Let’s Talk About WhitenessPosted in Audio, Family/Parenting, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2017-12-26 22:53Z by Steven |
On Being
2017-01-19
Krista Tippett, Host/Executive Producer
Eula Biss, Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
Image by Ann Hamilton
Could we learn to talk about whiteness? The writer Eula Biss has been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — but also how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.
Listen to the interview (00:51:21) here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.