Factually! with Adam Conover - How White People Benefit from Racism with Tracie McMillan

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

This episode is sponsored by Surfshark.When we talk about racism in America, we tend to focus on the harm inflicted upon people of color, while rarely focusing on the ways that white people indirectly benefit from a racist culture. Author Tracie McMillan explores this concept of The White Bonus in her latest book, exploring the tangible financial benefits associated with being white in America. In this episode, Adam speaks with Tracie about white Americans reckoning with their privilege, the interconnectedness of racial and class conflicts, and how racism serves as the foundation of the widening class gap in the nation. Find Tracie's book at at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, we've talked a lot on this show and on my other platforms about how specific policies and institutions in this country have harmed African-Americans. In fact, we're designed to harm them and to benefit white people instead, and how this created the racial inequality

that we see in this country today. Just to take a few examples, redlining made it impossible for African-Americans to access loans or buy homes outside narrowly confined areas, which constrained their ability to build wealth as white people were able to do. We have a school system that's based around property taxes. So rich homeowners in wealthier, whiter areas

get better educations than poorer people who are shut out of the housing market. And we have a racist policing and criminal justice system that targets black people disproportionately and that locks them up for longer on average. So when today we see things like income inequality, health disparities, education disparities, you name it, between black and white Americans,

we need to remember that they were the outcome of these specific policy decisions. Now, I know a lot of you have heard this argument before, but there's a flip side of it that we don't consider as often, which is that this system that was designed to harm black people was also designed to help white people. White people benefit from mass home ownership and easy access to credit, designed to harm black people was also designed to help white people.

White people benefit from mass homeownership and easy access to credit, higher education, and a criminal justice system that protects rather than harms them on average. And the reason we don't often think of it this way is that white people are taught not to think of ourselves as even having a race. Oh, everyone else has a race, but not us.

We are the regulars, the default. But it's bullshit. The system of racial hierarchy we live under does assign us a race. It just gives us a benefit for having that race. And what we as white people almost never do is confront those benefits. Ask, what are they, and how do we feel about them? And what should we do as a result? I mean, think about this.

Over the past couple hundred years, Black American writers and thinkers have done an enormous amount of incredible work asking and answering the question of what it means to be Black in America. But by comparison, there's been almost no white writers who have asked the same question about what it means to be white in America. And you know what? If having this conversation offends or disgusts you, you can feel free to shrink away like so many others have.

But guess what? That is not what we're gonna do. We are not gonna take that cowardly approach on this show. Instead, we are going to ask what it means to be white and what we should think about it as a result. And today we have an author who has written an incredible book on this very topic to talk with us about it. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you

that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every one of these conversations ad free. We have a community book club, a lot of other great perks as well. And if you want to come see me do stand up comedy, head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates. I'm coming soon to a city near you. And now let's get to this week's episode.

My guest this week is Tracy McMillan, and she has a new book called The White Bonus that is an incredibly powerful mix of journalism, memoir, and analysis about what it really means to be white in America and how we benefit as a result. Please welcome Tracy McMillan. Tracy, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you for having me, Adam. So let's talk about this right off the bat. We, as we sit here, are both white people. I am a white person. I assume that you would call yourself a white person too. You have written a book about racism in America, and here we are having a conversation about it. Why did you feel it was important as a white author

to write about this issue? And I'm really curious, what's important about that perspective? Right, well, I wanted to write about sort of how racism works for white people because I didn't know how to talk about it, right? Like I didn't really have any idea how to write about, think about being white other than to sort of be like,

oh, sorry about the privilege, right, but that's not very helpful. Yeah. Right? So I had been working for a long time as a racial equity reporter, I mean, racial and social equity reporter. And it just became really clear to me

that I'd been raised to be colorblind, but that wasn't really how things work in this country. It's a great goal. It's not really how things work. this country, right? It's a great goal. It's not really how things work. And I knew a little bit about how to understand race and equity in the US when it came to people of color, right? Racism is bad for them. But I realized I really had no idea how to talk about it.

The other half of it, right? Which is that racism often gives advantages to white folks. And it's part of the conversation we almost never have. I mean, even white Americans who are sympathetic to the issue of racism are aware of it. You know, is it, oh my God, that's so terrible. How black people are treated, da da da. You know, they read the right books.

They watch the right movies. You know, Michael Keaton knocks down the sign off the wall. Or is it Kevin Costner? Who was it in Hidden Figures? He knocks off the bathroom sign. Do you remember this? Right. It's Kevin Costner. Right. It's Kevin Costner. That's a great moment, right? Yeah. He pulls down the side. Oh, he fixed racism forever. Oh my God. I found out racism exists. Let me fix that for you. Bang. Knock the sign down. We did it, hooray. That's so many white people's experience of what racism is in America. But even folks who are maximally thoughtful about it,

almost never think about race in relation to themselves as white people. And in fact, a lot of white people have a revulsion or a resistance to thinking of race as even something that they possess or a label that would be applied to them. So have you felt that resistance throughout your life and where do you think it comes from?

Yeah, I mean, I definitely, you know, I don't come from a lot of money and I went to a private university. So I feel like particularly in college, right, I would be like, but what did I get for being white, right? Particularly because the way we would talk about racial privilege would be about the experience of very affluent white people, right?

And so I would sort of be like, what did I ever get for being white, right? Like, that's crazy. And then, you know, you get some more experience in the world and you understand like, oh, it works really differently for people who aren't white. And for me, like the project of doing the sort of studying of the white bonus was kind of like,

well, if we even take away these sort of soft privilege things that we talk about and instead just focus on like dollars and cents, maybe I'll learn something that's helpful. Yeah. So what is the concept of the white bonus? Is the title of the book? What do you mean by that? Right. Yeah. So what is the concept of the white bonus? Is the title of the book? What do you mean by that?

Right. So the white bonus is the amount of money that you've gotten because of racism when you're a white person, right? Oh, I get the check every year. It's awesome. I know we all get a direct check, right? No.

No, I mean, yeah. Well, I have not received such a check. So what do you mean by that bonus? Right. So the way that I measure it in the book is I say, okay, well, I have not received such a check. So what do you mean by that, Bones? Right, so the way that I measure in the book is I say, okay, well, how much money did I or the people that I was profiling in the book, how much have we gotten from our families since we left home? And how likely is it that our families would have had

that money to give us if they weren't white, right? So that just means going back through each family's history and the events in the person's life and saying, okay, like, just how likely is it, right? So that just means going back through each family's history and the events in the person's life and saying, okay, like just how likely is it, right? Like this is not, I'm not proving this at the level of social science. I'm not sort of proving it in a courtroom, but just sort of going, all right, well, you know,

for me, for example, you know, when my grandfather passed away, I inherited $25,000. That was really helpful for me at the time. Now, this is not the kind of money, right? That a lot of my classmates at the private university are getting from their families, right? It's much smaller. But for me, it was significant.

And, you know, then go, okay, well, how did my grandfather have that money? Right? Well, he worked as a banker in mid-century America, right? At a time when, you know, when he went into banking in 1930 in the entire country, there were only 80 black bankers. Right. And so pretty much, right. He had that job because he was white in part.

And then also, right. He bought a house in the thirties that had a racial covenant on it. So if he had been a black person, he would not have legally been allowed to leave in that, to live in that home and to build the wealth that he had right through that house. So I think, you know, when I started looking at my white bonus, I was like, well,

like, it's pretty clear, like any money from that grandfather, right, that's tied to his being white. And I didn't do anything to make that the case, right? But I'm still benefiting from it. Yeah. I also think sometimes, even if you haven't received a check like that, there's a more invisible form of getting that money. I mean, I never in my twenties, after I graduated college,

received a check from my parents for any reason, other than a birthday gift. And you know, sometimes the birthday gifts are, you know, not insignificant, but you know, whatever. So I guess I did receive money. Nevermind, I take it back. I guess I did get some checks And you know, sometimes the birthday gifts are, you know, not insignificant, but you know, whatever that's it's So I guess I did receive money. Never mind. I take it back I guess I did get some checks because they were birthday gifts. What am I talking about? Why would I have left that out? That's what is so strange the way we think about money Okay, but apart from the birthday gifts, right? Right. Let's just let's pretend I never got those

You know, I remember realizing well, hold on a second I Went to college. I have no debt, right? My parents were able to provide that for me. And also I know that if something were to go wrong, I would have my folks to fall back on. You know, early in my twenties, I decided I was going to quit my job as a web developer and do comedy full-time.

And I was luckily able to make a living doing that, doing freelance jobs, video editing, stuff like that, while I did the comedy until I could finally make a living at it. But why did I feel okay to take that risk? It was because, well, if things go really bad, you know, my parents will help me out. You know, I can go visit them on Long Island

and stay in their, stay in their bedroom or whatever it was, right? And I had friends who, in comedy, who genuinely didn't have that cushion. I had people around me who came from immigrant families who didn't have that cushion. There were people around me who came from immigrant families who didn't have that sort of resources, for instance. And then the college itself or why were my parents able to send me to college?

Well, they were both college professors themselves or had a PhD degrees and were educators. Why did they have that? It's because my mom's dad was a World War II veteran, bought a home on the GI Bill, and benefited from the huge influx of cash given to, cash and support given to that generation. Right?

And he lived in Michigan, upper Michigan at the time. Plenty of people lived in Michigan, I think who did not get that help from the federal government, buying a home, et cetera, et cetera. So regardless of the check, there's this whole basis of stability that came from multi-generations of middle-class stability

granted to my family by specific policy decisions on the part of state, local governments, federal government, that not everybody had access to. That's correct. I mean, so the GI Bill and the New Deal are really strong examples of how advantage to white folks has been baked into American policy and sort of social equity, right?

And so with the GI Bill, most of the education benefits were used by white folks. The way that they administered that program, right, you could sort of make the decisions about the GI Bill at the state level, right? So most black people at the time in the US lived in the South. And so the local administrators in the South, right,

could decide you do or you don't get that. Same thing with the housing. And this was in the mid fifties that they were making these decisions. Right, and the same thing with housing, and sort of the mortgage guarantees as well, like under the GI Bill. And so you both had that as well as most of the institutions

of higher education in the South were still segregated. And so you didn't have sufficient capacity to educate all the folks that wanted to get educated. Right? And so that's like huge thing that I think disappears for a lot of white folks, right? Cause it's, you know, your grandpa, your great grandpa but it really has a different effect depending on your race. Yeah. And what you're talking about

is intergenerational wealth. Is it not? I mean, we often think of wealth as being what Bill Gates has or Elon Musk has, but we're talking about resources that families are able to grow and pass down over time that were, to some extent, given to them by policy choices, right?

Absolutely. I mean, middle-class stability is something that government created, and when government created it, they essentially restricted it to white people. I had no idea that, you know, the GI Bill, such a famous bill that granted middle-class security was, you know, so segregation-elasty.

That's not worth, you know what I mean? What was discriminatory in that way? I mean, what other policies, you know, created this? Right, so in addition to the GI Bill and FHA, right, you had just general housing discrimination, right? So we had racial covenants sort of declared unconstitutional in 1948, but discriminating against people on the basis of race for housing didn't become illegal until the Housing Rights Act in 1968, right?

So you have all that time before you could actually, like as a black person go in and be like, no, you can't actually tell me I can't live here because of my race, right? So all those generations, all those decades of building wealth and stability, right? Get left out. And so that's really important.

Higher education, right? Also hugely important, particularly because you had so much segregation in it early on when it was affordable. So I think this is something really important and Heather McGee touches on it somewhat in her book, Some of Us. But, you know, with the GI Bill,

most of the people getting to go to college, it was covered, right? It was just free. You could just go to college because you had the GI Bill. When you get to the boomer generation going through college, then it's a little more expensive. Like you might need a part-time job over the summer

to cover some of the tuition, right? But the states are still chipping in a lot of money for it, right? And at the time, right, only a few more people of color are university, right? So GI Bill is almost only white people outside of HBCUs, right, that are in universities. Then you have the boomer generation,

the little bit less white, still pretty affordable. You get to my generation, Gen X, now you kinda gotta work full-time during the summer and halftime during the school year to get through, but you'll probably have some debt when you get out. And so that's as the amount of people of color coming into the educational population, right, is increasing.

And now, right, as we're getting a more and more integrated higher education population, right, you don't get out of college, right, without mortgaging your future, unless your family can pay for it. I was lucky that I had no debt. I consider that to be like a great gift that I had. Whereas 70 years ago, everyone going to college was like,

yeah, who has debt? I mean, like we all went for free, right? Or at least the vast majority did. I never even thought until you pointed this out of combining these two trends. A, that in the 50s, higher education was whites only. Like, if black people were going to the college, it was either a special institution

that was founded specifically for that purpose, of which there were only a handful, or they were escorted by the National fucking Guard. Right? In order to cross the gates of that university. To now, we have a much better, admissions is far more race blind than it used to be, and people of all races go to colleges to not a perfect extent,

but obviously it happens now it didn't before. To combine that trend with the trend that, hey, 70 years ago or so, university was free and now you have to, you have to pay hundreds of thousands, you put yourself hundreds of thousand dollars in debt to go. Holy shit. As college became more inclusive, it also became more expensive simultaneously, such that basically just white people of our grandparents' generations went for free.

Now, black people couldn't go. Now that black people can go, it's super expensive to go. I never thought of those two trend lines are going in opposite directions at the exact same time. Yeah, I mean, there's really interesting political research about this too, right? So in the 1950s, and I have not memorized these statistics, but in the 1950s, the majority of white voters supported the idea that government was supposed to help and that everybody would

need help sometime and sort of a broad support for things like the New Deal, where government was seen as an agent to help you and you would pay taxes and you would get broad support for things like the New Deal, where government was seen as an agent to help you and you would pay taxes and you would get something back for it, right? As soon as our sort of body politic and people in higher education, as soon as that began to be integrated white support for this idea of a collective sort of government response,

plummeted, right? It just went way down. And then you see the rise of Reagan and Nixon and you know, all this stuff that sort of sets up where we are today. I mean, we covered this on my show, The G-Word. It's one of the most like important facts about the 20th century that as soon as government help,

government assistance of any kind started being given to more than just white people. White people started going, it's wasteful. We gotta stop giving it out. Look at these bad people getting the government money. And then, you know, the age, the New Deal age of governments helping people buy homes, go to college, all the sort of supports that our grandparents had and that we don't have, started being taken away, specifically because suddenly they were going to black,

I mean, the most obvious example of this is, I've brought up on the show before, what happened to public pools that, there used to be public pools all across America. What happened when a very important place that was desegregated was public pools, the white people closed the pools down and they started putting them in their backyards

and country clubs instead. And now, like I dare you to find a public pool in America in a place that is not, you know, still consistently super white, right? And that is sort of, you can look at almost the entire history of 20th century America through that lens, but it's one of those things that's invisible

until you actually bring it up and talk about it. Yeah, I mean, I think for me working on the book, I was really surprised at just how consistently white people sort of are like, well, everything, and it can be generous if it's for us, but the second that we start integrating, right? And this is, it's not every individual white person, right? But sort of overall white voters are like,

as soon as we got to share with people who aren't white, we're not really into it. Like we're not, that's not what we're here for. And it becomes, you know, I think ends up biting us in the back side, like pretty consistently at this point, right, because increasingly we actually do need some kind of help from government to be able to afford housing, right?

To be able to afford healthcare. And these are all ideas that we've sort of allowed politically to buy into this idea that, well, we have to make sure people really deserve this, right? And whenever you hear about people need to deserve this, usually what we mean in the U.S. is, well, we want to make sure that black people aren't going to get this because we're worried about whether or not they would really deserve it. Even though it'd be fine, right, if white people were the ones intended to get it. And then there's this weird metastasization of that idea,

right, where you start getting this more and more punitive system. You normalize the idea that you're supposed to constantly be proving whether or not you deserve stuff. And then just, that's how the system works. And now that we've let capitalism get so much more aggressive and unfettered, where people do need more help, what we have is this really punitive system, right?

So increasingly like white people are caught up in that as well. Yeah, it ends up hurting everybody. I mean, if you're, I'm sure there's plenty of white people listening to this show perhaps thinking, well, hold on a second. I was not helped out that much by the federal government. Well, you might want to ask yourself,

were your grandparents helped out by the federal government? And then did your grandparents' generation then slowly over time want to stop supporting those policies and take them away from everybody? And could that be why your state, you know, your parents went to the state university for free or for very cheap, but for you, it was 20 grand a year or whatever it was.

Like that's, we, our entire generation is the victim of this trend. Probably less so white people than everybody else, but it's affecting everybody. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot, I grew up in rural Michigan and went to a public high school. And, you know, when I was graduating in the 90s, you know, a lot of my classmates were like,

why would I go to college? I can just like walk out the door and go work at Ford or GM. And I'm gonna be perfectly fine. I don't need a fancy life. I don't need to go study a bunch of stuff. I just wanna like live and have a family. And you could do that. So there was really this sort of public-private social contract across the Rust Belt for those communities where if you wanted to just have a basic life, you weren't necessarily ambitious about doing some grand thing out in the world,

but you just wanted to go and support a family, you can do that for free, right? You didn't have to go into debt to finish high school to get into the factory. And now, right, we've sort of bought into this economy where you are supposed to have this very high level of education just to get to the point that like my grandfather got into in the 40s, right, with very little education.

I was able to support like, like three children and a wife and send two kids to college. I mean, it's, I think all the time about, again, you know, my, my mom was raised upper peninsula of Michigan. Her grandfather, my grandfather was a, you know, a world war two veteran, didn't go to college, had some vocational training, became a manager at AT&T, worked that job for the rest of his life, died a millionaire, a single digit millionaire, you know, because of wise investments and the housing market and all the things you were supposed to do. Um, and you know, my, my part of the family, you know, my mom left that area and, you know, uh, got a PhD and et cetera.

But the rest of the folks that she grew up with, right, are not doing as well as my grandfather was, right? Like the, it's literally, if you go to that area, you're like, this is the death of the American dream, right? This is the death of the middle-class. If you look at what has happened to people's incomes, you know, the amount of opportunity, et cetera. And I mean, that doesn't bring race into it specifically.

But I mean, if the if if racism was the reason that we pulled back the help to, you know, people buying homes, getting education, et cetera, it's like we have we killed the American dream ourselves because black people were going to get it. And we said, you know what? If you don't have, if you're gonna have it, we don't want anyone to have it. Or something along those lines.

Is that too drastic of a way to look at it? I wish it was too drastic. I don't know that that's true, right? And it's certainly, it's not, right? Not all white people, this is like more about voting patterns and things like that, right? There's a lot of people who are not engaged as voters and aren't shaping this policy and things like that. But the overall trend seems to be like I got mine and on put up the ladder behind me. Yeah. And, you know, I think that probably the, like the generations before me, they weren't thinking too much about the,

like it just didn't even occur to them that this might also go badly for like their own kids and their own grandchildren, right? They were like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's just gonna happen to those other people. But they actually built this whole system that's pretty bad for most of us. Well, and I think a lot of that's because

a lot of people who are helped, especially by the federal government, don't really acknowledge to themselves that they were helped, you know, that they're like, oh, I did it all by myself, not counting, oh, I got to go to college for free, I had a huge home subsidy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It just doesn't, they're like, no, I did it all myself. They literally believe that they did, that's sort of part of the American way. And so when it's just doesn't, they're like, no, I did it all myself. They literally believe that they did. That's sort of part of the American way. And so when it's taken away, yeah, let's take it away from everybody else, not realizing that their own kids would need it too. I wanna dig into though, not all white people. I mean, because look, I have friends

who are from very poor areas of white America, right? Grew up in Appalachia, places like that. who are from very poor areas of white America, right? Grew up in Appalachia, places like that. Was this bonus that you speak of really something that was given to every white person in America or were there white people, white areas left out? Are there any trends to look at there? Right, so I didn't go into studying this particular trend,

but the white bonus doesn't hit every white person the same. Right. It depends a lot on the specifics of your family. So the overall trend of there being a bonus that absolutely holds, right. Because you don't just have things like the new deal and the GI bill. You also have employment discrimination. You have occupational segregation, right?

So stuff like, you know, my great grandfather was from a farming and mining community in Missouri and came up to Michigan to work in a foundry at like a GM plant, right? And so he got out of the foundry. He got training and he became a welder and started his own business and did very well for himself. Right?

Very strong data, right? About black workers were kept in the foundry, right? So if you got into the factory, you weren't getting out of the foundry, just the most dangerous and poorly paid part of the factory, like things like that. So I think that really shifts depending on location specifics of history. And there's also the question too of sort of how it parcels out over time, right? Because you could also just have, you know, a grandparent who did get some of a bonus, but wasn't as good with money, right? Didn't really figure out what to do with it.

Because I think, you know, for the purposes of the book and having this conversation, I thought it was important to quantify and have numbers to look at. But a lot of it's also just about the offering of opportunity, right, to folks, and then letting you get what you can with that opportunity. And so that's part of like this meritocracy idea, like, oh, I go and I work hard, and so I deserve this thing, and I wasn't given anything, because I had to work hard. But I think that something we often miss

as white people is that, like, having your hard work pay off is not guaranteed, right? And just the fact that it pays off is much more common for white folks traditionally and historically in the US. Yeah, I mean, everybody works hard. Like after a while, I realize, I don't know, this comes from my experience doing comedy. Working hard is kind of the easiest part.

Like I know it's hard to work hard, but that's just a part where you show up every day. Like, yeah, that's just you doing your fucking job. What else separates people who really thrive and people who are not able to make it? It's other factors. It's all the advantages that you started with, you know? It's like, sure, everybody ran the 100 yard dash,

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So you said a couple of times that you were, you know, trying to really calculate this. I mean, were you able to quantify what the bonus was and what tools did you use? Yeah, so again, the family bonus, there's sort of two parts of the white bonus. There's your family bonus, which is what you get from your family.

And then there's also a social bonus, which is sort of what kinds of material advantages you personally might've gotten as an adult, right? And so I really was just digging into social science and economics to try and figure out whether it was likely that race mattered at certain juncture points in terms of accumulating money. So as an example, for me, my family bonus adjusted for inflation is about $130,000 over the 30 years since I left home. And then I got that because I said,

well, my grandfather was a white banker. My grandfather had a covenant on his house, things like that. Then the social bonus, right, is me looking at things like employment discrimination. And for, you know, I was hired for a nannying job in New York when I was in college and looking at data on sort of the racial demographics of

nanny and how likely it is that, you know, I would get hired into the specific kind of job I had if I was black or white, right? And sort of that as well, I mean, and I talk about this in the book, you know, the woman I worked for came to me and she said, look, I know this is a really easy nanny and job, which is totally true, was not the nanny die. She said, I know this is a really easy nanny and job, which is totally true, was not the nanny die. She said, I know this is a really easy nanny and job. And you know, the fact is my kids are never gonna have to work and they need to know somehow that people do. And that's a large part of why you're here, right? And so these were two lovely-

You were hired as a nanny to be like, here's what a working person looks like. Look, someone who is being paid for their labor. That was the point? That is what she said to me. Okay. At least that's what I remember. I think, though, like if I dig into it, right?

Yeah. Like, I think me being white was a big part of that, right? Because these were like two, like very privileged young white girls. There were people of color who work all the time around them, including in their home, right? Right. Like I was there to be somebody who could be their sister,

but also had to work because they were not meeting like white girls from NYU who had to work, right? Wow. That's part of that, right? So you really felt you were hired for this job because you were white. That is not the only reason, but that was part of it, right? And I think that that was probably,

when I was hired, that was a necessary part of it. Now, right, the reason this doesn't work at the level of social science is like, there was not to my knowledge, a black candidate that I was chosen over. I have no idea. And then I will say like that woman had very liberal racial politics, right?

I don't think that, like, I have no idea if it was me versus a black person with the exact same like qualifications would be the same thing, right? But I do think me being white mattered there and helped me, right? And then once you start following that thread, so I go and I work for this family.

Well, then that family, because I'm just like some kid from like the country in Michigan, right? So that family says, oh, did you want to work in journalism? Let us give your resume to somebody. Where did you want to work? The Village Voice?

Okay, great, we'll take it over there, right? And so I ended up getting the best investigative internship at the paper. Now I had similar sort of politics to Wayne Barrett, who was the reporter who hired me. There, you know, I had been doing work that would suggest I would be good at that job, but it did also take, you know, a connected attorney handing my resume to the publisher and saying, find this girl an internship. Right. So it opened that door for me.

And then other things, right? So that same family, I was estranged from my parents after my, like during my sophomore year, I needed to find an apartment. I'm 19, I have like a thousand dollars in savings and two part-time jobs. And so to get an apartment, I needed someone to co-sign. That rich family co-signed for me, right?

And so that helps me to get an apartment in Brooklyn. This family really like, let's just, hey, let's just make this girl's dreams come true. Like, holy shit, this is- I mean, they did a lot for me because, I mean, the mom had put herself through college too, right? So she understood and sympathized and all of that. She saw you and she said,

here's someone with a similar struggle to me who coincidentally looks a lot like me, maybe a little bit. She saw herself in you, where she might not have seen herself in other types of people. Right, and doesn't mean she wouldn't have had sympathy for somebody else, but it probably would have been a little bit different, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so that all helped me. And then there's things like, you know, once you start looking at, you know, like New York City in the 1990s, right? That was right when rent stabilization, which is our rent regulation program, had gotten weakened, right, by the legislature. And so, all of a sudden, very recently in the 90s, there was a rule that

as soon as a stabilized apartment was vacated, if a new tenant came in, you could increase the rent by 20%. And then if you got it above the rent above $2,000, or this is 90s, so that seemed like a lot, if it got above $2,000, then there wasn't any regulation. You could just charge whatever the market would bear. So if you were a landlord that wanted to jack up your rent without technically breaking the law, what you would do is you would bring in a white girl

with an out-of- state driver's license into your apartment who's gonna just keep like, who's gonna probably cycle out in a year or two, right? Uh-huh. Right, you wouldn't have a family of color of four who are like looking for a place to live for 10 years. You're like, you know what I need? A college girl, baby, who's like.

I need a college girl who's not gonna stay, right? And this is like, like I initially. She's gonna move in with her boyfriend in 18 months. Look, get her out of here. She'll be up in like, Boram Hill. It'll be great. She'll be so happy. So, I mean, all of that, right?

And for me, that was really interesting, right? To sort of hold that thread and be like, all right, well, what did this door open? What did this door open? What did this door open? All that. And including, you know, I, my journalism internship was amazing. And I learned a ton and you know, my boss who was, I mean, was a racial radical. I mean, he like how is black liberation army, like people or something, right? Like he's a wonderful, like radical person, but he also felt very paternalistic

towards me because I was having this hard time with my family, right? And then you start getting into this thing where you're like, well, how likely is it that that would have been as warm, right? If I didn't look like I could be his daughter, right? And I think the thing that's really damning of my country, honestly, is that I'm like, I don't know.

I can't say, and it's like statistically, it's probably likely, right, that I would have gotten these advantages because I'm white, even though I didn't ask for them that way. Well, the reality is that when you say there wasn't a black person at any of these steps who you were chosen over, that's because there wasn't a black person

who even had the opportunity to get close to those opportunities. That was even in the neighborhood of those opportunities. That was, you know, oh, there's just no applicants, you know, like that sort of thing. Like there's no need to discriminate when no one's able to even get within a hair's breadth, you know, in the first place.

And what's also striking to me is every step in this story, you're talking about yourself and the other people who are giving you the advantages, are the most enlightened possible people at the time. They're literally, they're like Bradley Whitford in Get Out I Would Have Voted for Obama twice, or three times. They're racial radicals, as you say,

and yet they are unwittingly or maybe semi-wittingly perpetrating the exact same systems of intergenerational wealth transfer, basically, that result in the bonus that you're talking about, that perpetuate the same things that they would decry otherwise, which I guess I would say is, you could say is the height of hypocrisy,

except that, you know, we all live, none of us made the world that we live in and we're all to some extent doomed to do these things over and over again. I'm sure I could look at my own life and, you know, find a million ways in which I've been equally hypocritical. So I guess my question is, you know, you've million ways in which I've been equally hypocritical. So I guess my question is, you know,

you've very well established for me what the white bonus is and how we've benefited from it. What do we do with that information, right? Because I'm not a fan, you know, the knock against this sort of consciousness is that it's just about, oh, we're just supposed to feel guilty now. I certainly don't go around telling people

that they should feel guilty. I assume you don't either. So what do we do with this information? Well, I think for me, the thing that was really powerful about measuring the white bonus is that it allowed me to then look at what racism costs us. Like all of us, right? Like that's sort of the trick, right? Because this whole thing where we never talk about the fact that being white is an

advantage, right? People are real defensive about that. We also can't ever talk about how racism works otherwise for us, right? Because it's like, sure, it gave me $130,000 of advantage. I'm super grateful for that, right? It has also kind of completely decimated our capacity to have like a public healthcare system of any quality, right, which means that every year I'm paying like 5, 10 grand out of pocket to insure myself, right? So like over the course of my lifetime, that's a lot more than the $130,000, right?

Or, I mean, I'm very lucky to be and rent stabilized housing, but if I had to pay market rate housing, right? And right, we don't wanna regulate cause we want, and we wanna make sure people deserve things and all of that, right? What does that cost me over time? What does like, what would student debt look like? All of that, right?

You can't really, I don't think you can honestly talk as a white person about what that costs, unless you're also honest about what we get, right? And so for me, the point is to sort of be like, well, we have this consciousness. So do you think it's worth it? Right? Like, do you think it's worth being quiet

and complacent about racism, right? Because there's certainly a material conversation to have. And then let's say that you get through that calculation, you say, you know what? This is really good money and I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut. Well, then just be honest about that, right? Like if you don't really wanna say,

like I would just rather like not say anything and I'm totally fine with sort of buying into a system that goes against the founding ideals of this country, right? Then fine, go ahead, like do it, just be honest about it. I mean, you are putting so many new thoughts into my head here, for real, because I had always thought of the systemic racism, all these policy choices as being, you know,

white people hoarding wealth for ourselves, right? White people say, I don't want other people to have it as for us, as for my type of person, I want to keep it. What you're pointing out are the ways in which we hurt ourselves by doing so, that your argument is that ultimately it's a net loss that you receive a white bonus of, you know, $5,000 of goods and services and free housing or whatever it is. But you end up losing $7,000 because you took away free college education for your kids, because now there's homelessness on your street corner because housing prices are too high because we've stopped

subsidizing housing, et cetera, et cetera. Is that. Do I have that right, that it's ultimately a net loss? I think for most white people, that's true, right? I mean, I profile a woman in the book, Barb Nathan Katz, who had been born into a middle-class family in mid-century and fell into working poverty. She lived in Texas where they did not expand Medicaid. Social science, very clear,

the states that have not expanded Medicaid, that is a reflection of white resentment, right? But that's why that's happening. That's why you don't have Medicaid expansion in those States. And so Barb becomes diabetic and is, but doesn't know it is scared to go to the doctor because it's going to cost too much.

So she dies, right? She dies at home in bed and her sisters, she has three sisters, they all have done fine, they're middle class, but they lost their sister. So maybe you individually can say, oh, well, it works out okay for me. I think most white people outside of the top 1% of income, most of us don't have enough money

that we're not going to lose somebody or see somebody get hurt by this that we love. Right? Like I'm going to have a niece or a nephew who's going to be stuck in college. Right? I'm going to have a kid in my neighborhood that I really adore who gets caught up by like a really punitive criminal justice system, right? That doesn't give them a second chance.

Right? I'm going to see all those things start happening. And those are costs to me too, right? And so there's also this thing of being like, well, do I just, am I so into whatever middle-class stability and wealth that I've built that I don't care about seeing this other stuff happening outside? Yeah, I mean, again, take my own example.

You know, my grandparents and my mom's generation benefited from free public education. My mom and my dad were able to ladder up enough that I was able to go to college in the age of college debt without having to incur debt. But my cousins, I have a lot of cousins who are in a lot of debt. And that's awful.

I wish that, and again, that's the death of the American dream because they are doing less well off by many measures than my grandparents and their parents were. I think to go to another earlier metaphor, when white people said, okay, no more public pools, let's have private pools instead. Well, guess what?

A lot of white people can't afford a pool in their backyard or can't afford the country club membership. So even if, hey, 50% of the white people still are, there's a lot of white people who no longer have a pool to go to because collectively they were too resentful to give, you know, to share with black folks. So what's so striking to me about this argument though,

which I, it makes sense to me intuitively is the first time I've heard it, is that, again, I had assumed that all these policies were white people saying, just for us, we're the only ones who want to benefit, et cetera. But what you're saying is, white America cut off its nose despite its face, actually hurt itself, that we actually did economic harm

as white people to ourselves. And that makes me go like, why? It starts to look, if you're looking at it as an economist, which I believe neither of us are, but economics would assert that people act pretty rationally economically, or that overall systems do to some extent, that people would try to advance their own lives

and that of their children. And what you're saying is, no, white America hated black people so much that they said, you know what, we want our own kids to be worse off. And that's like almost hard to, I understand racism is real, right? But I'm like, that makes it sound like it's literally the most powerful force of the human psyche

if we're willing to do that shit just because we're like, ugh, I don't like the people with a different skin color than me. I mean, it's insane. Well, I don't think most white people were thinking that far out. Of course not. Right?

Like, I don't think, so that would be one thing. I think the other thing, and this sort of came out more in my reporting down in Mississippi is that, you know, often there's people who are, how do I put this? It's not like a bunch of white people got together and were just like only for white people for me and my white people, right?

Some people are like that. I mean, some literally did, but yes, many did not. Some did. Most people did not. So when you look at the example of segregation academies in Mississippi during the sort of post Brown versus Board of Education era, right? So these are private schools that were founded

explicitly to replace public schools. So there was this whole scheme that like, they were going to get public funding for these public schools. There was this whole scheme that like, they were going to get public funding for these private schools. This is the root of the school choice voucher stuff, right? Yeah. This is charter schools and everything, yeah. Yeah, so like the people that were running that,

that was like a very small cadre of upper middle class white folks who were real up in arms about it. And then they just kept really actively inflaming that among lower income white folks, sort of like the lower part of the middle class and lower income from there. I mean, and stuff where they're like sending out,

I've looked at this in archives, like sending out like collage newsletters that are just images from magazines of interracial couples and then be like, this could happen to you, this is terrible, like blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, sending this stuff out, all this hate sending out again and again, and then flaming that, whereas in a lot of districts

where integration just ended up happening, right? There's a bunch of mess at the start where people are kind of settling into it. And then after like a year or two, they're like, oh, it's not that bad, it's fine, right? Cause people can't stay, don't stay angry like that. Right.

When they're just trying to live their lives, right? So you can get, you know, I talked to this wonderful historian, Stephanie Rolfe, who studied this stuff. She's like, well, like usually, you know, people will acclimate, right? They don't stay as racist. They don't stay as hateful like that whole time. But what happens is you have this small cadre of people who are real dedicated and they

just keep making this mess again and again. And often those are the folks, they blame it on uneducated poor people, but it's often middle and upper middle class people who see power in this. They can see a way that it benefits them as more affluent people. And then they tricked like other people to come along with. Got it. So it's kind of like a one-way ratchet

where you have in certain areas, you've got a small group of really angry racists who get a racist policy passed. And then everyone else is like, well, okay, whatever, or they buy it or whatever. You know, most of the rest of the population isn't that angry, but it just sort of happens. And then those people die or they get tired

and, but now the policy is there. And it just sort of, and then later on, we had another one, another area, add another one, another area. Another thing that I think is really powerful of what you just said is you're complicating the story really well, because I was like, why would white people do this as a whole, right?

To, you know, our white children. And you're saying, ah, no, it's rich white people doing it to poor white people and black people. It's a combination, a toxic combination of racial warfare and class warfare, where you have upper-class people selling, taking away a benefit by saying, ah, the undeserving black people are gonna get it.

Hey, poor whites, you don't want undeserving black people to get this benefit, right? So therefore, nobody should have it. Aren't you afraid of the, using the welfare queen from the Reagan era of the black woman who is getting so much welfare for all her kids, because she never worked a day in her life, blah, blah, blah, this horrible,

horrible racist stereotype, using that to inflame people, you know, the entire country and take away the benefit from people who actually would otherwise benefit from it. Like take away welfare from white people as well. So it's upper-class people weaponizing racial hatred in order to take a benefit away from everybody else. That's really powerful. Right, and like the thing about this

is that if we don't talk about the white bonus, right, you can't really blame lower-income white folks for being like, what did I get? Right, because we never talk about the fact that we gave stuff to white people. And so then when people come in and say, well, you don't want somebody to get something special, you white person never got anything special.

But if we give money to a poor black person, that would be special and you don't want that. Because we never talk openly about the way that we've given stuff to white folks. And so it just facilitates that whole trick. Yeah, when they were doing the GI Bill after World War II, they weren't like, and a home for every white man. White people get your home.

They just said it was for everybody. And then secretly did not give it to black people who did not have any voice or representation in the media. And so people didn't know about it. They thought everybody just got it. I mean, I'm sure plenty of people were aware of racism at the time and knew better, but. Yeah, nobody in the South.

Nobody in the South was confused about that. They were like, oh yeah, I'm sure like the black GI will have a lot of luck down there at the office. And a lot of the bonus also, we have to be clear, it was something that was given to your grandparents and your parents, maybe not to you, but that's a big part of the dynamic as well, is that because we've taken a lot of government assistance

away, it's less obvious to us that how much we benefit from it because it's intergenerational, because it's stuck around in ways that made it even more invisible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the white bonus, the family part of it, that is like compounding interest kind of thing, right? That is something that your parents or grandparents got

and then facilitated some support and stability and facilitated you being able to keep going forward, right? And the thing is, is like, as the formal, like legal kinds of racial discrimination have become declared unconstitutional, those laws have been sort of overwritten and things like that, what's happened, right, is that somebody like me who has some of those compounding benefits, then the much softer forms of racism, right, which are just as

powerful, right, but things where I'm giving, given an opportunity, I'm hired for a job, whatever, then I am, I'm in a much better position, right, than to catapult myself forward because I have the stability, right? So I keep getting a bonus, but it's no longer part of legal stuff. It's more about implicit bias and sort of structural stuff there. ["Darkest Night of the Year"]

So when you are spending so much time pulling apart these bonuses, these historical advantages that white people had, and then how we then dismantled so much of our social safety net and government support for people. How do you view what we're seeing happening now, say in higher education with the attack

on any sort of affirmative action program in had Supreme Court rulings disallowing affirmative action in almost all cases. Like how does those recent events fit into this story? Right, well, I think the stuff with affirmative action is so interesting because it relies on this ideal of colorblindness and pretend that we've already achieved it. And so for me, the idea around higher education is that, you know,

you do want it to be an integrated space, right? That's really important. I think, I mean, that's important for people's education. It's also just important from a basic sort of rights perspective, right? Like I do think we all should have access to a good education and that includes people who aren't white. But it also benefits everybody to have people of all backgrounds in an educational environment.

Like it literally is better off for you if you have access to, you know, multiple types of people and points of view in your fucking educational environment, right? Absolutely. I think for me, I push back on that a little bit because what I have noticed in my research

is that often when you are looking at something that is actually supposed to be addressing racial discrimination and a history of it, the trick often is to be like, how can we talk about this as not being about remedying a discrimination, but as a universal good for everybody? Right? And so that we kind of like, and I saw this a lot in my reporting

on school integration, right? Every time that there was any move towards integrating this district in Mississippi, they'd be like, how do we convince the white people it's okay for them? Instead of just being like, you know what? All the kids deserve to go to school together and we should have better and worse schools based on their race.

Rather than trying to say, hey, white parents, this is actually gonna be good for little Tommy, which is a little bit of, I don't know, we're trying to sell on a false premise maybe. That's not the real thing that we care about. I get that, I don't know, we're trying to sell on a false premise maybe. That's not the real thing that we care about. I get that, I don't wanna fall into that trap. Right, I mean, I think it's all true. I just, now I've become so cynical about this stuff.

I'm just like. It's something that's important to hit. I mean, when I talk about it in Hollywood, for me it's never about like, oh yes, it's very important to be inclusive, da da da. I'm like, you literally can write television stories if you have black people in your writer's room that you couldn't write if you don't. And your show is better off for it.

And I've experienced that as someone who's run a television show and gone, oh my God, we got all these jokes, we got all these stories because we had multiple people of color in our writer's room. And so that's my own experience. And I think that's a more powerful argument

than like, you know, wouldn't it be nice for everybody? It's like, no, also the final product is fucking better too. But the equity argument is like still very, you know, very important and should be enough by itself. And so please go on. I'm just saying like, I think for me, right, I also come to that from like a similar perspective, but in journalism, right?

Where for me, I'm like, no, no, no, there is like a totally like just a democracy argument about how are we gonna make, how are you gonna hold power to accountable if you don't have a newsroom that looks like this country. Right? Exactly. And it's really, you know, I think we do a better job at this point

at talking about that in terms of race than about class. And I think, you know, that's something to really keep an eye on as well. Yes. No, that's especially because we've seen how class shows up in this conversation that like ultimately what was pushing the racism was the class division, was rich people trying to hoard

and take things away from all poor people and using race as an excuse to do so. And that's certainly a type of diversity we need a lot more of in my workplace is, you know, we don't, I think we have enough Harvard graduates on comedy writing, comedy writing staffs across America.

For example, oh, another Harvard lampoon guy? Oh, that'll give us a fresh new perspective. Yeah. So I, so going back to affirmative action, you know, the, it's being overturned, as you say, on this premise of false colorblindness. And so I guess you would say this is why it's important to have that cognizance of the white bonus

so that we remember, well, hold on a second, American society has never been colorblind, is not colorblind currently, that's a false premise. I mean, if we're, you know, the Supreme Court justices made that decision based on the idea, oh, we should just treat everybody equally, well, there's no such thing, right? Is, and we need to be aware of that

if we're actually going to solve the problem and get us to a place of equality. Right, I mean, the affirmative action stuff is super important, but we tend to forget that the whole reason that affirmative action exists is that white people were given stuff, right? And so, all this mess around like, oh, well, the way to end discrimination

is to end discrimination. It's just so disingenuous about what the reality is in our country, right? Like we know that advantages get given to white people. We just never talk about it. And people do tend to be much more comfortable talking about, and I've seen this in myself, people are much more comfortable talking about race

and racism as something that happens to people of color. And for me, I think that's a real problem because that's how you end up with an affirmative action plan being struck down because discrimination like should not be used to justify discrimination. Here's a very abstract metaphor, okay? But here's how I'm thinking about it, all right? You got like 100 people, you're handed out hundred dollar bills. All right

And so people are lined up to get their hundred dollar bills you get through about 70 people, right? Like that it's late in the day. Everyone's got to go home come back tomorrow Here's an IOU for everybody else, you know, we'll hit you up tomorrow Next day everybody shows up the 30 people you didn't get to are like hey, we got our I use Can we go to the front of the line and get our hundred dollar bills the other 70 people go hey We can't start discriminating based on the basis of who has these I use right we can't start Picking and choosing who has hundred dollar and then you give out the last 30 everybody randomly and a bunch of people end up getting 200 bucks that that sort of is what it seems like happened right yeah

I think that that's actually a really good metaphor. Oh, we should do a little animation. We can't, it's just a podcast. But if this was a television show, we would do a little animation about it. So I mean, so I ask again, we're getting towards the end of the interview. If you are talking to a white person and bringing them this consciousness as you're bringing it to me,

what do you recommend that people do with this information on a daily basis? Right? Again, I don't think folks should walk around going like, oh my God, I feel so guilty. Let me Venmo a person. Like, let me Venmo. I mean, help people out if they need help. But you know, it's not about, what can people do?

You know? Right. So I think one important thing here is this is a problem that's bigger than individual action. right? So if you're looking for like what can I go buy at the market to make me feel better about this? Like this is not the problem for you, right? But I think you know the things that seem to be reasonable to me are To be mindful about this and just pay attention to it, right?

And also to start asking your public officials and the people who have power like within your sphere, what they think about how to do this, how to deal with this problem, right? Be like, look, like I want like equitable public education, right? Because it doesn't necessarily, I think a lot of times white people get anxious and they think, oh, well, if I talk about this, they're going to make me give it back. Right?

Like if I say I got something for free, I'm going to have to give it back and then I'm going to have to like start from zero or something like that. That, that is not going to happen in this country. Particularly not just admitting like, yes, my grandfather got advantages that then trickled down to me. And you know what? Maybe this isn't only a meritocracy

and maybe we should work on figuring out how to make sure we don't have massive problems with like homelessness and poverty because that really sucks for everybody. And it doesn't even matter like if I'm the one that's most directly impacted right there. So. Yeah. I mean, I think it's,

I think having this awareness can influence every policy decision we make currently. I mean, when I think about where I live in California right now, you know, I think about, for instance, Prop 13, which is a prop that was passed in the seventies that prevented property tax, put a hard cap on property taxes.

Because white homeowners, homeowners, most of whom are white, because we're talking about California in the seventies, didn't want their property taxes to go up. What happened? It starved the public education system. The public education system immediately had to cut, I don't know, billions from its budget,

has never recovered. California now has nowhere near as quality of public education system as it should have. Who does that affect? Obviously black and brown people predominantly around the state of California. And so therefore, the next time a policy comes up that is like about, for instance,

raising property taxes to benefit public schools, and you as a white person are going, I don't know about my property taxes going up, I don't know if I like that. Maybe remember that you had a benefit, you know, if you live in California for many decades that benefited you as a white person and hurt black and brown people. You could look at the same thing with any kind of, you know, housing provisions, zoning, stuff like that. Again, here in LA, you know, a massively larger population of our

homelessness population is black compared to the number of people who live in the, you know, the actual population of the city. And so, you know, when you look at housing policy, education policy, those are also racial inequality policies. And, you know, when you have that feeling of like, oh, what if something's taken away from me? Well, that's something to think about,

how much you have already benefited from the policies that have resulted in there being disproportionate number of people, you know, who are black or Latino or other ethnicities that are affected by them. Is that something along those lines? Yes. Does that sound okay? I think that sounds great.

I mean, and I actually, I dug into prop 13 in the book as one of the people I profile, this guy Jared is a homeowner up in Vallejo in the Bay area. And so, right, I was running these numbers on, well, how much did you save because of prop 13? And it was really interesting, right? So like, if you run in the numbers, he's probably paying about 11 grand less a year

in taxes for his house than he would have if Prop 13 had never been taxed. However, right, he's up in Vallejo, that district is really struggling. And so, you know, he and his wife believe in public education, but they're like, we don't know, we got a little kid, we want to put him in school.

Like, what would private school cost? Well, that's like 12 to $20,000 a year, right? So you saved your 11 grand in property tax, but like now you don't have a school that you feel comfortable sending your kid to. And then you're going to be stuck figuring out, I mean, spending the 12 to 20 grand a year for education or putting in the time to like drive them to a charter

or whatever. Hey, when like if you just- And then by the way, you also live in a city where everybody has a worse education Like, you know all of the 18 year olds are walking around with bad educations. You're like, oh man Why is the guy at the sandwich shop so bad at making my sandwich or whatever? Why is the what? Why is that? Why do people seem so dumb in my town? Why is every, why do people seem so dumb in my town? It's because you fucking cut the education budget so you could save a little money on taxes, dumb dumb. And maybe that hurt your quality of,

I mean, this guy didn't personally do it, but the cost benefit analysis of these racist policies does not actually benefit white people in the end, I think is a really powerful point to make. Thanks, I worked really hard on it. Well, the name of the book is the white bonus. You can get it now wherever books are sold or at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books,

where your purchases support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Tracy, where else can people get it or where can they find you on the internet? So I have a website, tracymcmcmillan.com, the book's on macmillan.com's website as well. Hold on a second, hold on a second. Your name is Tracy McMillan.

It's published by Macmillan. Is this another one of these nepotism white bonuses that you're talking about? That's the Scots versus the Irish, my friend. So I am removed from the Macmillan's. Oh, you're a McMillan, not a Macmillan. I mean, there's some complexity back there, but we have no relationship to the publisher.

All right, well buy Tracy Macmillan's book from Macmillan. Yeah, and Bookshop. Bookshop.com, right? Your independent bookstore, so. Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here, Tracy. It's been a delight having you. Thank you for having me, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Tracy Macmillan for coming on the show.

Once again, you can pick up a copy of her book at factuallypod.com slash books. If you want to support this show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every single conversation we have on this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month,

I will read your name at the end of the podcast and you'll be in the credits of every single one of my video monologues, of which I have some new ones coming out very soon. This week I want to thank Josh Beol and Mask When You Can Protect Your Community. Thank you so much Mask When You Can Protect Your Community for slipping that message in there using our sponsorship feature. Once again, if you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. I want to thank everybody here at Headgum for helping make this show possible. My producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson.

If you wanna come see me on the road doing standup comedy, head to adamkonover.net for my tickets and tour dates. I would love to see you in person. And until then, I'll see you next week on Factually. I don't go home. That was a Head Gum podcast.