You can’t think about something if you can’t talk about it, says Eula Biss. The writer helpfully opens up lived words and ideas like complacence, guilt, and opportunity hoarding for an urgent reckoning with whiteness. This conversation was inspired by her 2015 essay in the New York Times, “White Debt.”

Eula Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University. Her books include On Immunity: An Inoculation and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Eula Biss — Talking About Whiteness." Find more at onbeing.org.

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