The Sum of Us summary

Picture the scene: a glistening public swimming pool that was once the pride of Montgomery, Alabama, is filled up with dirt so that no one can use it. The reason? In 1959, a court had ruled that the pool had to be desegregated and that as a public commodity it had to be open to all members of the public, including Black people.

Across the country, civil rights groups were gaining major wins in court cases challenging the legality of segregated public services. But instead of allowing for integrated public pools, officials chose to destroy the public pool system entirely. Some pools were leased to private clubs which stipulated whites-only membership. Others were allowed to slowly deteriorate for lack of investment. And yet others, like the pool in Montgomery, were closed down entirely. When the “public” included Black people, white people stopped supporting public services.

When armed protestors laid siege to the US capitol to protest the results of the 2020 elections, many commentators lamented the unprecedented attacks on US democracy.

But these attacks aren’t new. Democracy is, at heart, the idea that all citizens can have a say in how their country is run by voting in elections. Yet, this ideal has always been threatened. In the US, Black people were not considered to be citizens for a long time. And, today, racist voter suppression laws attack democracy by making sure that hundreds of thousands of people are unable to vote.

In 2017, workers at the Nissan car manufacturing plant in Canton, Mississippi, had the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted to join a union.

The potential benefits were enormous: joining a union meant they could fight collectively for better healthcare and retirement benefits, higher wages, and a safer workplace.

We’ve all seen the images of hurricanes crashing along the shores of the US, of wildfires consuming swathes of forests, and of emaciated polar bears sitting on melting ice caps.

Climate change is portrayed as having one main enemy: greedy corporations who bribe politicians to support the enormous fossil fuel industries. We don’t usually think of racism as having much to do with political inaction on climate change. But we’re missing an important part of the picture.

When you think of communities which are suffering from racial segregation, your mind probably goes to low-income neighborhoods full of people of color who are neglected by the government and can’t access good schools or social services.

The predominantly white suburbs, full of large houses and pristine gardens, may seem to be unscathed by the consequences of segregation. And it’s true that white communities escape the police oppression and neglect endemic to Black neighborhoods. But there are other costs to segregation that affect them too.

When the coronavirus spread with a vengeance in the United States in early 2020, people described the pandemic as being “color blind.” Indeed, it seemed like no one could escape the reaches of the virus – rich or poor, politician or waitress.

But very soon it became clear that while the virus might be color blind in terms of who got infected, its victims weren’t all being affected in the same way. Black and Latinx people were much more likely to die from the virus, due to working dangerous frontline jobs, living in places with more air pollution, and lacking medical insurance, among many other factors.

The small city of Lewiston, in Maine, was becoming a ghost town in the 1990s. Once a bustling industrial hub, the city was hollowed out when factories closed and jobs were sent overseas. More and more people left in search of work elsewhere, creating a vicious circle. Soon, most of the storefronts along the main street were vacant.

This gloomy story has a happy ending. Today, Lewiston is a thriving city once more. The factory jobs never returned, but an influx of immigration has meant that new entrepreneurs have moved into the storefronts, creating new jobs and leading to the creation of new schools.