Do you love your country enough to tell the truth about who she is and what she has done? Heather McGhee does and her probing work of nonfiction changed my life. It took all the disjointed pieces of information swirling around, all the messaging and signaling and unconscious biasing drilled into me as a child, all the disparity between the words that come out of people's mouths and the actions their behaviors produce. It all makes sense now. I am officially "in the know" and it is a gross place to reside.

America is not broken, folks. She's functioning precisely as intended. McGhee makes a clear and concise academic argument that education, medicine, financial markets, housing, unions, voting rights, healthcare, climate denial, Christianity, the totality of American public policy, it's all been pivotal in supporting institutional racism. And the cost of upholding white supremacy is destroying our economy for everybody.

Undisputedly, our diminishing middle class is now negatively impacting white people who don't understand why digging into suppressive and regressive politics isn't producing the same results as in the past. As she travels across the country interviewing people while proving her argument, McGhee convincingly points out what's wrong. And she spends a fair amount of time on what's right.

I put McGhee's National Book longlist up there with Isabel Wilkerson's CASTE; both have introduced me to startlingly obvious realities my education was too fearful to address.

Do you care enough about your country to tell the truth? Heather McGhee does and she has compiled a factual accounting of the way things are, along with a hopeful path forward that would start to end the economic disparity swallowing not SOME of us-but THE SUM OF US whole.

In case it's not obvious, I highly recommend this book.