![]() ![]() ![]() I themed my courses around race, identity, and narrative, and assigned the Biss essay. I was a white woman at the head of rooms filled with largely Black, Latinx, and Asian students, many of whom worked while in school and had long commutes from the outer boroughs of New York City. At the time, I was an adjunct teaching first-year writing at CUNY Baruch College, which made me acutely aware of my white debt. I kept returning to "White Debt" because I was in awe of how Biss completely reframed whiteness. The essay begins, "The word for debt in German also means guilt." From there, we hopscotch to what Biss is really in debt for-her white privilege, which she has done nothing to earn, and which is easy to forget, be complacent about, and complicit in. A few years ago, I couldn't stop thinking about Eula Biss's New York Times Magazine essay " White Debt." The essay is, in a sense, about literal debt-Biss had recently bought a house with a mortgage-but she immediately takes us beyond the prosaic meaning of the word. ![]()
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