“The word for debt in German also means guilt.”
“While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s 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’s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood — and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded — 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.”
“‘‘Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,’’ Nietzsche observes in ‘‘On the Genealogy of Morality.’’”
“Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s 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’s body punished. ‘‘The pleasure,’’ he writes, ‘‘of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.’’”
“The power to punish, Nietzsche notes, can enhance your sense of social status, increasing the pleasure of cruelty.”
“Reading this, I recall a white Texas trooper’s encounter with the black woman he pulled over for failure to signal a lane change. As the traffic stop became a confrontation that ended with Sandra Bland face down on the side of the road, she asked Brian Encinia, over and over, whether what he was doing made him feel good. ‘‘You feelin’ good about yourself?’’ she asked. ‘‘Don’t it make you feel good, Officer Encinia?’’ After asking the same question Nietzsche asked, the question of why justice would take this form, she came to the same conclusion.”
“The word ‘‘privilege,’’ composed of the Latin words for private and law, describes a legal system in which not everyone is equally bound, a system in which the law that makes graffiti a felony does not apply to a white college student.”
“Even as the police spread photos of my handiwork in front of me, I could tell by the way they pronounced ‘‘tagging’’ that it wasn’t a crime invented for me. I was subject less to the law as it was written than I was to the private laws of whiteness.”
“When the laws that bind a community apply differently to different members of the community, as Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls write in their 2015 collection of essays, ‘‘I Don’t See Color,’’ then privilege ‘‘undermines the solidarity of the community.’’ And that, in turn, undermines us all.”
“Hearing the term ‘‘white supremacist’’ in the wake of that shooting had given me another occasion to wonder whether white supremacists are any more dangerous than regular white people, who tend to enjoy supremacy without believing in it.”
“‘‘The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning’’ is the title of an essay Claudia Rankine wrote for The New York Times Magazine after the Charleston church massacre. Sitting with her essay in front of me, I asked myself what the condition of white life might be. I wrote ‘‘complacence’’ on a blank page.”
“After staring at ‘‘complacence’’ for quite a long time, I looked it up and discovered that it didn’t mean exactly what I thought it meant. ‘‘A feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements’’ might be an apt description of the dominant white attitude, but that’s more active than what I had in mind. I thought ‘‘complacence’’ meant sitting there in your house, neither smug nor satisfied, just lost in the illusion of ownership. This is an illusion that depends on forgetting the redlining, block busting, racial covenants, contract buying, loan discrimination, housing projects, mass incarceration, predatory lending and deed thefts that have prevented so many black Americans from building wealth the way so many white Americans have, through homeownership. I erased ‘‘complacence’’ and wrote ‘‘complicity.’’ I erased it. ‘‘Debt,’’ I wrote. Then, ‘‘forgotten debt.’’”
“What my son was expressing — that he wants the comfort of what he has but that he is uncomfortable with how he came to have it — is one conundrum of whiteness.”
“James Baldwin’s essay ‘‘On Being White … and Other Lies’’”
“the lie I was referring to was the idea that there is any such thing as a Caucasian race”
“the Caucasus region, which includes contemporary Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Outside that context, the word ‘‘Caucasian’’ is a flimsy and fairly meaningless product of the 18th-century pseudoscience that helped invent a white race.”
“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.”
“‘‘There is, in fact, no white community,’’ as Baldwin writes.”
“Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.”
“slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, ‘‘the down payment’’ on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, ‘‘this country’s second mortgage.’’”
“my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. ‘‘I don’t want to be on this team,’’ he said, with his head in his hands. ‘‘You might be stuck on this team,’’ I told him, ‘‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’’”
“Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work and deservedness, to ignore inequity, to accept that his sense of security mattered more than other people’s freedom and to agree, against all evidence, that a system that afforded him better housing, better education, better work and better pay than other people was inherently fair.”
“I still want my son to know the difference between compliance and complicity.”
“whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem”
“My son’s first week in kindergarten was devoted entirely to learning rules. At his school, obedience is rewarded with fake money that can be used, at the end of the week, to buy worthless toys that break immediately. Welcome to capitalism, I thought when I learned of this system, which produced, that week, a yo-yo that remained stuck at the bottom of its string. The principal asked all the parents to submit a signed form acknowledging that they had discussed the Code of Conduct with their children, but I didn’t sign the form. Instead, my son and I discussed the civil rights movement, and I reminded him that not all rules are good rules and that unjust rules must be broken. This was, I now see, a somewhat unhinged response to the first week of kindergarten.”
“Race Traitor articulated for me the possibility that a person who looks white can refuse to act white, meaning refuse to collude with the injustices of the law-enforcement system and the educational system, among other things.”
“This is what Noel called ‘‘new abolitionism.’’ John Brown was his model, and the institution he was intent on abolishing was whiteness.”
“Refusing to collude in injustice is, I’ve found, easier said than done.”
“Collusion is written onto our way of life, and nearly every interaction among white people is an invitation to collusion.”
“Being white is easy, in that nobody is expected to think about being white, but this is exactly what makes me uneasy about it.”
“Without thinking, I would say that believing I am white doesn’t cost me anything, that it’s pure profit, but I suspect that isn’t true. I suspect whiteness is costing me, as Baldwin would say, my moral life.”
“Like a bad loan, the kind in which the payments increase over time, the price of whiteness remains hidden behind its promises.”
“The moral concept of Schuld (‘‘guilt’’), Nietzsche wrote, ‘‘descends from the very material concept of Schulden (‘debts’).’’ Material debt predates moral debt.”
“Nietzsche has the kind of disdain for guilt that many people now reserve for ‘‘white guilt’’ in particular. We seem to believe that the crime is not investing in whiteness but feeling badly about it.”
“Nietzsche and I disagree on this, among other things. Like many white people, he regards guilt as a means of manipulation, a killjoy. Those who resent the powerful, he writes, use guilt to undermine their power and rob them of their pleasure in life. And this, I believe, is what makes guilt potentially redemptive.”
“Guilt is what makes a good life built on evil no longer good.”
“Once you’ve been living in a house for a while, you tend to begin to believe that it’s yours, even though you don’t own it yet.”
“When those of us who are convinced of our own whiteness deny our debt, this may be an inevitable result of having lived for so long in a house bought on credit but never paid off. We ourselves have never owned slaves, we insist, and we never say the n-word. ‘‘It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill,’’ Coates writes of Americans, ‘‘and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear.’’”
“A guilty white person is usually imagined as someone made impotent by guilt, someone rendered powerless.”
“But why not imagine guilt as a prod, a goad, an impetus to action? Isn’t guilt an essential cog in the machinery of the conscience?”
“What is the condition of white life?”
“We are moral debtors who act as material creditors.”
“Our banks make bad loans.”
“Our police, like Nietzsche’s creditors, act out their power on black bodies.”
“And, as I see in my own language, we confuse whiteness with ownership.”
“For most of us, the police aren’t ‘‘ours’’ any more than the banks are.”
“When we buy into whiteness, we entertain the delusion that we’re business partners with power, not its minions.”
“And we forget our debt to ourselves.”
“Eula Biss is the author of, most recently, ‘‘On Immunity: An Inoculation.’’”
“A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2015, on Page MM48 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: White Debt.”