By Tracie McMillan, April 24, 2025
The following is excerpted from “The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America”, published in paperback this week by Henry Holt & Co.
If American life is a river, relief from poverty and strife sits atop one of its slippery banks, and the American Dream sits safely back from its edge. Few of us manage to plant our feet firmly enough in that soil to have no fear of it falling away; fewer still are born there in the first place. Most of us, instead, start out somewhere in the water and do what we can to make it across. Family wealth determines our starting point. Economic class is the distance we must cover. Our various privileges — our individual rankings of talents and gender and beauty as well as race — are the scraps of wood and inflated rafts that present themselves in the current.
White Americans rarely talk about the differences in our crossings. Those who’ve reached the far bank often stay silent, content in having arrived. Many of those still in the river remain silent too, certain that speaking up will only make their crossing more difficult. Few of us consider how we might make getting across the river safer for everyone, or how to make that slippery bank a bit easier to climb. I have often stayed silent, and it has had its benefits. But I am no longer convinced it is for the best.
That is a long way of saying that, for a very long time I thought race and racism “happened” only to people who were not white. As a journalist, I reported on poverty and hardship, and could see plainly how racism kept nonwhite people down. I did not yet see how it pulled white people up. That limited approach mirrored the way that I’d been taught to understand race and racism: It wasn’t about me.
I dimly understood my race; it was a vague, immutable power about which I had limited knowledge, and even less control. Given the power my whiteness holds, it now feels strange, bizarre, — even dangerous — that I entered adulthood with so little conscious understanding about how whiteness works and what it means. This fact frustrates and embarrasses me, but it is nothing new for a white American.
For most of my adult life, I understood my place in the world through the lens of economic class. I grew up in a white, middle-class family. My mother fell ill when I was five years old. The adults in my family discussed medical debt constantly. When I was twelve, my mother moved to a nursing home. When I chose to pursue a career as a journalist covering the poor despite its low pay, I often found myself without much more income than the people about whom I wrote. Unwittingly and always somewhat unnecessarily, I have periodically experienced something of what it is like to cross the river unaided.
It has terrified me each time. It terrifies me still.
As a reporter, I know how to be specific about how race works for people who are not white, especially when they are Black. I know that Black children born poor in America are one-quarter as likely to become rich as poor children who are white, and I know that Black boys born rich are half as likely to stay rich as their white peers. I know that Black people are no more likely than whites to use or sell drugs, but they are three to four times more likely to be arrested on drug charges. And I know that when they are convicted of any crime, Black people are more likely to be sent to prison than white people. I know Black families have 13 percent of the wealth of white ones.
In this country I am rarely expected to acknowledge the obvious inverse: That white people born rich are twice as likely as Black people to stay that way. That we are two-thirds to three-quarters less likely to be arrested on drug charges. That we have eight times as much wealth.
Indeed, for all the difficulties of my crossing, whiteness has buoyed me up in my hardest moments. Some of the benefits of my race are hard to measure: my ability to blend in among white people with more power, to safely express anger in public, or to prompt sympathy with my tears. Others are easier to quantify: Racist policies in housing let my grandparents build middle-class wealth that was denied to Americans who were not white; racist administration of the G.I. Bill gave them access to college that was largely denied to Americans who were not white; and racism ingrained in the publishing industry gave me advantages that led to the contract for my first book —- and the contract for this one, too.
* * * * *
This is a sprawling story. To tell it, I must break it into smaller, more manageable stories, and then weave them together into a larger whole. I begin with my family’s story and end with my own, tallying what I have come to call a “white bonus” along the way. This concept is a clear inverse of what scholars and journalists have long referred to as the “Black tax”–– the higher costs faced by Black Americans who have been denied so much of the aid extended freely to whites.
For this “bonus,” I’ve chosen a crude but telling measure: the total money my family has spent on me since I left home at seventeen years old. The reasoning is simple: It is money I did nothing to earn, that my family had no legal obligation to spend on me, and that my family was able to give. Then I look at my family’s history and use my skills as a journalist to investigate: How likely is it that my family would have had that money to give if they were not white?
The more frequently I answer “not very likely,” the more financial benefit I’ve seen from whiteness. This initial “family bonus” is almost exclusively a measure of how American public policy, which built the twentieth-century’s middle class, has trickled down to the current day. This is the first piece of my white bonus.
The next element of white advantage I consider derives from the downstream effects of what W. E. B. Du Bois called whiteness’s “psychological wage,” the comforts and benefits that come from being a member of a dominant group. These are the small, interpersonal ways that doorways to power are opened: the offering of benefit of the doubt and encouragement, rather than suspicion and dismissal, which in turn encourages white people to tacitly believe they are entitled to things that others are not. Although these advantages begin as intangible privileges, they facilitate access to material advantages. This indirect relationship makes it difficult to measure this element of white advantage, what I call a “social bonus.” Still, when any event arose in my life, or that of my subjects, we where implicit white advantage seemed very likely to have yielded material benefits, I have tallied those, too.
Any honest consideration of a white bonus, though, must also address a related element: racism’s cost to all of us. This is different from the amorphous concepts of “privilege” and “fragility” that have dominated America’s discussion of whiteness in recent years. Its most recent champion is writer and policy expert Heather McGhee, who speaks compellingly about how racism hits “the target first and worst.” Racism, then, hurts nonwhite, and especially Black people the most —- but it hurts many whites as well. This broader understanding of racism is an important complement to, not a replacement for, the extraordinary body of work chronicling racism’s harms to its direct targets. It also begs a question that drives this book: If racism in American policy has given so much to whites, is there a point at which its costs outweigh its benefits, even to white people?
I cannot claim that the numbers I come up with are the definitive, irrefutable truth required of social science. For most white people, this ambiguity is sufficient grounds to dismiss the attempt at putting a dollar value to racism in my life. As a journalist, I asked the question anyway, and sought the truth for my answer. I think there is value in this work. If nothing else, I can tell a good, true story that I have not read before. There are worse things to add to the world than this.
I begin this work with my family because I know our story best. We take six chapters of the book. In between most of those, I have added four profiles of other white people, whose lives touch on history and policies that my own family does not. They are from different parts of the country, different generations, different gradations of economic class. Each subject has spent most, if not all, of their life in America’s shrinking middle class. Several are poised near the downward slide from middle-class to poor, reflecting, I think, an uncertainty about whether their economic stability will last.
As big as this story is, I have limited its scope in three important ways. First, I cover only the 20th and 21st centuries. This excludes the 246 years during which enslavement based on race was a legally codified part of America’s economic and political structure, as well as the 35 years, including Reconstruction, that followed the Civil War.* I had to draw a line somewhere —- and I believe the last 124 years provide plenty of insight into how racism has given advantage to white Americans.
Second, this book is primarily concerned with the divide between the experiences of Black Americans and white Americans. I have chosen this approach because the divide between Black and white is so enduring here that to call it “caste,” as the journalist Isabel Wilkerson does, is accurate. What this work adds, I hope, is a material suggestion for why caste has taken such a deep hold: Money.
Third, all of my primary subjects are white, and I do not systematically compare them to subjects who are not white. I have made this decision in hopes of forcing myself to study white advantage, and white advantage alone. This is important.
I do not like to admit it, but there is a relief I feel when I listen to stories of how racism hurts people who don’t look like me. There is the relief of absolution in exchange for having borne witness, and the relief of maintaining my innocence. Most of all there is the relief of having kept the focus off of me. I do not trust this relief, which keeps me so comfortable and does so little to change anything. The White Bonus is what I found by leaving that relief behind, and practicing honesty instead.
* * * * *
Detroit
The foreclosure crisis of 2008 was disastrous for Detroit. Before the crisis and its fallout, Detroit was a city of homeowners. That was true in the mid-century, when it was a majority-white city, and it stayed true as Detroit became a majority-Black city. In 2000, 52 percent of Black households there owned their homes, well above the national Black homeownership average of 46 percent.
Detroit’s status as a city that was majority Black and majority homeowner put it at the center of a crisis started by bankers on Wall Street, which in turn sent its home prices spiraling downward. This is because lenders targeted Black communities for the riskiest and most expensive loans. More than half of the mortgages held by African Americans were subprime –– compared to just 18 percent of the mortgages held by white Americans. The most explicit example is Wells Fargo’s subprime marketing program aimed at Black homeowners and promoted through churches ––- internally, the bank’s brokers referred to this financing as “ghetto loans.” After the financial crisis, white families averaged a drop in wealth of more than one-quarter –– while Black families, on average, lost nearly half of their wealth. Indeed, this pattern of incorporating Black Americans into middle-class financial institutions but on predatory terms is so pronounced that scholars have coined a term to describe it: “predatory inclusion.”
In 2007, nearly 5 percent of the Detroit area’s homes went into foreclosure ––– a greater share than in any other city at the time. Over the next eight years, roughly 65,000 Detroit mortgages would fail; more than half the properties ended up blighted or abandoned. There is no solid figure tallying the dollar value of that loss of wealth, but even a hypothetical loss of just $20,000 in equity per foreclosure would have generated a loss of $1.3 billion in family wealth across Detroit. Research suggests most of that loss was borne by Detroit’s Black families, who made up 82 percent of the city.
In 2015, in the wake of the subprime crisis and in the early years of Detroit’s tax foreclosure crisis, I bought a house on the city’s Southwest side through the Detroit Land Bank. I bought it because I have community in Detroit; because I have rent-stabilized housing in Brooklyn that I could never replace if I left; because the stock market scares me; and because I liked the idea of investing in a city that I loved.
Most of all, I bought an abandoned house in Detroit because I could afford it. With a down payment of $2,750, I was able to finance the rest of the $27,500 purchase price, as well as the repairs the house needed. The house had gone into foreclosure in 2013. There’s no public record of the mortgage rate, and the previous owner, a Latino man, declined to discuss it with me. But I can tell you that 68 percent of mortgages in Detroit were subprime in 2005 –– and he had refinanced the house in 2007. I doubt those numbers had changed much by the time he and his wife signed the papers.
I do not remember what year it was when I realized my house was worth more than what I owed on it, giving me wealth. I do not remember the year my equity climbed into six figures, but I know that the housing market explosion in 2020 spurred it higher still. I felt such relief each time I saw this wealth climb, because it offered me safety. And I felt such bitterness too, because I know it was only possible in Detroit because the banks and the city’s tax officials made decisions as if it did not matter whether residents lost their homes. I doubt that would have happened if most of the people in the city were white.
Detroit’s loss has been my gain. As a white person who has gained equity from Detroit’s losses, I am supposed to take the spoils without comment. I am supposed to know that if I comment, the spoils might be taken away. That is how my family does things, too.
In 2022, my father began to speak, obliquely, about setting up trusts. He explained that my sisters, stepsister, and I would each get “a quarter,” minus about $100,000 to be split among their four grandchildren. My father does not use the phrases I expect of someone bequeathing wealth; there is no mention of “inheritance,” no talk of an “estate,” not even the word “wealth.” That year marked the first time my father had mentioned anything to me about leaving money to his children.
This is the long tail of the midcentury government policies and private practices that gave so much to white Americans and withheld so much from everyone else. An inheritance from my parents, which itself is passed on from my father’s banker father, would have let me buffer myself against the unpredictable income of a writer, against unexpected expenses from the property I own, against medical bankruptcy if I sicken, against poverty when I am too old to work. It is how I, and my sisters, and my nieces and nephew, are expected to compensate for our government’s evident indifference to its people’s needs for health care, for affordable shelter, for education that leads to a stable life, for healthy food –– an indifference that, over multiple elections, a majority of white Americans have endorsed. And it is why my parents expect me to stay silent as they lie –– to themselves and to me –– and say they’ve earned this; that we have earned this.
I did not earn this. Not the money. And not this government that takes my taxes, and gives me ––– and most Americans without great wealth ––– so little in return. Not this government that takes my taxes and sends most of them into the pockets of the wealthiest humans the world has ever seen.
There are other things I have earned. The firm knowledge, gained in writing this book, of the myriad ways racism I did not create benefits me nonetheless. The knowledge that, for me, these benefits are not worth my silence. And the understanding that nothing in this country will get better ––– health care and housing will not become affordable, wages will not go up, our air and water won’t stay clean, the wildfires will not recede ––– if I do as my family has taught me, and endure silently in hope of getting out alive.
I have earned, in other words, an answer to the questions that began this book. I know, now, something of what racism has given me. And I have earned the conviction that those benefits aren’t worth what they cost. At least, not for me.
Tracie McMillan is an award-winning author and journalist covering America’s multiracial working class.
