BlackMajik
Behind Enemy Lines
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Exactly how much has racism benefited White Americans?
Journalist and author Tracie McMillan did the math: The advantages she’s gotten over her life from being White, she estimates, amount to $371,934.30.
To calculate that number, McMillan tallied those benefits and divided them into two categories: A family bonus, which includes money her parents spent on her college tuition, educational loans she got from her grandfather and an inheritance; and a social bonus, which includes jobs, apartments and access to credit she’s gotten throughout her life.
Those resources and capital, she concludes, wouldn’t have been available to her if it weren’t for her race.
In her new book, “The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America,” which publishes Tuesday, McMillan traces just how much of her family’s modest wealth can be attributed to policies and practices that have systematically hurt Black Americans.
Through investigative research, interviews and personal recollections, McMillan examines how racism has shaped her life, as well as the lives of four other White, middle class families.
“It was the one story about White people that I didn’t know,” she says
McMillan, who grew up in rural Michigan and now lives in New York, didn’t have a particularly privileged upbringing by most standards. As she details in the book, she grew up in an abusive household and an unfortunate accident left her mother unable to care for her. In college, McMillan juggled numerous jobs to support herself, and as a working journalist, she’s had her own brushes with poverty.
Despite those hardships, McMillan says the financial advantages she’s experienced because of her race are undeniable. Her grandparents benefited from federal programs that largely excluded Black people, allowing them to build wealth that was then passed on to the next generation. That enabled her parents to help her pay to attend an elite university, which in turn opened doors to employment opportunities.
But, as she writes in the book, those advantages also come with a cost — not just to Black Americans, but White people like her.
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If we could fix racism just by having Black people tell us how bad it was, we would have fixed it by now. As a White American, I felt like I needed to take some responsibility for myself and understand how things were working on my end.
What is the ‘White bonus’ you describe in the book, and how is it different from White privilege?
The “White bonus” is an estimate of the money a White person gets or saves because of White supremacy, public policies or private practices. For me, this was a really humbling exercise.
I’ve been on food stamps and had a stranger live in the bedroom of my one bedroom apartment to save rent through those periods. But at the end of the day, my family has spent about $146,000 to help me out since I left home. That’s money they’re not required to spend by the government. That’s extra money they have.
As I dug into my family’s story, every time I started to peel back the layers, I thought, “Would grandpa have had the money if he wasn’t White?” Well, no. He became a banker around 1930 when across the whole United States, there were a quarter million bankers and only 80 of them were Black. Then he bought a house with a racial covenant (a clause in many 20th century property deeds that explicitly prohibited Black people from owning or occupying real estate).
My grandpa on my other side of the family was a millwright. That’s a job that often was racially restrictive in practice for a long time. He got that job because he worked for his dad, who ran a welding business from his dad. (My great-grandfather) came up from the Ozarks in the early 1900’s and got a job in the foundry at a General Motors plant outside of Detroit.
Foundries are historically a site of racial segregation because it’s the worst, most dangerous, poorly paid job in the factory, and Black workers were not allowed to get out of those departments. My great-grandfather was allowed to get out of that department, got some skills and training, and was able eventually to start a business and buy a house with a racial covenant.
to this woman for doin the research on this. Ima have to give her book "The White Bonus" a read when I can
great point
