The White Bonus
Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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?
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.
