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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. In December of 2016, just after Donald Trump was elected president, journalist Tracie McMillan published an essay in the New York Times called White Resentment on the Night Shift at Walmart. She had previously gone undercover as a journalist working the night shift at Walmart for a few months to hear what life was like for the lives of people making their real livings that way. More than 90% of Americans born in 1940 earned more than their parents, she reminds us in that piece, but only 50% of those born in 1980 will, according to The Equality of Opportunity Project and that's some of the context.

She found that white resentment on the night shift at Walmart wasn't aimed at structural changes in the economy like the decline of manufacturing in their Michigan town or the decline of unions in America but as McMillan wrote, they blamed a rigged system. That was 2016. Sound familiar? A rigged system, new workers taking jobs, meaning immigrants, and corrupt politicians, all sounding like a big part of what put Donald J. Trump in office.

Here we are again in a Trump-involved election year, and Tracie McMillan has a new book that she says that resentment on the night shift at Walmart article set the stage for. It's called The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. She calculates her own white bonus, by the way, at about $372,000. Let's do the math and let's hear the stories. Tracie McMillan, hi, welcome. Nice to have you on with me again.

Tracie McMillan: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with some of your own story and maybe link it back to your night shift at Walmart experience? Maybe some listeners remember that New York Times essay because you also grew up working class and with a difficult family life and childhood in many ways in Michigan, right?

Tracie McMillan: Yes, I did. I came to do The White Bonus in part. The work that predates the resentment on the night shift piece is that I worked undercover in the food system. I wrote a book about that, and I had to really study how my identity shaped my experience in each place. I think most white people don't get this opportunity to study how our race shapes our experience. In the jobs that I was taking, I was like, "Well, this seems to be opening doors for me." When I worked on that book, I actually had taken a book contract that was not enough to really pay for the work, and by the end of it I--

Brian Lehrer: That book, let me just say for people who may have remembered that, and I once interviewed you about that book on a television show I was doing at the time. That was The American Way of Eating so maybe people remember that deep-dive investigation book by our guest, Tracie McMillan. Go ahead.

Tracie McMillan: Thanks. Anyway, I got pretty broke, and so I was running out of money. I was either going to have to stop finishing the book and get some hourly paid job, or I was going to have to find money somewhere else. I went to my parents, even though I have a very difficult relationship with them. As I write in the book, that relationship seems like it's probably over at this point.

I was able to go to them, and they were able to make a no-interest loan to me of $10,000, and that let me get through that period of my life. I realized I've been trained socially to talk about the hardship of that. I [unintelligible 00:03:45] on food stamps, I couldn't pay for health care, all of that stuff. The thing that saved me was my parents having this extra money that they could give me, and so that led me to be like, "Well, how did they get that money? Why do they have that money, and is that related to race at all?"

The way that the white bonus gets calculated, like this $371,000 figure that we're talking about, that's really just a back-of-the-envelope calculation of me sitting down, like, all right, how much money have my parents or grandparents given me since I turned 18 or left home? Then, how likely is it they would have had that money if they weren't white? Then add that to financial advantages that I think I probably had access to because of my own race once I'm out in the world as an adult.

The money I got from family adjusted for inflation comes to something like $140,000. We can talk if we want about why I think that's because of race, but then the professional doors that opened for me, the housing that I got offered. I got into a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn at a time when the easiest way to ratchet up the cost of the building, of the rents, was to bring in a new tenant who'd leave quickly so a white girl moving into a Puerto Rican and Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was a good bet for someone who'd leave quickly, all of that. That actually comes up to I think it's something like $225,000 for the social bonus that I end up accumulating.

Brian Lehrer: You actually have a white bonus estimator tool that you're developing, I see. Is that up yet, or how's that going to work?

Tracie McMillan: It is not. If everyone out there is listening that is interested in helping me build that, it's clear that to build that in a way that's sustainable and thorough enough to be public, I'm going to need some more institutional support. I'm in the process of building out a template and trying to figure out how to fund it or where it would be housed and things like that.

Brian Lehrer: What's your basic concept there? I know you have two general areas that you write about in the book where people can start to approach the idea of a white bonus, a family bonus, and a social bonus. Once that estimator tool gets up, do you have something in mind an algorithm or something where I guess mostly white people are going to use it to calculate their own white bonus and hopefully use that as food for thought?

Tracie McMillan: Yes. It's not an algorithm. I think any social scientist will tell you that getting a truly social science accurate number for each person is probably beyond certainly my capacity as a journalist. What the estimator will do is it will walk folks through and be like, "All right, so let's look at what kind of help you've gotten from your family." There's good enough social science to be like, "Oh, did your parents help with college? Did they pay for half of it? All right, well, the median cost of college that year was this, so here's a rough number." "Did they help with housing?" So on and so forth.

This has got to be somebody where all four of their grandparents were white. If that's not it, this probably is not the calculator for you. You go through, you tally that up, and then there's a bunch of questions and quizzes, pretty quick to get through, to look at what kinds of policies and practices might have given your families advantages because they were white. That would be things like the GI Bill, which pretty much was intended to only go to white folks. It wasn't written that way, but everyone understood that the housing and educational benefits would be going largely to white GI, that was its intent.

Looking at did one of your parents, or did you ever get given a pass when you broke a law? Were you stopped in the park when you were smoking a joint, and they just let you go? Things like that, where there's pretty good social science showing that discrimination often works in favor of white folks, where we get given the benefit of the doubt, we get given more opportunities, whereas folks of color will get punished.

Then the idea is that, on the back end, my researchers and I would be working together to pull together enough data that you can spit out, again, a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate. This is not something that you can take to a dissertation committee and be like, "All right. This is the defensible number." That $371,000 number for me, that's almost certainly an undercount. I don't think that there's a way to fully tally all of this.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I guess when you look at, for example, the amount that somebody's white parents paid into their college education, you have to have an underlying stat there that white families in America are pouring more money into their kids' college educations than Black families or other families of color because they just have more to start with and that's the source of the white bonus. You can't just look at how many dollars your parents paid for your college education, but it's got to be comparative, which, of course, those stats are out there and they're real.

Tracie McMillan: Yes. I think the way I did it for the book, was actually very specific to the anecdote and the person so you just say, were you personally, what's the money that you've gotten, and how likely is it that your family would have had that if they weren't white? It's not so much about, like, do white families do something more than others, but more looking at, do white families have more access to policies that help them build wealth, and then how does that trickle down to each person individually?

Brian Lehrer: We'll talk a little bit more in a minute about some of the other families you profiled in this context. You did it on yourself, and then you did it for five other families. If you're just joining us, listeners our guest is journalist and author Tracie McMillan. Her new book is The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. We can take some phone calls. Has anyone listening right now ever tried to calculate the cost or the benefit of your race in dollars and cents? Call us if you have, give us an estimate of a debit or a credit, 212-433-WNYC.

Or who has a question or any other story, you don't have to have actually crunched the numbers, for Tracie McMillan, 212-433-9692, or who's fuming right now. I see at least one text, and I'm going to read this in a second, who's fuming right now thinking, stop making everything about race in the post-civil rights laws world. This is about character and who deserves what, which Tracie addresses in the book.

On any of those, your calls or texts for Tracie McMillan, author of The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, 212-433-9692. Okay. Tracie, somebody already wrote in, "These nonsensical discussions of white privilege/bonus are what is polarizing the country. It's not a privilege if most people have it. We're also constantly reminded that European Americans will soon be a minority. Only then can you sensibly talk about white privilege as well as Chinese American and Jewish American privilege who already have above-average wealth." There's a lot in there, but I think the essence is the beginning. These nonsensical discussions of white privilege are what's polarizing the country.

Tracie McMillan: I don't think that the conversation is what's polarizing the country. I think what's polarizing the country is that our government has made really targeted investments in white communities and white people for a really long time, and they didn't extend it to everybody. That creates a lot of divide there because the folks who are of color who don't get those advantages, I think very fairly feel that they haven't been treated well.

Then the weird thing I think in the US is that much of these benefits that have been given to white folks, we have talked about them as if they're colorblind. We say, well, everybody gets them even when we know that in practice they're really only designed to go to white folks. A lot of white people think that, well, that's just what you get if you're American, but it's not how it's worked.

Brian Lehrer: Give us an example.

Tracie McMillan: Again, I think the GI Bill is a really good example of this. For example, the educational benefits there. It's written as if it's a colorblind law, but all of the congressional debates around the creation of those programs were very clear that the educational benefits were not intended to really go to Black folks, that there were not sufficient seats for Black students to enter colleges. Most Black Americans at that time lived in the deep South where education was still segregated and they were not allowed into institutions, and many northern institutions in fact were very hesitant to admit any Black students.

There's one study showing that 20,000 Black students were turned away from college in the post-World War II era, just a small set of colleges. When you start looking at that, people understood that those policies were not going to really benefit Black folks, but they mostly would go to white people, and yet react as if it was colorblind and everybody had the same chance when they didn't. I don't think the polarization is created by the conversation, the polarization exists. I don't see how we get past that polarization without being honest about the fact that it exists for a reason and then address that and move forward.

Brian Lehrer: I guess we could say, as affirmative action or any diversity, equity, and inclusion program is inspiring a lot of backlash right now. They're widely portrayed as Black or people of color getting a bonus that defines America today, that's the anti-DEI movement. The white bonus is the original racial preference program, it's like the OG affirmative action. It just wasn't called affirmative action. All the DEI programs and business or education are the response, the attempt to play catch up to make the playing field more level, not less level. Why do you think that isn't easier to sell politically as an obvious proposition?

Tracie McMillan: Well, I think it's hard to sell politically because we don't teach accurate history in this country around those programs. I would not have really understood the depth of the discrimination that's built into our policies and practices if I hadn't had time right to sit down and study it, because I was working on this book. I had a general sense like, "Oh, racism happens, things aren't always fair, but we've gotten better."

That's about what I would've understood and I'm somebody who had a college degree and is interested in equity. I had to sit down and actually work on this book to dig into the history and be like, oh, wait, these programs, it was always known that they would be discriminatory in their effect. Everybody knew that and they went forward with it anyway and talked about it as if it was for everybody.

I think in a certain way, it makes sense that so many white people are like, "Wait a minute, why are Black people or brown people, why are other people being given a special leg up?" Because our parents and grandparents got the leg up, not us directly. Then our parents and grandparents did not talk to us honestly about what those decisions were and how that all worked out.

For me, I came out of this project-- Honestly, appalled at how much of the history of discrimination had been hidden from me because I don't see how I'm supposed to go forward in this country as an American who believes in equity if I haven't been given an honest picture of the ways that we've been discriminatory somehow.

Brian Lehrer: Joseph in Rockland County, you're on WNYC with Tracie McMillan. Hi, Joseph.

Joseph: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. What you got?

Joseph: Okay. As I said to your screener earlier, after my 10-year reunion in high school, the young man that sat directly next to me, he had already graduated from college, travelled Europe for a year, came home, was married, had two kids, and owned a home. Unlike me, who had gone to college also, but had not started my professional career. My parents were not able to pay school for me so I had to take out loans.

He already had two kids, at which point I was not married, had no kids. My first child is only seven years old right now. I can relate to what your guest is saying here in terms of the privilege of having a leg up, and I'm playing catch up till this day. My kid will not be as advanced as his kids financially if that makes any sense.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Thank you for personalizing the premise of the book. Joseph, thank you very much, call us again. Mark in Kew Gardens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Yes. Hi. Thanks very much. Brian, in your last segment you said that none of us are, I think unbiased and that's certainly true. I'm a white person and I'm going to just ask the question about, what is politically pragmatic messaging for progressive candidates? I totally agree that my family, we've benefited from the white bonus so to speak. There's a Black man that I really want to get a promotion, and that's Hakeem Jeffries. I really would like to see him be the next speaker of the House of Representative.

For progressive candidates, the irony might be if they really want to help persons of color, communities of color, not to be so explicit about that being their aim, but instead of talk about helping disadvantaged communities. Because that is going to disproportionately help communities of color. I think that with white working-class folks who-- I don't disagree that they're privileged, but it's going to be a long process to try to convince them to[chuckles] feel like they're so privileged out there, a lot of them are struggling. I'm not a communications professional in politics, but I'm trying to draw a distinction between what is true and what is politically pragmatic messaging.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, thank you very much. Tracie, your book, you are not, I think at all writing about what's politically pragmatic messaging as opposed to what's true. You hear how it lands out there with Mark who wants the Democrats to do well, but is, I think cringing with the anticipation of how this conversation will land in the swing vote suburbs.

Tracie McMillan: Yes, for sure. This project is very much about facts and truth more than what's a good political messaging project. As much as the book is framed around the white bonus, I'm also pretty careful in the book to talk about what racism cost to all of us. I see this as a one-two punch. You have to be honest about the fact that there was white advantage before you can really then, at least as a white person, talk about the ways that racism so ruins our democracy and eviscerates our safety net. Because a lot of white people hurt a lot because of the ways that racism ruins those collective institutions.

In fact, I think with the reporting for the book, I've certainly come to feel most white people probably at this point in history are hurt more overall by the way racism decimates our collective institutions than we are helped by individual assistance. When we talk about that I Tracie got $140,000 or so from my family, which I can trace back to white advantage, most of that spending is for education, is for healthcare, is for covering living costs. It's covering stuff that if we had strong public healthcare, if we had affordable housing, if we had affordable education, I wouldn't have needed that help from them in the first place.

Getting back to what Joseph was talking about with student loans, for me, something that was just so powerful was to realize that when it was the post-World War II generation with the GI Bill, college education was basically free. Then as our population becomes more diverse, the folks who are going to college become more diverse. There's less and less public support for institutions like higher education for the taxes that can support it.

The more diverse the college student body gets, the less state money is going into those systems and the more expensive it becomes for individuals. For me, I think you've got to be honest about how that's working so you can address it. Ian Haney López and Heather McGhee do some beautiful work around this, talking about the ways that you-- If racism is dividing us, you can't fight it by pretending it's not there. I think as much as I certainly would like to see useful messaging, I don't know that I'm the one to figure that out.

Brian Lehrer: As the middle class stagnates and declines over the decades, and it hurts white Americans more than in the past. Just to follow up on our caller's political question, because this is in the book, why wouldn't they politically begin to align their interests more with progressive policies that could benefit lower-income Americans across racial lines, like higher minimum wage laws, Medicare for all, free public college, limits on the cost of rent and energy, things like those? I think we're still living in this world of, and you write about this in the book, an old notion of the undeserving poor and people see white people and Black people who are poor differently.

Tracie McMillan: That's certainly a difficult problem to address. For me, it just became really clear that racism is the language and the logic that we all learn that justifies this idea that some people deserve more than others, and particularly that some people deserve housing, but other people don't. Some people deserve education. These things where there's this fundamental argument about, well, that's something that everybody should have or not.

I will say that when I'm out talking to people about this work, I am surprised at how readily barriers and resentment come down when you're talking to folks one-on-one. I think a lot of what is happening is that you have-- White folks have plenty of reasons to be resentful. We were told that this economy was fair and that was going to work for us, and now for most people, it really is not working very well.

There's a lot of reasons to be resentful. It's just that we don't do a very good job of explaining why that is happening, and then you have folks come in and say, "Well, actually, the reason that you're life is hard is that it's immigrants coming in and taking your jobs. It's because Black people are getting benefits that they don't deserve things like that." Trying to combat that, I think it happens on the grassroots level. It happens in communities a lot more than what I see reflected in the media.

Brian Lehrer: Kitty in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kitty.

Kitty: Hi Brian. Just want to point out how racism is used as a disincentive for public investment, and to the extent that that happens, white people do suffer. I remember thinking about the book by Heather McGhee about The Sum of Us where she points out that the disinvestment in public pools in the South led to pools being privatized, and then poor white people couldn't afford them either.

I think it's important to point out how corporate power and corporate media stresses that there is the whole issues of race and how means testing and [unintelligible 00:24:25] let's give to poor people and let rich people fend for themselves is used to stoke that resentment. Then what happens is that very rich people get to keep what they got, and they don't invest publicly in services that are needed by all people.

Brian Lehrer: Kitty, thank you. Robert in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Yes. I just want to say that there's a lot of people being left out of this conversation. I understand how racism affects poverty, and nobody is more sensitive to that than I am. I understand the crimes against humanity that the Blacks in America have suffered. This may be a hard concept for people to accept, but there's poverty in the Jewish community. There's poverty in the Italian community, there's poverty in the Irish community. It's not necessarily the case that only racism creates poverty, and I just feel that there's a lot-- I grew up in a neighborhood in Philadelphia where poverty was the name of the game. Nobody's parents had the money to send them to college [unintelligible 00:25:44] what they were.

Brian Lehrer: Robert, let me get Tracie to answer your question. Tracie?

Tracie McMillan: I've done a lot of work around that. As a journalist, I come out of a tradition of poverty reporting. I was a welfare reporter for about five years during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, and I think one of the fundamental stumbling blocks in American political life is that we so often conflate race and class. We assume that Black equals poor and white equals advantage, and that's not at all the case. It makes it so difficult to build across race lines because I think Black folks rightfully are upset or people of color rightfully upset because they get portrayed that everybody must be poor, or struggle.

Then you also have white folks who are poor, who are like, "Well what about me? My life is not easy." I certainly have seen that in my family. I've had periods of being poor. I'm careful in The White Bonus to really talk about how-- As much as we certainly want to look at closing the gap between races, we also want to look at raising the bar for how poor we let people get in this country, and that affects everybody.

I don't think anybody who is white and is poor is not getting a whole lot of direct financial advantage from being white. They probably have a little more capacity to catapult themselves out of it because some doors might get opened, but I think that's really hard to see when you're actually struggling day to day.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much more we could do. We are running out of time. I'm going to mention one thing just because it's shocking and horrible, but amusing. There's the profile in your book of the white guy who didn't go to jail for something that he did that a lot of other Black people did go to jail for the same thing. Listener writes, "Trump is the poster child for The White Bonus. How else can a criminal and a fraud be given the benefit of the doubt to be president of the United States?"

I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but I would like you to conclude with a note on what policies you would like to see to more level the playing field. When you put it in these dollars and cents terms like you do, it inevitably raises the issue of reparations. Because what are reparations? Payments for plunder that's taken place over the generations.

That's complicated how to implement it, all of that stuff and talk about backlash, but what do you recommend, or do you only describe the situation in your book and not go to policy prescriptions?

Tracie McMillan: I don't go to policy prescriptions specifically because I didn't want to open up that hornet's nest [chuckles] because I was like, "It's going to be enough just to describe this." I will say, having done this research, I don't see how there can be any reasonable objection to the idea of needing to pay some kind of form of reparations and to level that playing field.

You should do something. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what's politically feasible. I follow the work of Darrick Hamilton, who I think is really smart. He's on the State Reparations Commission in New York, and I think that those are things that are really promising. For me, I would say the big thing is figuring out how to make education and housing affordable for everybody and raise that bottom, and then I think in some ways you would see that stuff trickle up.

Would be the rising tide books, all boats kind of idea. That if you make the bottom more stable, we're just generally going to see a little bit more mobility for everybody.

Brian Lehrer: Tracie McMillan's new book is The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Tracie McMillan: Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.

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