Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. McGhee, our 12th annual winner, joins a distinguished group of authors that includes Danielle Allen, Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, and most recently, Jia Lynn Yang.

The Sum of Us opens with a simple question: “Why can’t we have nice things?” The answer, McGhee finds—when it comes to everything from public education and voting rights to environmental regulation and labor—is racism. For centuries, white Americans have opted to disinvest in public goods, services, and protections out of fear that people of color, and Black Americans in particular, would benefit disproportionately. The resulting policies have cost nearly everyone, leading to democratic dysfunction and deep economic inequality.

But McGhee found hope, too, as she traveled around the United States to research the book—in the form of stories of Americans coming together to fight inequality. The Zócalo Book Prize judges noted the book’s current of optimism in their praise. One judge lauded McGhee’s “call for all Americans to unite in ways that work toward eliminating racism so that we can all prosper together.”

The Sum of Us is “far-reaching in its accounting of what we all lose when public pools get drained, when racism pits workers against one another, and when the legacy of slavery fosters a political economy that spreads economic inequality and environmental injustice,” a judge noted. “McGhee shows us how to move away from the zero-sum thinking that has long antagonized race relations and toward policies by which we might refill our pools.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture and interview with McGhee, will take place on June 1, 2022 at 7 p.m. PDT. For the first time since 2019, the event will be held in-person in Los Angeles and stream live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel. The program will also honor Georgia poet laureate Chelsea Rathburn, winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize for “8 a.m., Ocean Drive.” Zócalo’s 2022 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked McGhee to talk about the themes of her book, the American stories that inspire her, and how she came to make the book’s central argument.

The post Heather McGhee Wins the 2022 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.