About this item
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.
About the Author
A working-class transplant from rural Michigan to New York City, investigative journalist Tracie McMillan has chronicled America's multiracial working class for the past two decades. She is now working on a book about race, class and resentment in modern America.In 2012, McMillan's New York Times bestseller, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table mixed immersive reporting, undercover investigative techniques and "moving first-person narrative" (Wall Street Journal) to argue for thinking of fresh, healthy food as a public and social good--a stance that inspired The New York Times to call her "a voice the food world needs" and Rush Limbaugh to single her out as an "overeducated" "authorette" and threat to liberty. In 2012, Whole Living magazine named her a "Food Visionary," building on her numerous appearances on radio and television programs, which range from the liberal The Rachel Maddow Show to the "tea-party favorite" Peter Schiff Show. She has written about food and class for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, the Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, the American Prospect, and Slate.McMillan moved into writing about food after a successful stint as a poverty and welfare reporter while working as the managing editor of the award-winning magazine City Limits in New York City. While there, she won recognition from organizations ranging from the James Beard Foundation to World Hunger Year. In 2013, she was named a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, a year after she was named a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Visit her at TracieMcMillan.com or follow her at @TMMcMillan.
