Penguin Random House: Heather McGhee’s THE SUM OF US Named 2021 Porchlight Business Book of the Year

THE SUM OF US: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee (One World) was named the 2021 Porchlight Business Book of the Year (formerly the 800-CEO-READ award), at a virtual ceremony presented virtually on Thursday, January 13, from the company’s headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“THE SUM OF US is an urgent and important book for our historical moment,” said Porchlight owner, president & CEO Rebecca Shwartz. “Rejecting the zero-sum paradigm so often used as a bogus and obscuring device to prevent white Americans from recognizing the universal costs of racist policies, McGhee deftly illustrates how the all-or-nothing premise that whatever benefits Black people must necessarily harm whites is false and indeed harms everyone. As McGhee says, ‘[W]e must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom, rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more when the ‘We’ in ‘We the People’ is not some of us but all of us. We are greater for, and greater than, the sum of our parts.’ Congratulations and thank you to Heather McGhee for your compelling and indispensable book, THE SUM OF US, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year.”