Book Talk: Tracie McMillan — The White Bonus
In The White Bonus, Tracie 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.
Raised in rural Michigan, Detroit- and Brooklyn-based writer Tracie McMillan has written for publications including the New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; Mother Jones; Harper’s Magazine; Slate; and National Geographic. After putting herself through New York University and training under legendary reporter Wayne Barrett, she was the managing editor of the award-winning magazine City Limits from 2001 to 2005. A one-time target of Rush Limbaugh and a 2012-13 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow, McMillan is also the author of the bestselling The American Way of Eating (Scribner, 2012). McMillan’s work has been recognized by the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, and Investigative Reporters and Editors, among others.
McMillan will be in conversation with Dax-Devlon Ross. Dax is the author of six books and his journalism has been featured in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Nonprofit Quarterly, The Washington Post Magazine and other national publications. He won the National Association of Black Journalists’ Investigative Reporting Award for his coverage of jury exclusion in North Carolina courts and is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center. His most recent book, Letters to My White Male Friends, published by St. Martin’s Press, is a call to action and a reflection on race. Dax is the co-founder of podcast company Orbit Media along with Steve Fishman, Fisher Stevens, and Marci Wiseman. He co-hosts The Burden, a series about a disgraced NYC police detective, the innocent men he helped convict and put behind bars, and the broken system that made it all happen. Dax is also the host of the forthcoming Orbit series The Most Dangerous Black Man in the World. A New York City teaching fellow turned non-profit executive, Dax is now a principal at the social impact consultancies, Dax-Dev and Third Settlements, both of which focus on designing disruptive strategies to generate equity in workplaces and education spaces alike.
