The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value 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 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 forty-four, on Medicaid; her family's implosion; and a small inheritance from a grandfather. In the process, McMillan puts a cash value to whiteness in her life and assesses its worth. She expands her investigation to four other white subjects of different generations across the United States. 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 with the connection between the abuse we endure at home and the abuse America allows.