INTRODUCTION



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.

In the river, our various privileges help us to stay afloat and ease our crossings. The biggest privileges are whiteness and maleness, but other aids may come along—physical attractiveness, heterosexuality, physical strength, cunning social intuition, innate abilities. Nobody is guaranteed safe crossing, but each buoyant scrap can be the difference between making it across the river and foundering in the current, each privilege of varying use if we make it ashore. It is dishonest to say that we all start to swim in the same place and with the same advantages—or that, once we’ve arrived, we each enjoy the same security and comfort. It is an unsettling rejection of American meritocracy to admit that we do not.

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. As a journalist who has long documented America’s multiracial poor and working classes, and as a white woman raised here, I use this book to explore the flip side of that understanding: how race benefits people who are white. I start with my family and myself.

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. My father began to belittle me. Sometimes, his temper boiled over and he flew into rages. To escape, I worked: My first paycheck came at fourteen, from an orchard. I have supported myself since college, when I juggled up to five jobs to make rent and tuition and pay for food. In those early years of independence, which I stubbornly insisted on to avoid my father’s abuse, I was so malnourished I developed vertigo. Later, 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 live in America without a net. It has terrified me each time. It terrifies me still.

Few of the people I interacted with at the private university I attended or in the journalism circles in which I worked seemed to have had similar experiences—whatever their race. Most of my peers came from families with enough wealth that they were baffled, if sometimes sympathetic, when I mentioned my financial stresses. In these circles, being white and without family support made me strange, which carried its own ironic benefits. More than anything, my struggles seemed to make me a curiosity—someone with an entertaining backstory for cocktail parties, or a target for sympathy and, importantly, help.

In college, when people heard that I worked to cover my living expenses, they assumed my lack of money in the present meant that my family was poor. Later, professional colleagues made similar assumptions when I said I’d worked service jobs in college and had avoided graduate school because I could not fathom its expense. I knew, dimly, that my grandfather had some wealth, but my access to it was limited by both family custom and my objection to my father’s abuse. I avoided discussing those fraught topics with colleagues. Instead, I let my peers use the phrases they felt best described me. Eventually, “working class” stuck, and, for self-interested reasons I discuss later, I made it my own.

Until recently, it has been unusual in America to have a broad, mainstream discussion about how race works for white people, or how white advantage, much of it facilitated by government, intersects with the other factors that shape life in this country. For a very long time, I understood my race only dimly: as 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 whiteness means. This fact frustrates and embarrasses me, but it is nothing new for a white American.

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. There are many others, and they are documented in these pages. I tally their approximate—and bare minimum—value in the White Bonus Index at the end of this book.

I know that this book puts white people at its center, myopically focused on our experience as if it is the only one worth understanding. I know that mainstream journalists, in particular, have practiced this myopia almost as if it were a religion. And, as I document later, I know that I have not only observed these damaging practices; I have participated in them, too. But if there is any story about white Americans that this country has left untold, it is the story of how we—how I—directly benefit from racism. I’ve spent my career documenting how racism harms people who are not white, especially in the form of poverty, in hopes of making the lives of our poorest better. Not much has changed. Maybe I can do more good by documenting this untold story of exactly how racism helps me, just as it helps nearly all white Americans. That is the story at the center of this book.

* * *

This is a sprawling story. To tell it, I must break it into smaller, more manageable stories, and then weave them together into that 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.*

To begin tallying that 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: Would my family have had that money to give if they were not white? When the answer is no, the money comes from racial advantage. 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 what the pioneering nineteenth-century Black sociologist 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” of whiteness. Still, when any event arose in my subjects’ lives where it appeared that implicit white advantage 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?

This book is, by its nature, limited. There are many caveats: I work as a journalist, not a scholar, and certainly not an economist. I cannot take a full measure of the material benefits of racism—and, as many economists have told me, it is likely that no one can. Racism is too complex, too slippery, too multifaceted to pin down its value in a definitive way. The same is true of racism’s costs, which land on the bodies and psyches of its targets in ways that defy monetary calculation. Indeed, public health scholar Arline Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the way that the stresses of oppression of all kinds directly create poor health. But while this stress effect shows up across many hardships, it is most pronounced and most widespread among Black Americans—whose health, researchers have found, does not improve with income and education the way it does for whites. For Black people in the middle and upper classes, research suggests a lifetime of managing a constant flow of white assumptions, ranging from banal to lethal, can spur disease at an early age and even shorten their lives, regardless of how much money they make. There is, as of yet, no firm dollar value for that.* In this way, any estimate I offer will be woefully, dramatically, impossibly insufficient.

And yet there is value in posing a powerful question and following the answers where they lead, even if the math is rough. There is no algorithm here, no econometric model. There is only a question that needed to be asked, and the stories I learned when I tried to answer it.

I begin with my family because I know our story best. This is different from how I have approached most of my work as a journalist. For many years, my job has been to approach other people and ask them to explain a foreign experience to me, so that I might explain it to others. But it didn’t feel right to ask other white people to explain whiteness to me—as if I had no experience with it myself, as if I had any claim to objectivity at all. Following journalistic convention, I aim to accurately reflect the thoughts and experiences of my subjects, while leaving most of the work of judgment to readers. Following the conventions of memoir, I am more direct about how I see myself and my family.

As this work evolved, it became clear that any honest consideration of my own relationship to racism—which, as a white woman, means my relationship to unearned power—also meant being honest about the hardships that have shaped me. For a long time, I shrugged off my difficult childhood. I told myself that it was in the past, and that at least it had made me stronger and more empathetic. I suppose those things are true insofar as they go. I see now that they made me more resentful, too: more willing to endure abuse, more willing to expect others to endure it; angry when others got sympathy where I expected derision. Because white Americans’ resentment is so central to modern racism here, my hardships are a part of my relationship to racism, too.

Still, the story of white advantage in America is a bigger story than any single family can tell. So, in between the six chapters that tell my family’s story, I have written four profiles of other white people. 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. But the most important criterion was that they each agreed to speak with me openly about their lives, and to consider the role that their race has played in shaping them. With each person, I estimate their white bonus in the same manner I measure my own—and I tally it for each of us in the index at the end of this book. My hope is that this cross section of stories will help me understand how racism has shaped histories and policies to which my own family has few ties. I also suspect it will let me see how racism echoes across time and place; how it morphs, and whether parts of it disappear.

As big as this story is, I have limited its scope in three important ways. First, I cover only the twentieth and twenty-first 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. I hope that future work, by me or other writers, will clearly contrast white advantage against the complex histories between white and other nonwhite Americans, including those of Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian descent.

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. 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. I am curious about what I might learn about racism by leaving that relief behind, and practicing honesty instead.

This book does not highlight the extraordinary, and it does not study an average, either. None of my subjects have faced hardships that will sound foreign to most Americans. None of us have gone through life guaranteed the comforts of great wealth. Indeed, there is nothing about my family or the people I profile that is remarkable. Nor is any one of us an “everyman” who could represent an average of anything. Instead, my hope is that, by studying the ways that racism has shaped this handful of white American families, including my own, I can better understand why racism continues to fester in my country, why so many white Americans treat racial hierarchy as a fact they cannot change rather than a problem they will confront, and whether there’s any chance that the benefits it gives are not worth what they cost. I hope that writing this book can help me find a better way to cross the river—for myself, of course, and for all Americans.

I believe we all deserve safe passage. The story that follows is what I learned by trying to find it.



1 MY GRANDPARENTS

SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN, CANADA, AND MICHIGAN’S UPPER PENINSULA

1907–1943



For most of my adulthood, I’ve understood myself to be on the border of the working and middle class. Even so, I have longed to feel myself on solid financial ground—far enough into the middle class that I have no immediate worry of falling back into the river. So when my father moved out of my childhood home in 2016 and handed me the family albums he no longer wanted to keep, the old pictures I found of his parents surprised me.

The images are black and white, some with stark contrast and others a rainbow of grays. My favorite set contains four images of his parents, my Grandmar and Grandpa Mac, with their mothers. It must have been March or April. There is no snow, but everyone is in overcoats. The women wear hats. Grandpa Mac wears a three-piece suit, the vest buttoned. They stand in the driveway of my grandparents’ new house, solidly built with brick and white clapboards. One shows Grandmar, slender and birdlike, a cloud of dark curls around her shoulders. The mothers stand with her in front of a black Hudson Terraplane, all curving wheel wells and chrome grille. Another photo shows Grandmar in front of the house with her mother. A third shows Grandpa Mac with his. There’s no date written on the photos, but they would have been taken in the late 1930s. Maybe the early 1940s.

My favorite photo shows my grandfather with both mothers, in front of the car. My grandfather is on the left, overcoat open, one hand casually in his pocket, holding back the coat. He is lean, olive-skinned, and handsome, a broad prominent nose above a pencil mustache, dark curly hair cropped close to his scalp, hazel eyes fixed just beyond the camera. His mother stands in the middle, thin, awkward, and stiff, a tall hat draped in black netting atop her head, her mouth a flat line. Grandmar’s mother is on the right, shorter and rounder, leaning comfortably on the Hudson’s front wheel. She is giving my grandfather an amused look. I like to think she said, Can you get a load of all this?

When I look at these photos, I want to say things like “Look at how happy they were.” Or, “Grandpa’s mom must’ve been a piece of work, huh?” Or, “I would have liked to have known Grandmar’s mom.” Sometimes, I admire the coats and the car and Grandpa Mac’s style. Today, a good eighty years after those photos were taken, the details I notice do not surprise me. Instead, I am surprised by an obvious fact that I, and my family, had long left unsaid.

My dad’s parents had money. Later, my mom’s parents would have some, too. As a child, I could not see this because I did not understand how to spot money or its lack. As a young adult, I could not see it because a lack of money defined my options, separated me from my peers at college, limited the jobs I could take or the trips I might make. And, until very recently, I’d failed to see the most important reason they had that money in the first place: They were white.

I have avoided observing their race on instinct—my quiet subterranean compulsion to be mindful of power: to do what I can to acquire it, and to do what I can to avoid it being used against me. This instinct is why, when I look at old photos, I do the same thing my peers and my family and my country do with anything that suggests unearned advantage: I do not talk about it.

* * *

My grandparents were all from Michigan. It is where my parents are from, and it is where they raised me. Today, my home state gets mentioned in the news mostly because of Detroit’s troubles and glories, the state’s storied college football programs, or its swing state status in national elections. But when my grandparents were growing up, Michigan was a larger and more glittering force. For my family, Michigan and its cities must have seemed full of possibilities.


Copyright © 2024 by Tracie McMillan