When Tracie McMillan was a student at New York University in the mid-1990s, she landed an internship at The Village Voice and worked under Wayne Barrett, an investigative journalist who considered himself a “detective for the people.” Barrett’s tutelage shaped McMillan’s mission: “To hold the powerful to account by reporting rigorously and telling full, honest stories about the poor.” McMillan came to focus her own journalism career on the travails of American workers—particularly those struggling to earn a living wage—primarily through the lens of food. In outlets like City Limits, McMillan explored New York City’s food deserts; later, her first book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, exposed the underpayment of undocumented farm laborers and the racial and gender inequities in restaurant kitchens. She would come to identify as working-class herself, in part because she barely earned more than her subjects. 

McMillan had grown up white and middle-class in an exurb of Detroit. Her parents had jobs good enough to afford home ownership, albeit with help from their own parents. This domestic stability soon crumbled, however. On New Year’s Day 1982, when McMillan was 5, her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and soon after suffered a debilitating, traumatic brain injury in a car accident. She lived the rest of her life in institutional care. When McMillan lost her mother—first to institutionalization, then to death at age 44 in 1993—her father, who had long struggled to control his temper, took out his rage on her. But even these adversities did not cause the family to lose their class position.

Nonetheless, McMillan saw herself as downwardly mobile because she refused to rely on her abusive father’s money. Unlike many of her NYU peers, she worked multiple jobs throughout college to pay for rent, living expenses, and a portion of tuition. Though McMillan’s upbringing was full of personal loss and maltreatment, her economic precarity in young adulthood was a choice—and, as she would come to realize, she was never truly without a safety net. Even when she went undercover as a grape-picker, Walmart shelf-stocker, and in the kitchen of an Applebee’s for The American Way of Eating and mostly lived off her wages from those jobs, McMillan’s connection to her coworkers was tenuous. They may have had similar paychecks, but her skin color ensured that she was treated differently. She was buoyed all along the way by her whiteness.

In The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, McMillan comes to terms with what her race has given her, turning her investigative eye toward telling a “full, honest” story about whiteness. She attempts to provide a literal accounting for the monetary difference in how white Americans like herself “directly benefit from racism,” tallying, in dollar amounts, the flip side of “‘the ‘Black tax’—the higher costs faced by Black Americans who have been denied so much of the aid extended freely to whites.” This “white bonus” has its roots in public policies for housing, employment, education, crime, and social welfare, as well as the accrual and distribution of familial wealth facilitated by generations of racist policies in both the public and private sectors. As the book unfolds, McMillan tracks how she and four other middle-class white families she profiles have profited from racism—and, ultimately, what racism has cost them. 

But The White Bonus has an inherent flaw, one McMillan acknowledges in the introduction. “I cannot take a full measure of the material benefits of racism—and, as many economists have told me, it is likely that no one can,” she writes. “Racism is too complex, too slippery, too multifaceted to pin down its value in a definitive way…. any estimate I offer will be woefully, dramatically, impossibly insufficient.” Still, McMillan proceeds to offer estimates, down to the cent, in “The White Bonus Index” at the back of the book. Reading The White Bonus, it’s hard not to wonder why McMillan proceeded with this methodology. Her book attempts to answer whether the benefits of racism are worth their cost to white Americans, but in taking an individualist approach to a systemic problem, it poses another question: Whom is McMillan really trying to hold to account with this rough accounting?

McMillan begins her “story of white advantage in America” with her grandparents, focusing on how housing policies from the early 1900s through World War II allowed them to build wealth. She proceeds to take the reader through two more generations of her own family’s finances through an analysis of the federal, state, and local policies that have long subsidized life for white people at the expense of taxpayers of color. Woven throughout are four profiles of other white Americans, which allow McMillan to zoom in further on how racism has shaped American employment, education, crime, and healthcare. She is meticulous in approaching this task, tracking down property deeds and legal transcripts and conducting hundreds of hours of interviews. But in a book so diligent, what McMillan glosses over or leaves out is notable.

In her chapter on crime, for instance, McMillan tells the story of Jared Bunde, who managed to avoid felony charges after selling LSD at his Connecticut high school in 1994. While McMillan is focused on tallying all the money that Bunde and his family saved by avoiding incarceration—from the wages he didn’t lose ($52,735.44) to the commissary funds he didn’t need ($1,996.44)—she spends comparatively less time explaining and analyzing the policies born of the War on Drugs and their racist implications.

McMillan constantly reminds us that she was enabled to afford college, pursue a largely unprofitable writing career, and buy a house in Detroit by racist policies—along with the wealth her family accumulated as a result of those policies. Yet even as she reminds us that her tally in “The White Bonus Index” is “a bare minimum estimate,” the financial benefits she chooses not to link to her race are telling. She does not discuss the size of her advance for The White Bonus, a book that inherently depends on her whiteness, which Publishers Marketplace reported as “a major deal.” This is especially odd considering that McMillan acknowledges that “racism ingrained in the publishing industry gave me advantages that led to the contract for my first book—and the contract for this one, too.”

In approaching her racial reckoning with the tools of investigative journalism, memoir, and rough math, McMillan’s ultimate goal appears to be to cause white readers to think about their own financial advantages. This is a laudable goal, and The White Bonus succeeds in a cogent illumination of the systems that continue to drive racial inequity in the United States. On the book’s website, readers (primarily white ones) will soon be able to estimate their own family and social bonuses, answering such questions as: “Of the public policies and private practices that offered whites material advantages after 1900, which ones did your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents use?”

In other words, the ideal reader of The White Bonus is someone like me—a fellow member of the white middle class who is open to grappling with the “unearned advantages” conferred on us by institutional racism. Reading The White Bonus did indeed cause me to reflect further on those advantages and better understand how racism shaped the policies that undergird them. I was born and raised in West Hempstead, Long Island, less than 10 miles west of the original Levittown, which notoriously excluded Black families. The house I grew up in was built in 1947, during the postwar boom; my maternal grandparents purchased it in the mid-1950s. I believe that they were able to do so thanks to the GI Bill and a mortgage underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration—as McMillan points out, these benefits were functionally available only to whites. My own parents bought the West Hempstead house from my grandparents in 1988, the year before I was born. Like McMillan, I attended neighborhood public schools that were functionally segregated thanks to the long tail of postwar housing policies and the discriminatory practices of local real estate agents, who racially “steered” prospective buyers and participated in blockbusting. Like McMillan, I encountered personal adversity that irrevocably changed my life when I was a young teenager—both my parents died of cancer. And like McMillan, I can see that I continue to benefit, materially, from my whiteness.