Thursday May, 9 from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. New York Times bestselling author and Michigan native Tracie McMillan will present her latest work, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, at Oak Park City Hall (14000 Oak Park Blvd, Oak Park, MI 48237). This event is brought to you by Oak Park Public Library in partnership with Book Beat, with books available to purchase at the event. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Listen to a live interview with the author and Stephen Henderson on WDET’sCreated Equal.
“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.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy“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.”
—Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus
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 Fragilityand 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.