The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America

by Tracie McMillan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250619419
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tracie McMillan’s investigative and narrative journalism about America’s multiracial working class has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic. Her work has won wide recognition, from Investigative Reporters and Editors to the James Beard Foundation, and her 2012 bestseller, The American Way of Eating, won a Hillman Book Prize for Journalism and a Books for a Better Life Award. In 2013 she was a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. She splits her time between Detroit, Michigan, and Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

02/26/2024

In this intimate and eye-opening study, journalist McMillan (The American Way of Eating) documents the direct economic benefits of whiteness. Using three generations of her own family as her core example, she reevaluates her own history, acknowledging the depth of racism in Michigan, where her family has lived for generations, and tracking how racist public policies of the 20th century, like redlining and the G.I. Bill, not only discriminated against Black people, but elevated the status of white families. She draws on four other white subjects’ life stories to shed more light on how encounters with racist policy shaped white lives, including a nurse whose union involvement made her conscious of her own family’s “colorblind racism”; a pair of sisters whose white family dealt with the fallout of the white flight that changed the demographics and funding of their local school; and a young man whose whiteness provided a second chance after a teenage drug trafficking conviction. McMillan formally runs the numbers at the end of the narrative, solidifying her point: decades of racist public policies have provided outsize resources to white families in ways substantial and quantifiable, even as individual families felt they were simply making the best choices for themselves at the time. It’s a compassionate invitation to white readers to hear, and reckon with, the story of race in America as deeply personal. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"A cogent illumination of the systems that continue to drive racial inequity in the United States."

—The Nation

"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

From the Publisher

2024-03-20
The cost of being Black in America.

Award-winning journalist McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating, combines investigative reporting and memoir in a penetrating look at the material advantages of racial privilege. “For a very long time,” she writes, “I thought race and racism ‘happened’ only to people who were not white.” Using her own family as one example, and profiling four others, she investigates the impact of whiteness on individuals of different generations, from different parts of the country, who have one thing in common besides whiteness: “Each subject has spent most, if not all, of their life in America’s shrinking middle class.” In an appendix, she tallies each person’s monetary “bonus,” which includes expenses such as a family’s coverage of ACT prep courses, car insurance, subsidized rent, and direct inheritances. Money alone, though, does not account for whites’ “unearned power.” One woman, for example, was offered a nursing scholarship by a counselor who told her Black co-worker not to bother. Racial prejudice, McMillan notes, often takes the form of implicit bias, “assumptions people make about others without much conscious thought”—in this case, the assumption that a Black woman lacked the ambition or ability to “bother” about furthering her education. A teenager arrested for dealing LSD was helped by having both of his parents in court, showing solidarity. He avoided a jail sentence, McMillan asserts, because he was white: “the constant association in news accounts of Blackness with dysfunction and hardship could lead a judge in Waterbury to see a Black family and assume they faced poverty and hardship and could not manage their child.” Among many advantages that McMillan examines are fair labor laws that exclude agricultural workers and service workers; housing covenants prohibiting sales to Black families; and lack of access to well-funded public schools.

A well-researched, disquieting examination of inequality.

Kirkus Reviews