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

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?

Author: Tracie McMillan
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Published: 04/23/2024
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 9.48h x 6.62w x 1.49d
ISBN: 9781250619426

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2023 pg. 19
Booklist 02/15/2024 pg. 10
Publishers Weekly 02/26/2024
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2024
BookPage 05/01/2024

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.