Acclaimed journalist Tracie McMillan’s muckraking, experiential methods have earned her prizes, acclaim and the special animosity of Rush Limbaugh, a sure sign of the power of her investigative work. With The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America, McMillan offers a powerful and necessary exposé of the financial benefits of whiteness in the U.S.

In a style reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich, The White Bonus spotlights five working- and middle-class white families, including a very revealing and honest look at McMillan’s own. The book examines how zoning laws, discrimination in trade unions and the failure of school desegregation have rippled into the present, giving white families what McMillan calls the “white bonus,” a multigenerational “societal and familial security net unavailable to Black Americans.” In chapters focused on school, work, poverty and crime, McMillan develops case studies of how individuals and families benefit from whiteness even when they are accused of crimes or are scraping by on minimum wage. McMillan’s quantitative analysis starkly reveals how American institutions continue to benefit white people at the expense of Black Americans. 

Each case study is supported by extensive interviews and reporting, and presented with novelistic detail in a propulsive narrative. A chapter about the Becker family of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, illustrates “the steady reemergence of racially homogenous schools after a few decades of progress toward racial integration” that followed Brown v. Board of Education. The Beckers bucked the trend of white flight and sent their children to local public schools that had predominantly Black student bodies. While the oldest sibling benefitted from “gifted and talented” programs that primarily served white students in an otherwise diverse student population, the youngest sibling experienced a stark decline in educational quality at the same school after many of the white families left the district. 

McMillan’s own family story is told with admirable honesty, particularly regarding the impact of her father’s abuse after her mother’s death. These autobiographical chapters not only provide a detailed financial accounting of her own family’s white bonus, but also brilliantly shape a central insight that analogizes its dangers: The silence surrounding domestic violence is replicated in our society at large when we avoid addressing the impact of structural racism. Remaining silent about either is incompatible with morality.

When anthropologist and Stanford University professor Angela Garcia went to Mexico City to study a new urban development, she instead discovered families threatened by the violence of the drug war committing themselves or their family members to anexos, coercive drug rehab programs run out of private homes. There, staff members inflict beatings and emotional abuse unironically called “treatment.”

The chance that you’ve heard of an anexos is slim; a quick Google search elicits few results, the top result of which is an academic paper by Garcia herself. In her new book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos, she studies these complicated places and the social forces that have created them. Based on direct observation and interviews with people living in several such run-down centers, Garcia shows the diverse experiences that brought them there: A trans woman named Sheila self-admitted and becomes a den mother to young teen residents; an introverted 14-year-old with the nickname Catorce was dropped off by his mother before she left town; and teenage Daniel was violently apprehended after his desperate mother called an anexos for help about his drug addiction.

The stories of anexados vary, but the essential reason the centers exist is the same: The violence inside the walls of an anexos is less frequent and severe than that outside. As Garcia observes life in these makeshift drug rehab centers, she reckons with her own past abandonments, familial addiction and homelessness. Garcia is careful not to run a straight line from the violence of these programs to the healing of their participants. More often than not, people either spend long periods of time living in the anexos, or they are in and out of them as they vacillate between safety and danger, flush and broke.

Yet anexos serve a purpose to many in the communities where they exist. Garcia reflects on the pain many parents feel sending their children to anexos, knowing they’ll suffer violence within, but otherwise unable to keep them from the threat posed by the drug war in their neighborhoods. The Way That Leads Among the Lost is both a heavy and enlightening history of how anexos came to be, and a compassionate look into the lives of those impacted.

Correction, April 23, 2024: This review previously misstated the name of author Angela Garcia.