Tracie McMillan is an independent, award-winning journalist and author. She was an RSF visiting journalist in spring 2022. Her essays and journalism have been published in many publications including the New York Times, Mother Jones, Harper’s, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic. Her first book, The American Way of Eating, won the Books for a Better Life Award and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. In a new interview with the foundation, McMillan discusses her latest book, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What motivated you to write The White Bonus? What is a White bonus? How do you measure it, and can it truly be measured? Why is it important to examine the White bonus?
In 2016, I read Hillbilly Elegy, and I just thought, “This is not the way to talk about Whiteness and class at the same time.” Just victim blaming the poor, the same way we had done with folks who weren’t White for so long, didn’t seem helpful. So, for me, both as a reporter and as a person who doesn’t come from a ton of money, I wanted a way to talk about White economic hardship without being in service of racism.
And the only way I could think to address that question was to say, “Well, what if we were just really brutally honest about what Whiteness has gotten folks?” The ways that we’ve built our social safety net around Whiteness for a long time, the way that we built the middle class around Whiteness in the 20th century. What if we were just honest about that? Then we can move forward together from there. So, acknowledging the ways that this country, through public policy, has privileged folks who are White while also acknowledging that now we’ve let the system get so punitive for everybody that a lot of White people are hurting.
I do believe what the founders wrote down, which is that we’re all created equal. I think this country should be working in service of that. One of the only ways we can get there is if we’re honest about the ways we have not been equitable in building a lot of our public policies.
A White bonus a rough, back-of the-envelope estimate of money that an individual White person has gotten or saved because of White supremacy in public policy and private practice. There are two elements to measuring it. One is what I call a family bonus. That’s money that you can go into your financial records and pull out that you got from your family since you turned 18 or left home. You tally that up. And then you go back through your family’s history and see how likely it was that your family would have had that money if they weren’t White. Did grandpa have the GI Bill in the ‘40s? Did your family buy a home and gain equity before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banning housing discrimination? Did your grandfather or father gain employment and build wealth or get a pension through membership in a union that historically practiced occupational segregation or other forms of racial discrimination that meant they got more money and more stability out of that? So, that’s the family bonus.
The social bonus is what happens to you go out in the world separate from your family. How many doors does Whiteness open? What does it help with? At the end of September, I published a piece looking at JD Vance’s White bonus. His family bonus is quite modest. As far as I can tell, it’s around $28,000. Readers should remember, the man grew up middle class. That man is a lower middle-class industrial Rust Belt kid who had a unionized grandpa in a racist union at a factory. The house his great grandparents bought—that he ended up inheriting money from—had a racial covenant on it when it was built. Once somebody like me or JD Vance gets out in the world, what kinds of doors open for us, probably at least noticeably in part because we’re White. What do we know about employment and wage discrimination that shows that you as a White worker are probably, on average, making more than a comparable Black worker? Did you get hired into a job through social connections that depended in part on you being White, or at least very fluent in White culture and norms?
I write in the book about getting a job as a nanny for a wealthy family that wanted me there, in part, to show their kids, who are never going to have to work, that people like them did have to work. So, for me, I calculate the wage advantage that I got because that’s a much better paid job than what I was qualified for out in the regular work world. Then, that family opened doors for me with housing. They helped me get a rent stabilized apartment. They opened the door to my first internship, which became my journalism career. So, you start trying to calculate what does that stuff add up to? How valuable is that stuff? For me, that ends up being a few hundred thousand dollars because I accumulate all this stuff over the course of my adult life.
The idea is to set up a conversation and a basic methodology, in part, because I think that makes it easier for folks who do have the social science expertise to start looking at how it would be measured. We have to be really honest about the fact that middle class White people did not succeed only because of hard work or putting in the time. They succeeded because the government targeted White families and communities for investment and made us wealthier.
I certainly came to this project thinking, “Racism is bad. I don’t want racism in this country. I will not vote for racist,” all of that stuff. It hits different when you sit down and you realize the only boost I actually had access to, usually, was being White. That was the safety net for me. And that’s not the country I was raised to think we are. And that’s not the country I want us to be. I basically got out of poverty because doors opened for me because I was White. And I don’t think that’s how it should work. I think we should just guarantee that people don’t experience poverty. We have the resources to do that, but we’re not going to be able to build consensus around that if we keep pretending that everybody gets the same access to that opportunity.
Q. Can you talk briefly about the history of racism in unions? What did unions do to replicate the U.S. racial hierarchy?
I was studying union history in Pittsburgh as part of this project and I did not know this going in, but in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, Pittsburgh was site of one of the largest construction trade integration battles in the country at the time. It was something like out of 26 unions, 20 were 90% or more White and I think eight were 100% White. These are not luxurious lives that these people are leading. Often, we think about White privilege or White advantage as being about rich people. But for a lot of working-class, blue-collar folks, being White was what gave them access to some economic stability and a little bit of mobility
There’s certainly a rich history of interracial organizing and solidarity in unions. But it’s also true that in industrial unions, Black workers, generally speaking, would be confined to the most dangerous in the poorest paid parts of a factory. And due to seniority rules, if you came in as a Black worker, you were stuck in the foundry, and your seniority, your ability to gain raises and everything else, was tied to that department. You couldn’t move departments. And that didn’t change in steel until the ‘70s with a consent decree right before the bottom drops out of the industry.
That was particularly powerful for me in terms of my family’s story. My great-grandfather came up from Missouri, part of the south-north migration. He was White, so he’s just going for jobs, not because of racial terror, but he came up and got a job in the foundry at an auto factory in Pontiac. But then, he gets trained as a welder, and he moved into the welding line of work at the factory. Then he moves into a job with a private company doing welding outside of the factory. Then he starts his own business, and he buys a home. And he buys a home with a racial covenant. So that’s key to my family’s mobility. Nobody ever said anything to me like, “Great grandpa benefited from racism.” But when you look at the history of the industry and what happened in my family, you realize, “Oh, that right there is really significant,” because great grandpa would not have had a home.
In industrial unions you see occupational segregation locking Black workers into low wage and dangerous jobs, where White workers are given social mobility. And in trade unions, you just see a wholesale locking out entirely of Black workers, really, until the ‘70s. We often forget how long that sort of wage discrimination and occupational discrimination was in place. Sometimes people are like, “Well, enslavement was over hundreds of years ago.” It’s like, “Well, Black workers didn’t even have a legal right to equal pay, really, until the ‘70s.” So, it’s a much longer lag time.
Q. What is resegregation? Where did White families go? How did White flight impact integrating school districts and their municipalities?
Resegregation started happening pretty much as soon as all the court orders expired to force integration. I document this in one particular school district in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We sort of reached peak integration in the late 1980s and then once we stopped forcing it through government oversight the White folks are no longer going to school with the Black folks at all. Largely, what happened was White flight. I think it’s always important to flag that this is also true outside of the south.
In the north, it was more that you go from one town to another to a suburb. In the south, it was much more confined. In Hattiesburg, you see folks go into segregation academies, which are explicitly founded with the idea that you don’t want Black and White students to go to school together. Once it became clear that you weren’t going to be able to fight integration, you were actually going to have to experience integration if you stayed in the public district, then White families in the south also started following this pattern of moving out. So, White families largely went into private schools or to White districts; they just keep moving out.
In Hattiesburg, I saw that this economically devastated the tax base for the districts. Because what happens when those White families—who are wealthier because of long standing racial discrimination around occupations—leave, they take their tax base with them. That also meant that the commercial activity of Hattiesburg moved to these outlying districts and started funding the outlying schools. And then it just creates this feedback loop where the districts that are losing population and losing money start not performing as well. Then even middle-class Black families are like, “Well, I’m not putting my kid through this district.” And then they move out to the to the better schools and the districts lose that tax base as well.
Q. Mass incarceration disproportionately targets Black Americans. Can you talk about some of the ways that American society has been set up to privilege White people in the criminal justice system?
What I saw in the reporting for The White Bonus was just how powerful the implicit deference to White folks and particularly White men and White boys can be. I write about the sentencing experience for what, on paper, you could say was a drug dealer in a public school with extortion and larceny charges. It’s actually a 17-year-old kid who took ten hits of acid to school, was selling them off, and gets caught at school. After he gets back from suspension, he threatens the snitch and takes $5 from him. So, it’s just a kid making some bad choices.
His dad has enough money to get him an attorney. And then a young White guy shows up to court, clean cut, with two White parents. Not big money, but clean cut. And his parents have enough financial stability that they can take time off their jobs and go to court every time that my subject, Jared, has to go to court. And then my subject gets given an alternative to incarceration, suspended sentence and community service. I want to say that is what should happen with a 17-year-old making those kinds of decisions. The assumption is that this kid’s life and future matters and we should give him a second chance. I think that has a lot to do with looking at a middle-class White family.
For me, it was also really powerful looking at the disparity in whether you sentence kids to adult or juvenile facilities. Black kids are being sentenced to adult facilities at dramatically higher rates. So, a Black teenager making the same kind of mistake as my subject would be much more likely to get sent to adult court and all the stuff that comes with that.
And my subject, Jared, was very clear about that. He’s like, “I was a kid who was making some bad choices. And, you know, I’m really lucky that they gave me that extra time, because that would not have gone well for me if I’d gone through that system.” He’s also like, “If I was not White, I probably would have been sent away.”
Q. What is racial fractionalization? How does it impact social spending in the U.S.? What did social spending in the U.S. look like before racial fractionalization?
Racial fractionalization is an academic term for racism being used to split folks apart from each other and the divide it creates in our body politic. Social science is very clear that one of the strongest predictors of opposition to social spending is White racism, it has really undercut public support for the idea that we will use our tax dollars to help alleviate suffering and hardship.
The other thing to keep in mind is that, until we started using social benefits to benefit people of color, White people were very supportive of social spending. Heather McGee is the first person I read to make this comparison. Public opinion surveys of White folks in the ‘40s and ‘50s showed a really high level of support for using government money to help people. They believed the point of government is to help people out. People are not on their own; that was not the assumption. And then as you see the Civil Rights Movement take hold, you see an expansion of an understanding that, actually, Black people should be part of the groups that are getting good public education, they should be part of the groups that are getting help with college education, and all that stuff. And White support for social spending just goes down, down, down.
When you look at the 1940s, when my grandfathers had some access to college after the GI Bill, college is basically free. Tuition, covered. Books, covered. You’ll be fine. And at that point, the college going population is almost entirely White. In the south, you have some historically Black colleges and universities but outside of that, colleges are really not admitting Black people, even in the north.
So, then you get to the next generation, you go and look at the Boomers. You’re like, “Okay, well, it’s a little more diverse.” And at that point, state funding—state funding priorities depend on the population in the state and how it votes—diminishes a bit. It diminishes a bit, but you could pay entirely for your college—a year of tuition at a public university—and have some money left over by working part time in the ‘70s.
So, then you get to the ‘90s, when I’m going to college. You basically would need a few thousand dollars of loans and work part time, and you could get through university. And now, I mean, forget about it. It’s impossible. There’s no point in trying to work when you’re in school. There’s no way you will ever pay for the actual cost of the tuition. The less White the population is, the less willing White people have been to support state funding of public education. When you talk about racial fractionalization, I think that’s what it is. It’s groups, and particularly White folks, not being willing to share public resources with anyone that doesn’t look like them.
Q. How did your time as a visiting journalist at Russell Sage inform The White Bonus?
Working at Russell Sage was really important and incredibly powerful for me because it got me out of my journalist head. It made me be much more rigorous about the research that I was considering and how I was using it. The White Bonus draws on so many different areas of social science. I’m pulling from all over the place, and I had access to social scientists that could match the breadth of my research, whether it was somebody who was currently a scholar or somebody in the network that I could then access. It’s incredibly powerful to be able to reach out to top scholars and say, “What is the research I need to make sure I check when I’m writing about the sociology of race?” “What is the best research on the psychology of whether or not White people want to talk about racism as an advantage to them versus a disadvantage to Black people?” And the generosity isn’t just the other scholars, it’s also the staff and the faculty and the leadership. I took a lot from talking at lunch with staff – as much as with the scholars.
It’s great. Do it. 100%! Everyone talks about the food, which is lovely, but honestly, the guidance and the scholarship just made my work so much better.
