About this Event
About the Book
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.
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTOR
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist, columnist and author based in Los Angeles who focuses on race, politics and culture. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Politico, Huffpost, Truthdig and many other publications. In 2007 she became the first African American in the history of the Los Angeles Times to author a weekly opinion column. She is the author of two books, 'Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista (2011)" and "I Heart Obama (2016)." She lives in Inglewood with her five dogs.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Chevalier's Books, 133 North Larchmont Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States
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