The Sum of Us Major Figures

Heather McGhee

Heather McGhee (born 1980) is the author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. She is from Illinois and for most of her K–12 education and beyond, she inhabited what she calls “very white spaces.” Educated at Yale and University of California, Berkeley, Law School, she worked for the think tank Demos, eventually becoming president. She decided to embark on a journey to speak with different people about their attitudes toward racism and diversity, which is the subject of this book. McGhee traveled from California to Mississippi to Maine in its writing.

Janice Tomlin

Janice Tomlin is a Black North Carolina woman who, along with her husband Isaiah Tomlin, bought a home in 1978. After almost 20 years of payments, they tried to refinance their home to use their equity to pay private school tuition for their kids. Chase Mortgage Brokers contacted Tomlin and gave her a subprime mortgage, even though she had good credit. A high-interest subprime mortgage is offered to people whom the bank views as likely to default on their loans because they have poor credit. Tomlin became suspicious and enlisted the help of an attorney friend. Eventually, Tomlin became the named plaintiff in a class action suit against Chase; the suit helped over 1,300 people keep their homes despite predatory mortgage practices, which lead consumers to accept mortgage loans they cannot afford.

Dr. Gail Christopher

Dr. Gail Christopher is Heather McGhee’s mother, a woman McGhee describes as having “the fluctuating income of a person with an entrepreneur’s mind and a social worker’s heart.” She divorced McGhee’s father when the author was two and always struggled as a member of the “fragile middle class.” However, she has been successful in recent years, including as senior vice president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Like her daughter, she has done work toward racial healing and speaks and writes about the subject.

Ron Pollack

Ron Pollack (born 1944) has dedicated more than 50 years of his life to fighting for housing, health care, and other antipoverty measures. He began his work when he was student body president at City University of New York after one of his classmates was killed in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. The author asks him whether he thinks racism plays a part in people’s unwillingness to fund antipoverty efforts, and he affirms this statement. He believes that if people could realize they were all in this life together, they’d be better off.

Amy Rogers

Amy Rogers is a white homeowner who bought a house in 2001. Unbeknownst to Rogers, her husband refinanced the house with a subprime loan. A high-interest subprime mortgage loan is offered to people whom the bank views as likely to default on their loans because they have poor credit. The house was worth less than the debt on it. After a series of financial reversals and heroic efforts to keep her home, Rogers suffered foreclosure at the hands of Wells Fargo. Foreclosure occurs when the bank takes possession of a mortgaged property because the borrower fails to make payments. Now in her 60s, Rogers is unemployable because of bad credit and living in a rental apartment, even though she worked hard all her life and made mortgage payments for 13 years.

Sanchioni Butler

Sanchioni Butler is a Black lead organizer for United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). She worked on the campaign to unionize the auto plants in the South, specifically the Nissan plant in Mississippi. During her work, she encountered bad attitudes toward unions, such as that they would only help “lazy” Black workers. She tried to counter these prejudices with logic.

Bridget

Bridget is a white fast-food worker in Kansas City, Missouri. A single mother, she struggled to make ends meet. She had always thought that she had nothing in common with her coworkers who were Black or Latinx. Then, she realized that a Latinx coworker was experiencing all the same problems she was. She became involved in Stand Up KC and the fight for a $15.00 an hour wage. During the campaign, she realized that the company executives tried to pit people of different races against one another to profit from their misery.

Larry Harmon

Larry Harmon is a white Ohio man who was purged from the registered voter rolls because he missed voting in one presidential election and one midterm. He didn’t vote in 2012 because of apathy toward the candidates. As a military veteran, he was outraged when he learned of the purge. Harmon and others filed a class action lawsuit, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, but a conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state of Ohio’s ability to deregister voters.

Angela King

Angela King (born 1975) is a white former neo-Nazi who grew up being bullied and found solidarity and solace with white supremacists. When she went to prison for a series of crimes including aggravated battery and disorderly conduct, she befriended inmates who were people of color. These friendships caused her to recognize the errors in her thinking. King thinks that white people should learn how they are benefiting from racism.

Ben Chin

Ben Chin is the Asian American deputy director of the Maine People’s Alliance. He ran for mayor but was portrayed by his rivals as a communist, with signs that said “Ho Chi Chin”—a reference to Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese revolutionary. Chin was defeated after a leaked email in which he described nice people he had met campaigning and, also, “a bunch of racists.” Chin worried that the government was going to ruin the newfound solidarity in Maine with racist rhetoric.