I've enjoyed Biss's writing in the past, but this is a disappointment.
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If Eula Biss is serious about grappling with white debt, she should probably credit the people of color who came up with the concept.
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For a white person, and Eula Biss specifically, to write about white debt while obscuring this is meta. And annoying as all hell, really.
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But it's not just that: Eula Biss, like so many white folks, manages to re-center whiteness when writing about white debt. Ugh. SO ugh.
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The essay also highlights Biss's safe encounters with cops; reads like YAY! I'M WHITE AND THESE COPS CAN'T TOUCH ME SO SORRY BLACK PEOPLE.
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Speaking of which, for Eula Biss, race is white and black. There are no people who look like me in her imagination. How did she miss that?
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Oh, except for the small Playing Indian moment, which is probably the most disappointing in this essay.
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Not *exactly* Playing Indian, but her son wanting to be Indian because Little House on the Prairie? Indians only exist in the past? Mmhhmm.
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Which somehow leads her to Rachel Dolezal and this whole "Caucasians don't exist," so I guess it's ok that Dolezal did that shit? I dunno.
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When Eula Biss writes that the term Caucasian "is 18th-century pseudoscience that helped invent a white race," I just shake my head.
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Yeah, of course it's invented. But it doesn't mean it doesn't have real consequences. It often determines whether one lives of dies, dammit.
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But let's go back to Nietzsche in every other paragraph, shall we? Umm. Ok, Eula Biss, I guess. Or not. No, not really. wtf.
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Anyway, I could go on and on. I even thought about writing an essay myself, but can't bring myself to imagine going through drafts of this.
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And that's part of this too: the good whites often exhaust us. I'm tired. Tired of seeing this essay. Tired of correcting it in my mind.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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@aurabogado Going to read this again with yr tweets in mind. Maybe you don't have to write your own essay & tweeting yr critique is enough.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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