I'm writing this as the Senate is considering a pair of infrastructure bills, one of which focuses on "human infrastructure" - child care, elder care, education, and health benefits. Those vital but intangible benefits have been cut underfunded at least since Ronald Reagan used the budget and tax code as a way to convince the middle and working class that "those people" are getting more than they deserve. That philosophy was supposed to bring an economic windfall that would help everyone, but instead it hollowed out the middle class while enriching the already wealthy.
Heather McGhee argues in The Sum of Us that it's not tax cuts and lean budgets that "raise all boats" but investment in human infrastructure. The former head of Demos, she begins by covering much of the same ground as Richard Rotstein did in The Color of Law. White families have more wealth, even when you adjust for income, because of the discriminatory housing policies and practices of the mid-20th Century. She traces the resistance to social programs which help everyone to the dismantling of pools and parks when they were required to desegregate in the 1950s and 60s. The next step was to underfunding schools, particularly as cities became less white and white students moved to private schools. Along the way, blatant racism (claiming that non-whites are inherently inferior) was replaced with cultural blame ("they" don't respect education or family or hard work, or whatever excuse seems believable).
McGhee explains how some of the largest current social problems hit the African American community first. Even adjusting for income, non-white students carry considerably more debt than white students, so it became unmanageable a decade before our current crisis - and cuts to higher education and the switch from grants to loans accelerated this process. The housing crash hit everyone - but the history of redlining and the practice (which doesn't fall directly under any laws or regulations) of selling sub-prime rates to non-whites whose credit qualified them for regular loans meant those communities had less equity and a smaller margin for error. But politicians feel they have to dial back any program to ameliorate these problems because "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" constituents won't stand for them. Like my former co-worker who didn't want the state to help Philadelphia's public schools because it might cut the advantage his sons got from living in Delaware County, even if something doesn't harm them (or even helps them), too many people afraid that helping the community as a whole will end up hurting them.
I know this sounds depressing, but The Sum of Us is an optimistic book. McGhee's final chapter describes a trip to Lewiston, Maine. It's the second largest city in the oldest, whitest, and one of the poorest states. Like West Virginia (where Joe Manchin is currently harming his constituents at their request) and post-COVID Alabama they record more deaths than births. Parts of Lewiston, though are thriving thanks to 20 years of immigration, mostly from Africa. McGee shows us a place where refugees have found a new life, and the old residents have benefited as well. An older woman who regretted losing her French Canadian roots reclaimed her language with Francophone African immigrants, a chance meeting between a parolee and a Muslim woman brining halal food to the prison started a friendship and brought him into social activism. The seemingly unlikely coalitions formed in Lewiston worked to expand Medicaid by ballot measure (then Governor Paul LePage rejected expansion multiple times using racial scare terms, even though the number of Mainers who live in poverty is twice the number of non-white resident), and provide hope going forward. These coalitions shouldn't be rare, because studies show that integrated groups solve problems more quickly and creatively. If we only realized that we all benefit when we work together.
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