Caleb: Eula Bliss' "White Debt"

For the last few go arounds, our Mac Mondays have been visual — tv shows, movies, TED talks. I’ve known for awhile now that when it got to be my turn, I was going to assign some reading. But what?

My first thought was the text of philosopher Benjamin Bratton’s insightful TED talk (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted) about why TED talks are bad for us. Braxton begins by asking, “Have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change.” From there, he goes on to assert that TED talks precariously rely on over-simplification. A successful TED talk takes a complex theory and turns it into an accessible story. The speaker shares “a personal journey of insight and realisation” and the end result is a teachable epiphany. The danger, so he says, is when you turn psychology or science or whatever into a 20 minute talk that people without specialized knowledge can understand, you minimize the complexity of the issues at hand.

But since Bratton’s essay originated as a TED talk (visual) I ruled it out.

My next idea was an incredible article (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/the-impossible-refugee-boat-lift-to-christmas-island.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) by a guy named Luke Mogelson who posed as a refugee and boarded on of the barely seaworthy crafts that more than a thousand Middle Easter asylum seekers have taken to Christmas Island, a bijou Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. For some reason, though, marvelous as that story is, I decided that with Tim’s original assignment on ISIS, we’d already dealt with the Middle East, and I wanted to introduce a new area of conflict.

I decided, then, on a piece by the curiously named essayist, Eula Biss. I first discovered her in a story she wrote for the New York Times last month called “White Debt” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white–debt.html), a piece in which she wonders aloud if white Americans owe a moral debt to African Americans, and further puzzles of the notion of whiteness and blackness, and the lengths people go to to protect “whiteness,” even though it is a genetic and cultural fabrication.

What I like about Biss’s writing is that she advanced the technique of TED talks. She blends personal anecdotes with theory, politics, philosophy, and history. What’s more, she poses questions to which she doesn’t claim to have the answers. Someone once said that “to write with … authority you have to have a great deal to say and no hesitation about how it is to be said or about saying it.” What I admire about Biss, is that she never hesitates about how it is to be said, but she freely admits that there may be more to say, she just hasn’t figured it all out yet.

Bliss’s writing is best described as a meditation. Here, she mediates on race, on class, on gentrification, on the meaning of neighborhood and the one she has made her home. The piece is beautiful and challenging. I’m interested to hear what you guys think: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200802/?read=article_biss