The White Bonus
Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.