with Moran’s preamble. All italics are mine:

Heather McGhee is the author of a new book on race in America, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” The former head of the liberal think-tank, Demos, McGhee argues convincingly that white supremacy is a curse not just for Black people, but for white people. The path to redemption, she says, is when both races join hands to fight for their common interests, like  higher wages, universal health care, and secure retirements. This battle can’t be won until white Americans understand how they are harmed by racism and appreciate its ferocious legacy, and she believes that is beginning to happen.

This means government-mandated “higher wages, universal health care, and secure retirements, imposed on people whether they agree or not, as we shall see. Note also the collectivist framing: “both races join hands to fight for their common interests.” It is your group, based on “race”--that is, skin color--that matters. There is no room in McGhee’s worldview for real living flesh-and-blood human beings--individual human beings with individually differing interests to respect. We are all to be mashed together into races. But races, or groups generally, don’t have interests. Individuals have interests. And individuals act on common interests, voluntarily and by mutual choice, while leaving those who disagree to their lives and interests. That’s not what McGhee has in mind. She is a statist. Let’s look at some questions and answers:

Q. You call this “zero sum” thinking, a mistaken belief that a gain for one group is a loss for the other. How does that play out on other issues like health care or education?

A. Sociologists have found that white Americans are more likely to view race relations through a zero-sum lens, the idea that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people. In health care, that means politicians have been able to get the majority of white voters to oppose health care reform, often by using dog whistles about the benefits going to Black Americans. So even though white people are the largest group of uninsured, the majority of white people remain opposed to the Affordable Care Act.

Really? I’m for health care reform -- free market reforms that leave individuals freer, drive innovation, increase quality, and lower prices. There is nothing zero-sum about freemarkets. It is government control that is zero-sum, harming some for the unearned benefit of others. So why is McGhee for government control? Yet because I, a “white” person, oppose the Affordable Care Act, which moves in the opposite direction of free markets, not to mention my moral and political beliefs, I am a racist? What “dog whistle” is she talking about?* “Free market”? “Capitalism”? “Freedom”? “Individual rights''? “The Declaration of Independence”? “The Constitution of the United States”? Is my only path to racial redemption to renounce justice and support a statist, socialist agenda? As we will see--and as I have repeatedly observed, from the 1619 Project on--this premise is the fundamental driving force of the whole racist Anti-Racist movement.

Q. You write that the fear of losing social status among many whites is connected to their embrace of “anti-government stinginess” that has left America lagging behind other rich countries when it comes to health care, retirement security, child poverty, and other measures of social health. What’s the evidence for that?

A. White Americans with high degrees of racial resentment, which is the feeling that Black people don’t try hard enough and get special favors from the government, are 60 points more likely to oppose government spending than white Americans with low levels of resentment.

Another piece of evidence that’s compelling to me is that before the civil rights movement nearly 70 percent of white Americans believed government ought to have a universal job guarantee and income. Support for that cratered after the March on Washington and President Kennedy’s comments around civil rights, from 70 percent to 35 percent. And it’s stayed that low among whites ever since, even though Black people remain enthusiastic. And of course, we know that after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party lost the majority of the white vote. 

The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Acts passed with widespread public and bi-partisan political support. The exception was among the racist Democrat-dominated South. But notice that if you opposed President Johnson’s massive Welfare State/War on Poverty spending binge, it’s because you believed the racist view that it’s because Black people don’t try hard enough and get special favors from the government.” Well, my parents and Aunts and Uncles were strongly in favor of Johnson’s welfare state binge. The objection to the welfare state is that it discourages work among all people--a truth that even liberals acknowledge--not that it encourages laziness among people of a particular skin color. McGhee is big on statistical correlations over causation. But the drop in white voter support for Democrats in the 1960s also correlates with Johnson’s prosecution of the ultimately wildly unpopular Vietnam War, followed by the rise of the often violent New Left and the capture of the Democratic Party by the socialist McGovern faction. Does that make white voters racist? Many were, of course. But not because free market ideology is racist. A free market is, in fact, a bulwark against racial discrmination, as Thomas Sowell has shown.

Q. What about conservatives who say they are driven not by fear of losing status, but by a desire for lower taxes and a conviction that government is wasteful and ineffective?

A. The sociological research that shows a correlation between anti-Black attitudes and anti-government attitudes suggests something deeper is going on. And this zero-sum idea, the draining the pool, is a strategic weapon deployed by elites to divide white Americans from Black and brown Americans with whom they have so much in common. It’s a tactic to convince white Americans to choose their race over their class, and side with wealthier whites, even as they are harmed by it. 

Note that if you support lower taxes, wasteful and “ineffective” (whatever that means) government, you are “anti-government.” McGhee disingenuously equates limited government with anarchy. But they are exact opposites. “Limited” in limited government means limited to the equal protection of individual rights. Had America adhered consistently to its limited government creed from the Founding, there would have been no slavery, no Jim Crow Era, and women would have had the vote in 1776, not 1920.  But McGhee’s anti-government folly has the effect of wiping out the Americanist idea that the government should be limited to protecting each individual’s right to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, without consideration, as if such a system cannot exist, and has never, ever existed. Of course, those ideals run contrary to socialist central planning, so they have to be wiped out. 

Q. It sounds like you’re saying there is no intellectually sound reason to be a small government conservative, that it must be rooted in racial attitudes.

A. No, I think the percentage of people who are ideologically committed to the idea of small government, who would go without health care, let the minimum wage stagnate, be opposed to unions and higher taxes on the wealthy — that’s a much smaller group than the share of white Americans who vote for those policies.

Once again, a false correlation. “Small government” does not mean “go without health care.” Yes, “small”--or, more accurately limited--government does forbid government interference in the job and healthcare markets, such as minimum wage laws or the Affordable Care Act. But it does not forbid unions, only government-mandated unions that force unwilling workers into unions and force employers to negotiate with unions. As to taxes, limited government does oppose unfair taxes, such as taxes targeted specifically at some minority. 

Here we see the creeping in of Platonism. McGhee seems to believe that wealth and prosperity are caused by government. This is nonsense, and I don’t believe she actually believes that. Governments have existed for thousands of years. Yet, The Great Enrichment--the near 100 fold increase in the general standard of living of the past 250 years--cannot be explained on the state supremacy premise promoted by McGhee. That Enrichment happened as a result of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to individual rights, limited government, and free market Capitalism that liberated the common man. It’s absurd to think that without the Affordable Care Act, there would be no health care, as if private individuals left to their own freedom and self-reliance, would result in no health care. In fact, the government creates no wealth. It can only hamper private wealth creators with regulation and redistribute wealth produced by free, private enterprise.

McGhee doesn’t have room in her worldview even for an honest and accurate acknowledgement of what the American concept of what limited government or Capitalism even is. Everything is government or nothing. It’s the resurrection of the age-old pre-Enlightenment Platonic belief that the “common” man is incapable of running his own life and needs totalitarian philosopher kings to direct them. And from this absolute statist lens, she calls for socialist “solutions'' to every injustice committed against black Americans, whom she obviously believes are incapable of self-reliance under the American system of individual rights and limited government. It’s the ultimate aim of “cancel culture”; the cancelation of America.

If “white” people are racist, limited government and free markets are racist, and socialism is the cure for racism, then McGhee seems to be resurrecting the old Confederate argument for slavery as a necessary good with the contention that black people are not capable of living and flourishing in the freedom of capitalism. So, to balance the racial justice scales, liberating black people from the oppression of government-enforced segregation and racism, McGhee proposes to equalize the oppression by forcing everyone under government controls. 

This is the exact opposite of the Abolitionist counter-argument to the “inferior race” premise put forth by George Fitzhugh and other slavery-defending Southern intellectuals. American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass dealt with this insidious argument directing in his famous speech What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?

These objections [to freeing the slaves] are often urged with a show of sincere solicitude for the welfare of the slaves themselves. It is said, what will you do with them? they can't take care of themselves; they would all come to the North; they would not work; they would become a burden upon the State, and a blot upon society; they'd cut their masters' throats; they would cheapen labor, and crowd out the poor white laborer from employment; their former masters would not employ them, and they would necessarily become vagrants, paupers and criminals, overrunning all our alms houses, jails and prisons. 

Douglass categorically rejected this demeaning “prejudice” as the “depraved moral sentiment” of “the enemies of human liberty.” His powerful answer:

What shall be done with them?

Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone . . . —let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jews, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows.  When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you. 

By pushing socialism and demeaning capitalism, McGhee is saying don’t correct past injustice by ensuring blacks the same rights as everyone else, take away everyone else’s rights to secure our own livelihoods, healthcare, and retirements so we are all equally subservient to the state. While Fitzhugh defended Southern slave farms as “the beau ideal of communism” and as necessarily good, preaching that “slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism,” Douglass sought to free the slaves from socialism and release the slaves into the freedom of American Capitalism. 

McGhee moves in the opposite direction. How is McGhee’s vision of government-as-provider different in essence from George Fitzhugh’s claim that “The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future—no fear of want.” Douglass understood the connection between being provided for and being subservient, and the difference between dependence on a master and being free to provide for oneself by keeping what one earns. Is being dependent on a plantation master any different from dependence on the state? A state of independence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings. In answer to those who insisted that by enslaving blacks they were providing for their welfare, Douglass retorted angrily, “Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings.” “The negro,” insisted Douglass, “is a human being, capable of judging between good and evil, right and wrong, liberty and slavery.” 

Keep this in mind as you digest the racist “anti-Racists” claim that if you oppose socialism/statism/collectivism you are a racist. Their goal is not to stamp out racism. It is to shame people into rejecting Capitalism and embracing “big government”; i.e. socialism. Remember that slavery, racism, segregation in America were powered by government’s legal apparatus. McGhee acknowledges that statism drove injustice against blacks, yet she embraces more statism as the solution. She’s got it backwards. McGhee is committed to statist socialism, snuck in under the guise of “Anti-Racism”. But we need genuine anti-statism--that is, individualism. We need to embrace Douglass, who rejected socialism and embraced the individual liberty of the Declaration and the Constitution.

* [“Dog whistle” is the term used by people who “see” racism in unrelated remarks because they can’t find real evidence of actual racism.]

Related Reading:

The Racism of the Anti-Racists: Dr. Jill Biden, Wanda Blanchett, and Dr. Bob Harris

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: San Diego’s ‘Educators’

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

The Racism of the 'Anti-Racists': 'This New America' - Apartheid?

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

An Anti-Racist Education for Middle Schoolers by ROBBY SOAVE for Reason