“To a large degree,” she writes, “the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the Southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and divide-and-conquer tactics, going national.” But it’s a blight that’s no longer relegated to the region. The material legacy of slavery can be felt to this day, McGhee says, in depressed wages and scarce access to health care in the former Confederacy. But “The Sum of Us” is predicated on the idea that little will change until white people realize what racism has cost them too. Helper and his argument come up early on in Heather McGhee’s illuminating and hopeful new book, “The Sum of Us” - though 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 the people of color who are subjected to it.
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.” Members of the plantation class refused to invest in education, in enterprise, in the community at large, because they didn’t have to. His 1857 book, “The Impending Crisis of the South,” argued that chattel slavery had deformed the Southern economy and impoverished the region. He was also, in the years leading up to the Civil War, a determined abolitionist. Hinton Rowan Helper was an unreserved bigot from North Carolina who wrote hateful, racist tracts during Reconstruction.
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