{"id":44478,"date":"2015-12-06T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T04:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44478"},"modified":"2017-12-26T22:57:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T22:57:00","slug":"white-debt-reckoning-with-what-is-owed-and-what-can-never-be-repaid-for-racial-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44478","title":{"rendered":"White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed \u2014 and what can never be repaid \u2014 for racial privilege."},"content":{"rendered":"

White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed \u2014 and what can never be repaid \u2014 for racial privilege.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-12-02<\/p>\n

Eula Biss<\/a><\/strong>. Professor of Instruction
\nDepartment of English
\nNorthwestern University, Evanston, Illinois<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIllustration by Geoff McFetridge<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

The word for debt in German<\/a> also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich<\/a> mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I\u2019m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that\u2019s one quality of debt that I\u2019ve been pondering lately \u2014 how easy it can be.<\/p>\n

I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment, and now I have a dining-room table, six chairs and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn\u2019t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy\u2019s<\/a> skit in which he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people free. It\u2019s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood \u2014 and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded \u2014 that the money was not being given to me free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,\u201d Nietzsche<\/a> observes in \u201cOn the Genealogy of Morality<\/a>.\u201d My student-loan debt doesn\u2019t hurt, though it hasn\u2019t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I\u2019ve managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I\u2019d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor\u2019s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor that the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor\u2019s body punished. \u201cThe pleasure,\u201d he writes, \u201cof having the right to exercise power over the powerless.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. \u201cThere is, in fact, no white community,\u201d as Baldwin<\/a> writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that\u2019s one quality of debt that I\u2019ve been pondering lately \u2014 how easy it can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,26,394,20],"tags":[22200,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-44478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-eula-biss","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44478"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55474,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44478\/revisions\/55474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}