She Wrote a Racial-Equity Instruction Manual for Nonprofits. Then She Wrote a Bestselling Book.

Heather McGhee is the author of The Sum of Us, which was recently named to the long list for the 2021 National Book Award. With warmth and the clear-eyed logic of a lawyer and policy expert, which she is, McGhee examines the flipside of American history to see how racism impedes progress for everyone, extracting a cost on people of color but also on white Americans.

A case in point: Due to slavery, she writes, the South’s progress was limited because it failed to developed the infrastructure of libraries and schools that the North did. The plantation class, with a captive labor force, didn’t invest in education for all, to the detriment of Black and white Southerners.

Before McGhee outlined this “shared fates” view of history in a bestseller, she deployed it in the revamp of a nonprofit. In 2014, at the age of 33, she became president of Demos, a national think tank founded in 2000, and began to transform the organization, which works for economic and political equality, to put racial equity at the center of its mission.

“We suffer together,” she wrote to staff in an analysis of why the transformation was needed. “A deeper understanding of racism doesn’t just equip Demos to focus on communities of color; it helps Demos better understand what we have already identified as America’s two central problems — inequality in our democracy and in our economy.”

At the outset, Demos expected to lean on the work of other groups. But it found no instruction manual, as few organizations had pursued such profound change.

As a result, the work took much more time and sweat than expected. Lucy Mayo, the Demos vice president for organizational development, devoted nearly 100 percent of her time to organizing the work. Early on, the group created a racial-equity curriculum for staff development, with readings that totaled more than 600 pages. Over time, the overhaul extended to the organization’s research, litigation, and campaign strategies. Applying racial equity to its work on college affordability, Demos conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis that found rates of borrowing are much higher for students of color than for their white peers — data that significantly changed the group’s advocacy.

Demos focused its transformation more on people than policies, believing staff needed to unlearn old ways of thinking at the organization, which had been founded by white men and led by white men until McGhee became president. Racial-equity competencies were created and added to job descriptions, performance reviews, and hiring evaluations.

Staff members have called the racial-equity training “a gift” that has made them better people as well as better advocates. “There was so much that I didn’t know, even as a Black woman who was born in an apartment building that my great-grandmother bought on a predatory loan,” says McGhee, an expert in financial regulation and consumer protection. “I didn’t know much about the essential racial history of the very field I was working in.”

Several former Demos staff members are now engaged in similar transformation efforts at other nonprofits; Mayo joined the Sierra Club to help put equity at the forefront of work for the environmental giant, which has several hundred staff members compared with the 30 or so at Demos.

When Demos launched its transformation in 2014, 73 percent of staff identified as white. By the time of McGhee’s exit in 2018 to focus on the book, 60 percent of the staff identified as people of color.

Though Demos continues its racial-equity work, McGhee, Mayo, and consultant Angela Park wrote a detailed report of those first four years as a roadmap for other organizations — the instruction manual they had wished for. In conversations with leaders struggling to make progress in such fields as housing, the environment, and education, McGhee argues that racism is to blame more than they know.

“In many ways,” McGhee says, “I wrote The Sum of Us for people in the community and leaders who are trying to make the country a better place and experience these inexplicable headwinds.”