CLOSURE: Central Library will be closed Tuesday, July 21, through Saturday, July 25, while emergency repairs are made to the building’s cooling system. We expect to reopen Monday, July 27. Click for more details on holds, program schedules, and returns during the closure. 

Notice of Public Meeting: Kalamazoo Public Library Board of Trustees | July 27 | 5:30 pm | Central Library/Van Deusen Room. The packet of information for the meeting can be found on the library’s website. 

Book

The white bonus : five families and the cash value of racism in America

Call Number

  • 305.8 M4788 (CEN, OSH)

Browse similar titles by call number

Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2024.

Physical Description

xiv, 444 pages ; 25 cm

Summary

"In The White Bonus, Tracie 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"--

Contents

  • My grandparents
  • Katrina Rectenwald : work
  • My parents' childhoods
  • Lindsey and Maryann Becker : school
  • My parents as parents
  • Jared Bunde : crime
  • My childhood
  • Barbara Nathan Katz : poverty
  • My young adulthood
  • My adulthood.

Subjects