Is there a white bonus? Investigating class, race, and Oakland County's American Dream

Presented in partnership with RHPL and OU Center for Public Humanities 

Journalist—and Holly native—Tracie McMillan will discuss her groundbreaking work in the 2024 book, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America (Henry Holt & Co.). In this work described by renowned author Kiese Laymon as "courage and absolute genius," McMillan's stunning hybrid of memoir and journalism alternates between her own struggling middle-class family in Michigan and four other white families across generations—and across the country.

Driven by personal history marked with abuse, illness, and poverty, McMillan asks—for real—what has being white ever gotten me?

To answer it, McMillan goes beyond hollow discussions of "privilege." She seeks out whether her family in Oakland County and Ann Arbor benefited from public aid targeted to white families alone, and asks how much it was worth. With that knowledge in hand, she studies what America's steady loss of a safety net—in the form of education, housing, and health care most people can afford—has cost her, too.