Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Eula Biss’s “White Debt” is not about financial debt. Instead, this piece confronts white privilege and white guilt prompted by unpleasant historical truths and knowledge of the maltreatment Black and Indigenous Americans face.

Biss, a white woman, had a run-in with law enforcement when she was a college student accused of “tagging” for pasting posters around the city of Amherst, Massachusetts. Tagging is a felony, but she was released without charge. Yet the justice system frequently doles out severe punishments to Black Americans for similar offences. Even worse, police sometimes kill Black Americans in routine traffic stops.

For Biss, “whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem” (117). It is a moral obligation for white people to refuse to be party to racial injustice and to actively work against it. To embrace whiteness, and the privileges that come with it, is to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with power structures. She concludes, “And we forget our debt to ourselves” (121). 

This short story is about a wealthy, widowed, white philanthropist who visits a Black church and protest rally to donate to the Save Our Lives campaign, a fictitious version of the Black Lives Matter movement.