The White Bonus | Reviews and Blurbs
What Is A White Bonus? | Data Viz: Tracie | Bonus Estimator
Original Documents | Press kit
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: “The White Bonus buckles and snaps everything I thought I knew about race, space, place and bookmaking. This is what courage and absolute genius produce. We have never needed a book more than we need Tracie McMillan’s The White Bonus.”
Darrick Hamilton, Founding Director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, The New School: “The White Bonus is a remarkable book from a peculiar gaze. McMillan’s compulsively readable mix of memoir, policy and journalism shines a spotlight and collective responsibility on modern American inequality: indelibly racialized and crosshatched by economic class. A must-read for anyone seeking to better understand race, class, or both.”
Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus: “A painful, calm, and clear-eyed excavation of white complicity, The White Bonus is stunning in scope. McMillan will make you re-examine everything you thought you knew about American health and wealth.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination: “Finding hidden systems that enrich a few at the expense of the many is Tracie McMillan’s superpower. Armed with an ethnographer’s sensitivity, a journalist’s instinct, a scholar’s capacity to see the value of both forests and trees, and a poet’s gift for turning words into feelings, she combines deep investigative research with personal stories to reveal that “whiteness” is America’s most lucrative fiction, the intangible asset that keeps on giving—and taking. The point of the book is not just to interpret the “white bonus” but to end it.”
William Darity, Jr., Duke University: “The White Bonus confronts head-on the widespread myth that white Americans will lose nothing if the nation finally ends anti-Black racism. By translating complex scholarship into layperson’s terms, this powerful work forces us to recognize the difficulties in reaching a point where most white Americans will support, actively, racial equity in the United States.”
Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author, The Sum of Us: “In this eye-opening examination into the tangible and intangible advantages of being born white in America, McMillan uses her own family’s story and those of everyday white Americans to quantify the cash value of whiteness. An important contribution.”
Ira Katznelson, award-winning author of When Affirmative Action Was White: “This searing book, hard to put down, confronts difficult truths about racism’s direct and indirect gains for white Americans and losses for all. With often painful human detail, The White Bonus sharply explains how public policies and private actions regarding housing, schooling, crime, and health care, each inflected by race, affect personal prospects and collective outcomes.”
Steven Greenhouse, journalist and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor: “The White Bonus is an unusually daring book that explores how racism has given unfair advantages to white Americans as we all pursue the American dream. Tracie McMillan profiles a range of Americans to show how their “white bonus” results in advantages that can total hundreds of thousands of dollars. This original, compelling work investigates an undeniable inequity that America has too long ignored.”
Lewis Raven Wallace, Abolition Journalism Fellow, Interrupting Criminalization and host and author, The View From Somewhere: “The White Bonus is an invaluable resource for understanding racism in terms of systems, rather than just attitudes. McMillan looks unflinchingly at the benefits and costs of racism through the lens of her own family’s gains and losses. A reporter at heart, she digs through the archives of both personal trauma and personal finance to show how every story in the U.S. is actually a story about race.”
