A
genre-bending work of journalism and memoir by award-winning writer
Tracie McMillan tallies the cash benefit―and cost―of racism in America.
In The White Bonus,
McMillan asks a provocative question about racism in America: When
people of color are denied so much, what are white people given? And how
much is it worth―not in amorphous privilege, but in dollars and cents?
McMillan
begins with three generations of her family, tracking their modest
wealth to its roots: American policy that helped whites first.
Simultaneously, she details the complexities of their advantage,
exploring her mother’s death in a nursing home, at 44, on Medicaid; her
family's implosion; and a small inheritance from a banker grandfather.
In the process, McMillan puts a cash value to whiteness in her life and
assesses its worth.
McMillan then expands her investigation to
four other white subjects of different generations across the U.S.
Alternating between these subjects and her family, McMillan shows how,
and to what degree, racial privilege begets material advantage across
class, time, and place.
For readers of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us, McMillan brings groundbreaking insight on the white working class. And for readers of Tara Westover’s Educated and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, McMillan reckons intimately with the connection between the abuse we endure at home and the abuse America allows in public.
REVIEWS:
"The White Bonus buckles
and snaps everything I thought I knew about race, space, place and
bookmaking. This is what courage and absolute genius produce. We have
never needed a book more than we need Tracie McMillan's The White Bonus."
―Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"A painful, calm, and clear-eyed excavation of white complicity, The White Bonus is stunning in scope. McMillan will make you re-examine everything you thought you knew about American health and wealth."
―Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus
"Finding
hidden systems that enrich a few at the expense of the many is Tracie
McMillan’s superpower. Armed with an ethnographer’s sensitivity, a
journalist’s instinct, a scholar’s capacity to see the value of both
forests and trees, and a poet’s gift for turning words into feelings,
she combines deep investigative research with personal stories to reveal
that “whiteness” is America’s most lucrative fiction, the intangible
asset that keeps on giving―and taking. The point of the book is not just
to interpret the “white bonus” but to end it."
―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"The White Bonus
is a remarkable book from a peculiar gaze. McMillan's compulsively
readable mix of memoir, policy and journalism shines a spotlight and
collective responsibility on modern American inequality: indelibly
racialized and crosshatched by economic class. A must-read for anyone
seeking to better understand race, class, or both."
―Darrick Hamilton, Founding Director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, The New School
"This
searing book, hard to put down, confronts difficult truths about
racism’s direct and indirect gains for white Americans and losses for
all. With often painful human detail, The White Bonus
sharply explains how public policies and private actions regarding
housing, schooling, crime, and health care, each inflected by race,
affect personal prospects and collective outcomes."
―Ira Katznelson, award-winning author of When Affirmative Action Was White
"The White Bonus
is an invaluable resource for understanding racism in terms of systems,
rather than just attitudes. McMillan looks unflinchingly at the
benefits and costs of racism through the lens of her own family's gains
and losses. A reporter at heart, she digs through the archives of both
personal trauma and personal finance to show how every story in the U.S.
is actually a story about race."
―Lewis Raven Wallace, Abolition Journalism Fellow, Interrupting Criminalization and host and author, The View From Somewhere
"The White Bonus
is an unusually daring book that explores how racism has given unfair
advantages to white Americans as we all pursue the American dream.
Tracie McMillan profiles a range of Americans to show how their "white
bonus” results in advantages that can total hundreds of thousands of
dollars. This original, compelling work investigates an undeniable
inequity that America has too long ignored."
―Steven Greenhouse, journalist and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
"The White Bonus
confronts head-on the widespread myth that white Americans will lose
nothing if the nation finally ends anti-Black racism. By translating
complex scholarship into layperson’s terms, this powerful work forces us
to recognize the difficulties in reaching a point where most white
Americans will support, actively, racial equity in the United States."
―William Darity, Jr., Duke University
"In
this eye-opening examination into the tangible and intangible
advantages of being born white in America, McMillan uses her own
family's story and those of everyday white Americans to quantify the
cash value of whiteness. An important contribution."
―Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author, The Sum of Us
"In
a style reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich, McMillan offers a powerful
and necessary exposé of the financial benefits of whiteness in the
U.S... Each case study is supported by extensive interviews and
reporting, and presented with novelistic detail in a propulsive
narrative."
―BookPage (starred review)
"Intimate
and eye-opening... [A] compassionate invitation to white readers to
hear, and reckon with, the story of race in America as deeply personal."
―Publishers Weekly
"[A] fresh, urgent new look at the mechanisms of racism in America."
―Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Raised in rural Michigan, Detroit and Brooklyn-based writer Tracie McMillan has written for publications including the New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; Mother Jones; Harper’s Magazine; Slate; and National Geographic.
After putting herself through New York University and training under
legendary reporter Wayne Barrett, she was the managing editor of the
award-winning magazine City Limits from
2001 to 2005. A one-time target of Rush Limbaugh and a 2012-13
Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow, McMillan is also the author of the
bestselling The American Way of Eating (Scribner,
2012). McMillan’s work has been recognized by the Sidney Hillman Book
Prize, the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, and Investigative
Reporters and Editors, among others. She edits coverage of worker
organizing for Capital and Main: capitalandmain.com/strikingback.
