By Tracie McMillan
Read the full piece on Switchyard’s website.
I was taught to believe in the American Dream.
For a Gen-X white girl in a white-flight exurb in the Rust Belt, that meant I grew up believing that the Founders meant what they said, that we are all equal. I was taught to believe that to be a good American was to be colorblind. I was taught to believe that if I worked hard enough to prove my merit, I would get what I deserved. That was my American Dream.
On January 20, 2025, our president promised to make that American Dream come true. He promised to “forge a country that is colorblind and merit-based.”
It is a lovely idea, to be “colorblind and merit-based,” but this country has never been either. I can tell you that as someone who has reported on class in this country for a quarter century. I can also tell you that as someone who has lived here nearly twice as long.
When I was forty-two, I reported on Maximus, a corporation that profits from the paperwork of public benefits. The more paper there is, the more money Maximus makes. In Indiana, I met Sue, an illiterate white gas station attendant with high blood pressure who kept losing her public health insurance. Every time Sue missed an appointment or failed to pay the $1 a month the state required (the fee was supposed to be a demonstration of “personal responsibility”), she lost her insurance and got sicker. She also faced more paperwork, which made Maximus more money.
Sue’s merit—what she deserved—did not seem to matter. That was in 2017. But the myth of merit goes back further than that.
When I was thirty-three, I worked undercover at a Walmart outside Detroit, where I had a Black male co-worker in his twenties. His name was Brian. He had worked in produce markets for years and knew the ripening schedule of every piece of produce by heart. He had applied for the manager position, but Walmart hired Randy instead. Randy was twenty-two years old and white, and he did not know that plantains were related to bananas. So far as I could tell, he showed no signs of aptitude for his job.
Brian’s merit—what he deserved—did not seem to matter. This was in 2010, but the myth of merit goes back further than that.
When I was twenty-one and paying part of my way through NYU, a financial aid clerk gave me bad information. I ended up with a bill for $750 that I could not pay. I put on a thrifted blouse and went to an office. I asked a man in a suit, the financial aid dean, to cover the balance.
I was at NYU because financial aid made it cheaper for me than in-state tuition at the University of Michigan, which I’d also gotten into. In-state tuition was unaffordable because the state funding for public higher education had been dropping for years. I didn’t know that legislators cut funding, over and over, because white voters stopped supporting taxation for public services. I didn’t know that white support for taxation for public services began to dwindle once the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954.
In New York, I made my case in my thrifted blouse. The dean sighed. There was nothing he could do. Then he asked my name a second time; it rang a bell. He rifled through papers and told me, with a smile, that I was on a list of nominees to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor society to which he belonged. Now he smiled. Now he winked and told me he’d wipe the slate clean; after all, I was Phi Be.
I had thought that my merit depended on some mix of justice and need. Instead, it was membership in a club to which I had not applied—and the benefits of which I was in no position to refuse. That was in the 1990s. But the myth of merit goes back further than that.
When I was eight, my mom was hit by a drunk driver while she drove home on a curvy rural road in February. She ended up with a brain injury. There was no public health insurance to help her. There was no public health insurance for her because, in the 1960s, Southern legislators who talked about dissuading Black women from depending on government assistance insisted on limiting public health insurance to those who deserved it.
My mom, according to the rules set by our government, did not deserve public health insurance. The insurers argued that she did not deserve their private insurance, either, because she had already had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. We ended up in a lawsuit. As the lawsuit dragged on, my mom had no consistent care. Nine years later, on April 4, 1993, Michigan’s supreme court ruled she had, in fact, deserved coverage. It didn’t matter by then. My mom had died five weeks earlier.
My mom’s merit—which is to say, what she deserved—did not seem to matter, at least not when it counted. That was in the 1980s. But the myth of merit goes back further than that. And so it goes, year after year, story after story.
In America, we learn the myth of merit through the logic of race. Our first lesson is that some people merit more than others. As a journalist, my job has often been to show that people who are not white deserve the same consideration as people who are. That is true, insofar as it goes. It also misses the point.
If my work is to be of any use, now or in the future, I cannot fixate on proving who deserves what. I need, instead, to show that we all deserve to have enough.
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