Through her trips and interviews, she refined an idea she calls “racial zero sum.” Many other cities, North and South, did the same. On her research journey, McGhee traveled around the country to understand how race infuses questions of “belonging, competition and status,” and how restrictive policies aimed at Black people can also hurt white people.įor example, she went to Montgomery, Alabama, where in the late 1950s, city leaders drained a public swimming pool rather than integrate it, leaving everybody, Black and white, without the public pool. Her marriage is only a sentence in the book, but on the phone she said she included it as a “revelation of our common humanity.” Part of her journey was to marry a man - her best friend from high school - whose father was white and whose mother was an immigrant from Pakistan, meaning her children would have grandparents who were Black, white and South Asian. McGhee often uses the word “journey” to describe her thinking. But the education from her mother and her hometown stuck with her. On the East Coast, she said, Black community feels “thin,” as opposed to the “thick” Black culture of Chicago. “Friends who had fridges full of snacks and food, everything that was on the commercials.”īy the time she finished Yale, she moved in a very different world. “I saw an entirely different relationship to money,” she said.
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