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

By Tracie McMillan

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250619416
• ISBN13: 9781250619419
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Length: 464 Pages

Customer Reviews

Glossary was 1/4 of the book,

While she did make fairly good points, most of those points were the findings and observations of other writers. Most of her examples were pretty weak given the nature of the subject. Almost like she was afraid of offending anyone. The white saviorism was prevalent as well. All in all a half hearted effort to seem "down with the struggle" while perpetuating the exact unsubstantiated exceptionalism and disassociation she was writing/almost plagiarizing. I think without even realizing, which makes it worse. She literally ends the book boasting about how she capitalized on minorities being kicked out of their homes to generate six figures. Heres a breif summery "Lol if I was white I would have never been able to do white things, and get white bonuses" vaguely reference historical event "and my grandpa was a racist, and his grandpa too" vaguely reference historical event "boy am I glad to be white" vaguely reference historical event "I know it's not fair, I could tell you how or why it is that way but...to busy telling you about my white saviorism, i struggled too ya know, kinda sorta, i mean relative to the rich whites" Absolutely no substance...