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

by Tracie McMillan

Overview

A genre-breaking work of journalism and memoir that tallies the cash benefit—and cost— of racism in America

This unflinching book from award-winning investigative reporter Tracie McMillan examines what white privilege delivers—in dollars and cents—not only to white people of wealth but also to white people from the poor to the middle class.

McMillan begins with her own downwardly mobile middle-class family and takes us through a personal history marked with abuse, illness, and poverty, while training her journalistic eye on the benefits she saw from being white. McMillan then alternates her story with profiles of four other white subjects, millennials to baby boomers, from across the United States.

For readers of Stephanie Land’s Maid, Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us, and Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, McMillan brings groundbreaking insight into how, and to what degree, white racial privilege builds material advantage across class, time, and place. Rather than analyzing racism as a thing that gives less to people of color, McMillan studies how it gives more to people who are white—including, with uncommon honesty, herself—and how it takes so much from so many. The unforgettable follow-up question thrums steadily through this book: Do white Americans believe that racism is worth what it costs all of us?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250619402
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/23/2024
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	3 MB

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

"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