Tracie McMillan
April 30 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is proud to welcome Tracie McMillan for an event in celebration of her new book, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, on Tuesday April 30 at 7:00 pm at All Souls Unitarian Church, 2952 S. Peoria Avenue.
A genre-bending work of journalism and memoir by award-winning writer Tracie McMillan tallies the cash benefit–and cost–of racism in America.
“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
Tracie will be joined in conversation by Victor Luckerson, author of Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street.
This event is free and open to the public.
The White Bonus will be published by Henry Holt and Company on April 23, 2024. Pre-orders are available at Magic City Books or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-white-bonus/1975. Copies of The White Bonus and Built from the Fire by Victor Luckerson will be for sale at the event on April 30.
About The White Bonus
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 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.
