Thinking back on it, Tracie McMillan wonders if one of her earliest lessons about racism came as a result of her mother's illness.
"I understood, when I was a kid, that my mom was sick, and nobody was helping her," McMillan tells Reckon. "When you are beating your head against the wall, trying to help somebody where there's no system in place for them, and you're also being gaslighted about it being a problem — that was really formative."
In her newest work, The White Bonus, McMillan highlights the pathways of systemic racism and inequity through a compelling blend of investigative journalism and reported memoir.
At its core, is McMillan's searing question: If racism penalizes people of color, what dividends does it pay out to white people?
And most crucially, how much is that worth— not in the nebulous notions of privilege, but in quantifiable dollars and cents? Or, in other words: power?
In her case, a back-of-the-envelope estimate shows that she received approximately $372,000 that she would not have if she was not white and part of a family that was able to build wealth by taking advantage of government programs that were only available to whites.
McMillan's journey begins within her own family history, tracing three generations of relatively modest wealth back to policies that explicitly advantaged whites. Through this exploration, McMillan assigns a minimal cash value to the advantages conferred by whiteness in her own life.
Reckon recently spoke with McMillan about that exploration. Let's talk about it. |
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Reckon: What are some of your earliest recollections that a white bonus was accruing to you?
Tracie McMillan: Honestly, it probably wasn't until college or my professional life. In part because I grew up in a place that was so overwhelmingly white. The community I grew up in was like 95% white so it's not like I had a lot of interaction with folks who weren't white. I don't think I had that conscious understanding that I was having a different employment or housing experience, at least until I was living in rent-stabilized housing in New York.
I moved in with two white boys who had moved to Bed Stuy. The joke in the house was, 'Oh, if you get lost, just ask where the white kids live,' because we were literally the only white people for several blocks. And then you start thinking, 'Why would this landlord rent to us?' Once I started understanding rent stabilization ... because he thinks we're gonna leave so he'll be able to jack up the rent. My race is part of how people are looking at me for housing, which I had not understood before, in part because I hadn't really looked for housing before in my life. I think ... (my whiteness) is mattering, and it's saving me money.
There's this part of white middle-class culture that it's impolite to talk about money, about not having money. It gets back to the idea that they just made good choices and did the hard work
Right. We've made good choices, as opposed to we had good choices and selected from good choices. It's really important to talk about the white bonus because so much of middle-class white culture relies not only on not acknowledging whiteness but not acknowledging that they even have unusual resources or that they're tied to government investment. I think lower-income white families talk about it more. They're more transparent about it. They're less precious about it. But middle-class white families have this investment in the idea that we made the right choices, and we don't talk about having money, and we don't talk about how we got it other than we made choices. So it hides this whole thing from any conversation — not only the whiteness, but that government was part of it. It fuels this bootstrapped narrative.
So the bonus thing, to me, is really interesting because white folks not only believe whiteness doesn't matter, but I think many middle-class white people think government hasn't done anything for them. And that's not true. The middle class only exists because of government intervention in the economy and policy. And so white folks have this idea that we've worked really hard, and it's true. My grandparents all worked really hard. It's just that it paid off for them.
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The sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, writing in 1935, argued that post-Civil War, white workers received a "public and psychological wage" from racism. This non-material wage included public deference, access to better schools, lenient treatment by courts and media that flattered them. These privileges provided a sense of superiority and social benefits. Today, what we think of as better quality-of-life is tightly tied to being white in white spaces that protect white people from certain harms. Here are several other ways that white folks hold material advantage in American society: —According to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, a majority of Americans, about 56%, say that white people either benefit “a great deal” or “a fair amount” from advantages that Black people do not have. —Broken down by race, however, whites have a very different view of their advantage. Just 16% of whites surveyed say whites benefit a great deal from their race; another 46% say whites benefit at least a fair amount from advantages in society that African Americans don’t have. —Whites usually enjoy the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S., but that's not necessarily because white people make better educational or life choices. —Data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research show that the white high-school dropout rate tends to be lower than the average unemployment for all African Americans. In 2022, the overall Black unemployment rate was 5 percent, and the unemployment rate for White high school dropouts was 4.8 percent. —Between 2000 and 2022, in 14 out of 23 years, the overall Black unemployment rate was higher than the rate for White high school dropouts. —When it comes to racial wage disparities among college-educated workers, it's not because African Americans disproportionately pick low-paying majors. In fact, white and Black college students have similar choices in college majors, according to CEPR, with the top 5 for each being business, health professions, psychology, social sciences and biomedical services. Within jobs considered low-skill and for low-experience teenagers, whites hold an employment advantage. —For those enrolled in school, white unemployment was 8.4% compared to 14.2% for Blacks; for those not enrolled in school white unemployment was 11.5% to 22.4% for Blacks, according to 2023 data. |
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As always, never hesitate to inbox me with thoughts, to chat or to rant. Peace, R.L. |
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