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Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man’s Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man’s Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time.
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man’s Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man’s Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time.
256 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2009
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About the author
Eula Biss
16 books589 followersEula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches nonfiction writing, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, a new press dedicated to innovative nonfiction. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, The Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.
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June 14, 2017
I’m going to begin this review by telling a boring but hopefully illustrative story. I’ll try to keep it brief.
A couple of months ago I was in a park in the Rittenhouse Square area of Philadelphia at around 9 a.m. on a weekday. By this time everyone else was at work and the park was fairly deserted and peaceful. After I finished my coffee, I still had some time to kill before I had to be somewhere else, so I decided to go across the street to a large chain bookstore on the square. I wasn’t really looking to buy anything, but that store is usually quite crowded, so I thought it would be fun to browse around when the place was pretty empty. And indeed, except for a few people on laptops in the café, I seemed to be the only one in there. As I wandered around, I was noticed by pretty much every employee, all of whom asked if they could help me; I replied that I was just browsing. I needed to use the restroom, felt bad about it because I wasn’t planning to buy anything, but eventually went ahead and used it anyway. While washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and noticed that one of my eyes was weirdly bloodshot, making me look slightly demented. I left the restroom and browsed for a while longer, then left without buying anything. On my way out the door, I set off the alarm. I turned back to the security guard. “Is that me?” I asked. The guard smiled and said, “Do you have a library book in your bag?” Indeed I did have a library book in my bag (this book, as a matter of fact), and I started to reach into my purse to show it to her, but she waved me off. “You’re fine,” she said. So I left the store and continued on my way.
To sum up: I wandered around the empty store and was noticed by every employee. I used the restroom even though I wasn’t technically a customer. When I and my weirdly bloodshot eye exited the store without buying anything, I set off the alarm but was allowed to leave without even having to show what was in my bag.
In case you didn't know, whiteness has its privileges.
Now look, I’m not trying to say that this specific store, or this specific security guard (a woman of color herself), would have treated a nonwhite person any differently. But what I am saying is that we (that is, white people) only need to think about it for around 15 seconds to recognize that, as we go about our days, we benefit from our race presentation in countless ways. As a white middle-aged woman, I’m the kind of customer most shopkeepers would see and immediately deem harmless. This annoys me on my own behalf, because frankly I don’t consider myself totally harmless—I see myself as fairly formidable. But of course it’s much worse for someone who’s a nicer, more polite, all-around better person than I am, but who is regarded with suspicion solely because of their race, actual or perceived. In the vast majority of situations, whether deserved or not, my race is just not viewed with a similar suspicion. I'm allowed to be blithely unaware of my whiteness as I go about my business.
For that reason, white people have the luxury of just not having to think about our race very much. In fact, I think it’s pretty easy for white Americans to see our race as “neutral,” which of course it is not. Until everyone’s race can be seen as a neutral element, no one’s is. But because white people often have so much difficulty grasping that, or even contemplating it at all, a book like No Man’s Land is important.
As Eula Biss puts it, her extended family is “mixed,” meaning while she herself is white, various marriages have resulted in her having close relatives of different races. For most of her life, then, Biss has been aware of her whiteness in a way that a lot of us don’t have to be. This translates into some interesting essays that take the reader from a neighborhood in Queens, where Biss’s race puts her in the minority, to Iowa City, where she feels immediately at home and then uncomfortably realizes it’s the first time in years that she’s been in a place where her race puts her in the majority. She also notes that, living surrounded by white frat boys in Iowa City, she has far more occasion to summon and interact with the police than she ever did in Queens, and the provocative analogy she builds from that observation is one of the most unforgettable things in this book (well, that and the essay about race and telephone poles that begins this collection).
It’s obviously vital for white people to consider racial issues as laid out by people of color—Between the World and Me and We Gon’ Be Alright being two recent examples of good books for this purpose. But I think No Man’s Land is a valuable book as well, not just for its intelligence, insight, and elegant writing, all of which it has in abundance, but for the way it pries whiteness out of its comfortable oblivion and forces us (that is, white people) to regard it as part of a much larger dialogue that’s been ongoing for millennia and shows no signs of wrapping up anytime soon.
I nearly gave this impressive book five stars, but held back for two reasons. The first is that, to me, Biss sometimes seemed just a wee bit too impressed by her own wokeness, and the book would have been improved if she’d acknowledged that. The other reason is simply that this book was published in 2009 and a lot has happened since then, so this isn’t the most up-to-date book on race you could be reading. Indeed, this definitely shouldn’t be the only book you read to consider race in general, but if you’re white, this is the book you should read to consider your race in particular.
A couple of months ago I was in a park in the Rittenhouse Square area of Philadelphia at around 9 a.m. on a weekday. By this time everyone else was at work and the park was fairly deserted and peaceful. After I finished my coffee, I still had some time to kill before I had to be somewhere else, so I decided to go across the street to a large chain bookstore on the square. I wasn’t really looking to buy anything, but that store is usually quite crowded, so I thought it would be fun to browse around when the place was pretty empty. And indeed, except for a few people on laptops in the café, I seemed to be the only one in there. As I wandered around, I was noticed by pretty much every employee, all of whom asked if they could help me; I replied that I was just browsing. I needed to use the restroom, felt bad about it because I wasn’t planning to buy anything, but eventually went ahead and used it anyway. While washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and noticed that one of my eyes was weirdly bloodshot, making me look slightly demented. I left the restroom and browsed for a while longer, then left without buying anything. On my way out the door, I set off the alarm. I turned back to the security guard. “Is that me?” I asked. The guard smiled and said, “Do you have a library book in your bag?” Indeed I did have a library book in my bag (this book, as a matter of fact), and I started to reach into my purse to show it to her, but she waved me off. “You’re fine,” she said. So I left the store and continued on my way.
To sum up: I wandered around the empty store and was noticed by every employee. I used the restroom even though I wasn’t technically a customer. When I and my weirdly bloodshot eye exited the store without buying anything, I set off the alarm but was allowed to leave without even having to show what was in my bag.
In case you didn't know, whiteness has its privileges.
Now look, I’m not trying to say that this specific store, or this specific security guard (a woman of color herself), would have treated a nonwhite person any differently. But what I am saying is that we (that is, white people) only need to think about it for around 15 seconds to recognize that, as we go about our days, we benefit from our race presentation in countless ways. As a white middle-aged woman, I’m the kind of customer most shopkeepers would see and immediately deem harmless. This annoys me on my own behalf, because frankly I don’t consider myself totally harmless—I see myself as fairly formidable. But of course it’s much worse for someone who’s a nicer, more polite, all-around better person than I am, but who is regarded with suspicion solely because of their race, actual or perceived. In the vast majority of situations, whether deserved or not, my race is just not viewed with a similar suspicion. I'm allowed to be blithely unaware of my whiteness as I go about my business.
For that reason, white people have the luxury of just not having to think about our race very much. In fact, I think it’s pretty easy for white Americans to see our race as “neutral,” which of course it is not. Until everyone’s race can be seen as a neutral element, no one’s is. But because white people often have so much difficulty grasping that, or even contemplating it at all, a book like No Man’s Land is important.
As Eula Biss puts it, her extended family is “mixed,” meaning while she herself is white, various marriages have resulted in her having close relatives of different races. For most of her life, then, Biss has been aware of her whiteness in a way that a lot of us don’t have to be. This translates into some interesting essays that take the reader from a neighborhood in Queens, where Biss’s race puts her in the minority, to Iowa City, where she feels immediately at home and then uncomfortably realizes it’s the first time in years that she’s been in a place where her race puts her in the majority. She also notes that, living surrounded by white frat boys in Iowa City, she has far more occasion to summon and interact with the police than she ever did in Queens, and the provocative analogy she builds from that observation is one of the most unforgettable things in this book (well, that and the essay about race and telephone poles that begins this collection).
It’s obviously vital for white people to consider racial issues as laid out by people of color—Between the World and Me and We Gon’ Be Alright being two recent examples of good books for this purpose. But I think No Man’s Land is a valuable book as well, not just for its intelligence, insight, and elegant writing, all of which it has in abundance, but for the way it pries whiteness out of its comfortable oblivion and forces us (that is, white people) to regard it as part of a much larger dialogue that’s been ongoing for millennia and shows no signs of wrapping up anytime soon.
I nearly gave this impressive book five stars, but held back for two reasons. The first is that, to me, Biss sometimes seemed just a wee bit too impressed by her own wokeness, and the book would have been improved if she’d acknowledged that. The other reason is simply that this book was published in 2009 and a lot has happened since then, so this isn’t the most up-to-date book on race you could be reading. Indeed, this definitely shouldn’t be the only book you read to consider race in general, but if you’re white, this is the book you should read to consider your race in particular.
March 6, 2013
This is a very readable, elegant book of essays. Smart, engaging, well-researched and the writing interrogates race and class in America within the context of privilege and whiteness. Nearly all of her observations are stunning and so beautifully phrased. I really enjoyed this book and learned a great deal, found a great deal to work with and think about. One thing tweaked me a bit. Biss discusses her whiteness quite a lot, as if we might have... forgotten it between or within essays? I realize that her whiteness is part of the point of the book but there's.... something about the way it keeps coming off that feels a bit off.
April 15, 2019
Eula Biss is odd... and super smart. and interesting. Reading her essays and her take on cultures and how we view race was surreal and intoxicating. The word oblong keeps floating in my head to describe the effect of Biss. She sees things in different ways that at first seem bizarre, but as she writes become obvious points as she examines both race and white privilege juxtaposed over her background and life experiences and the social cultures of various places she has lived. It’s a very interesting approach and brings out/highlights how race an privilege are perceived and experienced by geography.
Obviously a lot of racially charged things have happened since this book was written. Obama served 8 years as President, Black Lives Matter was created, racially charged mass shootings are more pronounced, the hurricane in Puerto Rico has occurred, and obviously the election of Donald Trump was never envisioned. Ten years was a long time ago from this lens. So much has changed in such a short time. To some extent, white privilege is more acknowledged, not because there is a drive towards equality, but because it is viewed as a birthright. Taking all of this into account, for me Biss does not come across as dated. It's almost as if racism and inequality are timeless. Warning this collection will invoke anger, but it is also incredibly thoughtful and thought provoking. She is a very compelling and brilliant author and this was a compelling and brilliant read.
4+ Stars
Read on kindle
Obviously a lot of racially charged things have happened since this book was written. Obama served 8 years as President, Black Lives Matter was created, racially charged mass shootings are more pronounced, the hurricane in Puerto Rico has occurred, and obviously the election of Donald Trump was never envisioned. Ten years was a long time ago from this lens. So much has changed in such a short time. To some extent, white privilege is more acknowledged, not because there is a drive towards equality, but because it is viewed as a birthright. Taking all of this into account, for me Biss does not come across as dated. It's almost as if racism and inequality are timeless. Warning this collection will invoke anger, but it is also incredibly thoughtful and thought provoking. She is a very compelling and brilliant author and this was a compelling and brilliant read.
4+ Stars
Read on kindle
December 29, 2023
I’m considering that this essay collection was published in 2009 when I give it three stars instead of two. Eula Biss has some interesting and important comments about race in this essay collection, such as how some universities may try to recruit students of color to make themselves look progressive instead of actually caring about the experiences of these students, or how she sometimes try to distance herself from her whiteness by thinking that she’s not like other white people. In 2009 (the year I started my Goodreads account!) I was an eighth grader in the spring and a freshman in high school in the fall, and I don’t recall people talking as openly about whiteness or being white – so I suppose Biss writing about whiteness was more novel at that time.
At the same time, there were some wild misses in Notes from No Man’s Land. At one point she says that her mom should be “allowed out” of being white because “she has sacrificed” and she’s dated or married men of color?? Eula your mom can have sacrificed things and she can date or marry men of color and still have white privilege, it’s not that complex?? At another point in the book Biss apologizes for slavery which… was perhaps well-intentioned and also cringeworthy.
I suppose that what makes this essay collection most cringeworthy is the lack of action Biss actually takes to address white supremacy. She names whiteness, she hints at and occasionally kind of names white privilege, and then she ends her essays as if that’s enough. Newsflash: you can actually do things with racial privilege! I just googled “how to use white privilege” and found this article that upon skimming, seems decent. Or you can read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. And even if these resources emerged well after Biss wrote this collection, I’m fairly confident that there were white people in 2009 who were using their white privilege and tangibly taking action to dismantle white supremacy. So maybe she could’ve used those white people as an example of how to actually take action against white supremacy instead of only naming it and calling it a day and then winning an award for this collection.
In sum, I think Biss is a fairly strong writer on the sentence level and I suspect that overall it’s better that she named whiteness than not. As a queer person of color though it’s a bit frustrating to see a white person name their whiteness and not do anything about it aside from writing about it and then get rewarded for doing so. I know people have a lot of mixed opinions about Robin DiAngelo and for valid/thoughtful reasons, though at least she called other white people out and talked with other white people about their white fragility, whereas Biss doesn’t even seem to do that.
At the same time, there were some wild misses in Notes from No Man’s Land. At one point she says that her mom should be “allowed out” of being white because “she has sacrificed” and she’s dated or married men of color?? Eula your mom can have sacrificed things and she can date or marry men of color and still have white privilege, it’s not that complex?? At another point in the book Biss apologizes for slavery which… was perhaps well-intentioned and also cringeworthy.
I suppose that what makes this essay collection most cringeworthy is the lack of action Biss actually takes to address white supremacy. She names whiteness, she hints at and occasionally kind of names white privilege, and then she ends her essays as if that’s enough. Newsflash: you can actually do things with racial privilege! I just googled “how to use white privilege” and found this article that upon skimming, seems decent. Or you can read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. And even if these resources emerged well after Biss wrote this collection, I’m fairly confident that there were white people in 2009 who were using their white privilege and tangibly taking action to dismantle white supremacy. So maybe she could’ve used those white people as an example of how to actually take action against white supremacy instead of only naming it and calling it a day and then winning an award for this collection.
In sum, I think Biss is a fairly strong writer on the sentence level and I suspect that overall it’s better that she named whiteness than not. As a queer person of color though it’s a bit frustrating to see a white person name their whiteness and not do anything about it aside from writing about it and then get rewarded for doing so. I know people have a lot of mixed opinions about Robin DiAngelo and for valid/thoughtful reasons, though at least she called other white people out and talked with other white people about their white fragility, whereas Biss doesn’t even seem to do that.
February 14, 2020
She admits to tracing Didion’s sentences as Didion admitted to tracing Hemingway’s – much of this is Didionish, personal-historical, my neurosis intersects the vastness – but three of the essays, "Time and Distance Overcome," “Is this Kansas,” and “No Man’s Land,” are distinctive and strong. You can read them on her site and you should. I liked the shoutouts to Marilynne Robinson and the fighting abolitionists of the Middle Border. The blurbs oversell her; if Biss tells you a “story of our country” that you “never saw coming” – then you ig’nant. Or were. Or are a teenager - this is an ideal book to assign to undergraduates. I say that without snark – her’s is a young, “relatable,” approachable, wise and stylish voice telling Americans what they always need to hear: “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
March 23, 2016
My skin is white, but I still have the ravaged blood of Africa in me.
The more I read essay collections produced by Graywolf, the more impressed I am. There is something deeply personal and yet alluringly informational about the personal essay form; maybe it's in the brusque style, or in the compendious structure. I enjoyed Eula Biss's absolutist style and provocative non-censorship of her personal feelings, but what I really admired was the look at consciousness, the same thing I loved in Solnit's collection, The Faraway Nearby.
Ever heard of the 1999 New York story of the Staten Island woman who gave birth to twins, one black, one white? A fertility clinic accidentally implants the embryo of a black woman into a white woman, alongside the embryo of the white woman. Consequently, the woman becomes pregnant with twins: one black, the other white. The puzzling nature of this occurrence is something Biss analyzes in one of my favorite essays from this collection,"Relations," expounding the theory that whenever race is involved, things get even more complicated, especially for two young kids "in an uncomfortable no man's land between two racial identities:"
Without denying that blacks and whites remain largely segregated and disturbingly polarized, and without denying that black culture is a distinct, if not uniform, culture, I think we ought to admit, as the writer Albert Murray once insisted, that American culture is "incontestably mulatto."
Zora Neale Hurston was among those who were against the Supreme Court's decision to integrate public schools in the South. This I learned while reading "Back to Buxton," a layered essay wherein Biss reveals her struggle to find identity, after moving to Iowa. She gets to moments of self revelation through stunning parallel formation - essay within an essay- and reveals the history of a town called Buxton. The small company coal town, called "the colored man's mecca of Iowa," where black and white miners belonged to a union that demanded equal pay for equal work, was a town that drew researchers and scholars who studied it in 1980 and deemed it a "utopia" because of its "racially harmonious" environment. One thing Biss does well is link history, fact, and consciousness with theme, for somehow this essay circles back to this feeling of homelessness wherever one goes, the loss of identity that comes from complex family ethnicity, or from one's wander away from one's homeland; the self actualization:
Perhaps it is only through leaving home that you can learn who you are. Or at least who the world thinks you are. And the gap between the one and the other is the painful part, the part that you may, if you are me, or if you are Zora Neale Hurston, keep arguing against for the rest of your life…
I didn't know that Joan Didion borrowed the title of one of my favorite essays, "Goodbye to All That," from Robert Graves's memoir (maybe because I wasn't familiar with the memoir). What I do know is that I love that essay for all it stands for - New York City, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the struggle - and for how exquisitely threaded it is. Apparently Eula Biss felt the same way, because she wrote an essay that copied Didion's essay - same structure, same subject, different story. "Goodbye to All That" is now also one of my favorite essays from this collection (just as it is one of my favorite essays from Slouching Towards Bethlehem).
February 6, 2020
Originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press in 2009, this powerful essay collection about how identity is bound up with race and place has recently been made available in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who previously published Eula Biss’s On Immunity, a wide-ranging study of vaccination practices.
Although Biss is white, she considers herself to have had ‘mixed’ influences in her life. For instance, her mother converted to the West African Yoruba religion and had a black boyfriend and later a Chinese husband; and Biss has a half-Jamaican cousin. Furthermore, she remembers how when she and her sister were growing up they had different colored dolls, with hers known simply as “Black Doll”.
In one of the best individual essays, “Relations,” Biss discusses psychology studies in which children overwhelmingly associated such black dolls with negative words like “bad” and white dolls with positive ones like “nice”. Also woven through is the eye-opening 1999 case of a white woman being treated by a fertility clinic who had a black couple’s embryo accidentally implanted alongside her own and thus gave birth to ‘twin’ boys – one black and one white. A custody battle ensued to decide whether these babies who had shared a womb were actually brothers. This unprecedented ethical dilemma revealed much about American attitudes towards race and belonging.
Apart from when she taught at the University of Iowa, Biss has generally lived in places where she is in the minority as a white person: in Harlem, where she taught in public schools; in San Diego, where she lived in a poor area and worked as a reporter for an African-American newspaper and then as a bilingual (English and Spanish) receptionist for a chemical factory; and in Chicago, where she and her husband can only afford to live in a sizable apartment because theirs is considered a rough, minority-predominant neighborhood.
The title piece interrogates notions of pioneers and frontiers, with Biss carefully pointing out how the adventuresome connotations of such terms are counterbalanced by the fact that natives must usually be displaced for others to take over. Who actually owns places, and what do names really say about Americans when most have immigrant ancestors? she asks.
A few of these essays, including the first and the last, are in a slightly different style: short paragraphs of loosely related anecdotes. In “Time and Distance Overcome” she recounts the early history of the telephone and cites instances of telephone poles being used for lynchings, while in “All Apologies” she gives a history of apologies for atrocities, whether that be slavery or apartheid. Unfortunately, these mostly come across as disjointed lists of facts.
The text has been brought up to date for this edition with a short coda entitled “Murder Mystery” about the recent spate of police shootings of black men in America. The whole book feels timely, though, because the injustices and absurdities it mentions are ongoing: black parents are more likely to be investigated for abuse and have children taken away into foster care; and we continue to fear people who are unlike us while failing to recognize true threats close by.
“Race is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact,” Biss writes, and this strong set of essays examines those facts with bravery and eloquence. I would highly recommend this to readers of Joan Didion and Leslie Jamison.
Although Biss is white, she considers herself to have had ‘mixed’ influences in her life. For instance, her mother converted to the West African Yoruba religion and had a black boyfriend and later a Chinese husband; and Biss has a half-Jamaican cousin. Furthermore, she remembers how when she and her sister were growing up they had different colored dolls, with hers known simply as “Black Doll”.
In one of the best individual essays, “Relations,” Biss discusses psychology studies in which children overwhelmingly associated such black dolls with negative words like “bad” and white dolls with positive ones like “nice”. Also woven through is the eye-opening 1999 case of a white woman being treated by a fertility clinic who had a black couple’s embryo accidentally implanted alongside her own and thus gave birth to ‘twin’ boys – one black and one white. A custody battle ensued to decide whether these babies who had shared a womb were actually brothers. This unprecedented ethical dilemma revealed much about American attitudes towards race and belonging.
Apart from when she taught at the University of Iowa, Biss has generally lived in places where she is in the minority as a white person: in Harlem, where she taught in public schools; in San Diego, where she lived in a poor area and worked as a reporter for an African-American newspaper and then as a bilingual (English and Spanish) receptionist for a chemical factory; and in Chicago, where she and her husband can only afford to live in a sizable apartment because theirs is considered a rough, minority-predominant neighborhood.
The title piece interrogates notions of pioneers and frontiers, with Biss carefully pointing out how the adventuresome connotations of such terms are counterbalanced by the fact that natives must usually be displaced for others to take over. Who actually owns places, and what do names really say about Americans when most have immigrant ancestors? she asks.
A few of these essays, including the first and the last, are in a slightly different style: short paragraphs of loosely related anecdotes. In “Time and Distance Overcome” she recounts the early history of the telephone and cites instances of telephone poles being used for lynchings, while in “All Apologies” she gives a history of apologies for atrocities, whether that be slavery or apartheid. Unfortunately, these mostly come across as disjointed lists of facts.
The text has been brought up to date for this edition with a short coda entitled “Murder Mystery” about the recent spate of police shootings of black men in America. The whole book feels timely, though, because the injustices and absurdities it mentions are ongoing: black parents are more likely to be investigated for abuse and have children taken away into foster care; and we continue to fear people who are unlike us while failing to recognize true threats close by.
“Race is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact,” Biss writes, and this strong set of essays examines those facts with bravery and eloquence. I would highly recommend this to readers of Joan Didion and Leslie Jamison.
November 19, 2010
Essays were extremely well-written, thought provoking, the book went by like a breeze... but Biss unfortunately seems to have predetermined those who it is worth examining and who not. The "white trash" she comes across in Mexico are an embarrassment to her, so she makes no attempt to get to know them. At one point she acknowledges her holier-than-thou attitude, and exclaims that she shouldn't think of herself as better educated, more cultured, etc., than most whites-but she continues to do just that throughout the book. Biss clearly thinks of herself as better than most, and maybe that is what gives her the confidence to write these essays, but it keeps her from examining people who she might be surprised to learn that she can learn from.
September 26, 2013
Themes of escape, isolation, prejudice, and the search-for-self penetrate this book. Which I could enjoy if executed in a different style, but I did not enjoy this book whatsoever. I think that Eula Biss sounds extremely pretentious, presumptuous, naive, and at times careless throughout the entirety of her book.The embarrassing irony of this book is that if it were written by a man I do not believe it would have been published. As a female and as a mid-westerner - one who is not ignorant to the harsh realities in our country - this book left me embarrassed; not ashamed like Biss may have intended for her none other than young, white audience to feel.
I often grew frustrated or bored while reading "Notes From No Man's Land". I would only recommend this book to someone who honestly believes that racism does not exist anymore in America. But I'd recommend something else first.
One of the few tidbits from the book I enjoyed was a quote from Zora Neale Hurston, a black female who'd moved out of her entirely black community in to the city; being seen as "colored" for the first time: "No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my knife."
This quote explains my distaste for this book entirely. I've not time to dwell on the harsh realities I know surround me. I'd rather "sharpen my knife" now, to put myself in a position to make a change in the future.
I often grew frustrated or bored while reading "Notes From No Man's Land". I would only recommend this book to someone who honestly believes that racism does not exist anymore in America. But I'd recommend something else first.
One of the few tidbits from the book I enjoyed was a quote from Zora Neale Hurston, a black female who'd moved out of her entirely black community in to the city; being seen as "colored" for the first time: "No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my knife."
This quote explains my distaste for this book entirely. I've not time to dwell on the harsh realities I know surround me. I'd rather "sharpen my knife" now, to put myself in a position to make a change in the future.
September 3, 2014
This book left me all but completely aggravated. There were times when I wanted to track down Biss and punch her in the face. Honestly, to me this book seemed like a white woman complaining about her whiteness and almost refusing to approach any situation in a non-white fashion. This book upset me so much and I was so happy to be done with it when I finished. This book could have been better titled "Eula Biss and Her White Guilt". It would have given the reader a much better idea of what the essays were about.
November 1, 2011
This is the best book of essays I've read in over thirty years--since I read Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. Biss is a master of language--her sentences skip along--but they are also PACKED with insights about America's continuing struggle with racism, especially with regard to brown and black Americans. Biss writes about what she witnesses, connecting the dots between historical and newsworthy occurrences and her own eyes and experience. Case in point: the frat boys of Iowa and how they are more threatening than anyone Biss has encountered down any dark, inner-city street. Or ... how when looting occurs in an Iowa town (she was attending U of Iowa at the time, so she was there to observe this first hand), it's not newsworthy ... but when it happened after Katrina, and black people happened to be looting, it was on CNN faster than you can say American Pie. It's no wonder Biss won a National Book Critics Circle prize for her book; it is one of the most enlightening, thought-provoking and well-written books on contemporary race issues in America out there.
February 20, 2013
I discovered this book in the "Ethnic Studies" section of Powell's Books in Portland. Intrigued by a book of nonfiction "American Essays" about race and written by a white woman, I browsed only to discover my hometown, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, mentioned on page 5. It went home with me, needless to say.
Eula Biss didn't disappoint. Weaving together personal and public encounters with racism, fear, prejudice, as well as hope, Biss is honest. She acknowledges white guilt, her guilt, and is, in writing the book, attempting to find her place in the ongoing, complex, painful racial climate we live in today.
These essays were provocative. They might not have always been right, but they were honest and provocative, which is more than most of us can muster on the subject of race.
I'd love for friends, family, and everyone I know to read these essays. They need further discussion at every table. They need life off the page.
Tip: Don't skip the "Notes" in the back of the book. They're essential.
Eula Biss didn't disappoint. Weaving together personal and public encounters with racism, fear, prejudice, as well as hope, Biss is honest. She acknowledges white guilt, her guilt, and is, in writing the book, attempting to find her place in the ongoing, complex, painful racial climate we live in today.
These essays were provocative. They might not have always been right, but they were honest and provocative, which is more than most of us can muster on the subject of race.
I'd love for friends, family, and everyone I know to read these essays. They need further discussion at every table. They need life off the page.
Tip: Don't skip the "Notes" in the back of the book. They're essential.
September 8, 2016
I literally can't even fathom how much I hated this, and how disappointing that is after loving On Immunity. Most of the essays touch upon topics that aren't up to Biss to write about, and if that isn't bad enough, she somehow finds a way to turn issues of race around to focus on her own whiteness every single time.
Writing-wise, this also wasn't as satisfying as On Immunity was--she couldn't seem to shake the cliché MFA tone.
Writing-wise, this also wasn't as satisfying as On Immunity was--she couldn't seem to shake the cliché MFA tone.
December 29, 2014
The award for My Current Number One Nonfiction Writer Crush goes to Eula Biss. She is so damn talented and brilliant and her writing is down to earth and honest and really fucking SMART. Her research makes my brain explode. This was by far the best book I read in 2014. And maybe even ever. Marry me, Eula.
July 7, 2014
The point of this book seems to be to display that Ms Biss has discovered there is racism in America.
Read
August 31, 2020Using the personal as a filter for understanding that which is greater than our own lives.
June 1, 2025
the book is exactly the type of writing i’d like to do after my memoir. eula biss is really paradigm for resisting, “it’s best to write about only what you know” debate in the literature canon.
this book is self-aware, remorseful, accountable, and accessible. there is no one like biss currently weaving in deep research, cultural relevance, and personal narrative like she is. if you want an honest account of systemic racism in this country, this is it. eula biss does a great job of delineating past and present problems while not flouting her identity as a white woman hasn’t helped sustain them. this book is a call to push people to take accountability on how we all settle in preserving problems because of the acute division all over.
“One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for—a violence” (158).
I’m sooooooo blessed and thankful for europe, for being selected to go to a more ethically diverse school than i originally would have, for the opportunities my life has given me to be exposed to so many different kinds of people where i have learned to forgo the type of fear my white flight suburban neighborhood subconsciously ingrains. im so thankful and soooo privileged to have been presented opportunities that lead me to an open-minded curiosity and love of learning instead of vacuous privilege that lead me to an insular fear.
this book is self-aware, remorseful, accountable, and accessible. there is no one like biss currently weaving in deep research, cultural relevance, and personal narrative like she is. if you want an honest account of systemic racism in this country, this is it. eula biss does a great job of delineating past and present problems while not flouting her identity as a white woman hasn’t helped sustain them. this book is a call to push people to take accountability on how we all settle in preserving problems because of the acute division all over.
“One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for—a violence” (158).
I’m sooooooo blessed and thankful for europe, for being selected to go to a more ethically diverse school than i originally would have, for the opportunities my life has given me to be exposed to so many different kinds of people where i have learned to forgo the type of fear my white flight suburban neighborhood subconsciously ingrains. im so thankful and soooo privileged to have been presented opportunities that lead me to an open-minded curiosity and love of learning instead of vacuous privilege that lead me to an insular fear.
October 15, 2021
2.5/5 stars
The phrase I would use to describe this collection of essays is “tone deaf”. Eula Biss is a white woman. Make sure you get that straight because she reminds you of that fact approximately 50 times per essay. Biss grew up in upstate New York/Massachusetts. At one point, she refers to her mother, who is also white, using a term which I will not repeat here because her mother “had the personality traits” - yeah go ahead and co-opt a racial slur to describe your mother. You’re so edgy, Eula Biss.
Eula Biss is obsessed with race. I don’t know who gave her the authority to talk about race, but talk about it she does. Mostly she’s obsessed with Black people, but sometimes also with brown people — Mexican people, mostly. She’s white and sometimes she wishes she weren’t! She’s white and she is grappling with guilt about that fact! She doesn’t know if it’s better to apologize and expect forgiveness, to apologize and not mean it, or to not apologize at all. Guess what, Eula Biss? Nobody gives a fuck what you do.
Eula Biss is THAT annoying person. She’s liberal without having engaged with the idea of what it means to be “liberal” in any critical sense. She knocks on doors and complains that the music is too loud at student parties. She tattles on a kid for “hissing” at her in a public school in New York; a student is called to the principal’s office to apologize for sexually harassing her. At one point she bemoans how awful Hurricane Katrina was. Yeah, real fucking mind-blowing. Like, nobody else has ever pointed that out.
I had to read the following passage out loud to my partner and my friend to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting it. “Perhaps my inability to pass is why I feel so trapped within my identity as a white woman. That identity does not feel chosen by me as much as it feels grudgingly defaulted to. But I haven’t worked to assimilate into any other racial group. And I have rarely turned down any of the privileges my skin has afforded me” (“Relations”, pp. 20-30).
Um, excuse me? This is satire, right? Is this where Jordan Peele got his inspiration for “Get Out”? Does Eula Biss wish that she could go on a racial safari and try out each race just to see how it feels? Ugh, ugh, ugh.
You know why I read this book? Because I once took a creative nonfiction writing class with Biss’ husband, John Bresland. Long story short, he was an asshole. He was jealous of the attention she’d received for “Notes from No Man’s Land”, which had been published 2-3 years prior. In fact, he assigned us to read the titular essay, “No Man’s Land”, which isn’t as completely cringeworthy as the rest of the collection, but still made me recoil when Bresland himself is quoted as saying “‘I hope more white people don’t move here’” because he likes the local flavor of his neighborhood too much (p. 166). I was curious about this academic couple, this nonfiction writer who was jealous of his nonfiction writer wife, and I once saw them walking around campus, a couple of absurdly pale, absurdly thin people, looking like a pair of vampires caught out in the daylight.
I should just remember them as vampires, which is in some ways a poetic and fitting description of what they do for a living anyway.
The phrase I would use to describe this collection of essays is “tone deaf”. Eula Biss is a white woman. Make sure you get that straight because she reminds you of that fact approximately 50 times per essay. Biss grew up in upstate New York/Massachusetts. At one point, she refers to her mother, who is also white, using a term which I will not repeat here because her mother “had the personality traits” - yeah go ahead and co-opt a racial slur to describe your mother. You’re so edgy, Eula Biss.
Eula Biss is obsessed with race. I don’t know who gave her the authority to talk about race, but talk about it she does. Mostly she’s obsessed with Black people, but sometimes also with brown people — Mexican people, mostly. She’s white and sometimes she wishes she weren’t! She’s white and she is grappling with guilt about that fact! She doesn’t know if it’s better to apologize and expect forgiveness, to apologize and not mean it, or to not apologize at all. Guess what, Eula Biss? Nobody gives a fuck what you do.
Eula Biss is THAT annoying person. She’s liberal without having engaged with the idea of what it means to be “liberal” in any critical sense. She knocks on doors and complains that the music is too loud at student parties. She tattles on a kid for “hissing” at her in a public school in New York; a student is called to the principal’s office to apologize for sexually harassing her. At one point she bemoans how awful Hurricane Katrina was. Yeah, real fucking mind-blowing. Like, nobody else has ever pointed that out.
I had to read the following passage out loud to my partner and my friend to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting it. “Perhaps my inability to pass is why I feel so trapped within my identity as a white woman. That identity does not feel chosen by me as much as it feels grudgingly defaulted to. But I haven’t worked to assimilate into any other racial group. And I have rarely turned down any of the privileges my skin has afforded me” (“Relations”, pp. 20-30).
Um, excuse me? This is satire, right? Is this where Jordan Peele got his inspiration for “Get Out”? Does Eula Biss wish that she could go on a racial safari and try out each race just to see how it feels? Ugh, ugh, ugh.
You know why I read this book? Because I once took a creative nonfiction writing class with Biss’ husband, John Bresland. Long story short, he was an asshole. He was jealous of the attention she’d received for “Notes from No Man’s Land”, which had been published 2-3 years prior. In fact, he assigned us to read the titular essay, “No Man’s Land”, which isn’t as completely cringeworthy as the rest of the collection, but still made me recoil when Bresland himself is quoted as saying “‘I hope more white people don’t move here’” because he likes the local flavor of his neighborhood too much (p. 166). I was curious about this academic couple, this nonfiction writer who was jealous of his nonfiction writer wife, and I once saw them walking around campus, a couple of absurdly pale, absurdly thin people, looking like a pair of vampires caught out in the daylight.
I should just remember them as vampires, which is in some ways a poetic and fitting description of what they do for a living anyway.
June 21, 2016
The essays in this collection follow a chronological path through Biss's young adulthood, from her early twenties to (it seems) her early thirties. Some of the essays she began working on while still temporally close to the experiences, if not still in fact in the middle of them. Although she later revised many times, the anger and confusion of her younger self will out in these pieces--the "impudence," as she herself defines it in her end notes. When I was reading these, I had a hard time with that weave in the fabric. I normally expect "wisdom" and "emotion recollected in tranquillity" in a book of essays, more or less. When I got to the end, I felt that the more unbridled struggles of the first third or so--maybe half?--added a lot of power to the book as a whole. In fact, you could say they may make the Biss of No Man's Land a more "trustworthy" essayist who is not reconfiguring the views and emotions of her earlier self as much as most essayists invariably do -- it's impossible not to, to some extent. So I ended up valuing a quality of this work that initially nettled me.
When you read her subsequent book, On Immunity, it's all elegant reflection compared to NML. I loved the latter book, but the difference in tone and temperament are striking. Interesting to consider.
Insightful, painful, heart-twisting, "educational," original. Highly recommended.
When you read her subsequent book, On Immunity, it's all elegant reflection compared to NML. I loved the latter book, but the difference in tone and temperament are striking. Interesting to consider.
Insightful, painful, heart-twisting, "educational," original. Highly recommended.
November 14, 2017
Notes from No Man's Land is incredible. I read it in pretty much two big sittings, and I did the same with another book of hers "On Immunity." Her depth of feeling and personal interrogation are matched only by the thoroughness of her research and an open-mindedness toward that research. What I mean is, it doesn't feel to me like she is trying to assert some sort of pre-formed agenda. She seems to be honestly searching for the truth, and her place or role in the story of that truth. The associations she draws—such as comparing her move to a "troubled" neighborhood in Chicago to "Little House on the Prairie"—are surprising and meaningful.
In other reviews of this book, I see a lot of accusations of white guilt and liberal bias, etc. I don't really feel that. A worthy aspect of this book is that it examines the narratives that White America tells itself about its black citizens, and points out some very obvious hypocrisies that perpetuate racial discord. But again, this book is not damning or accusatory toward anyone, esp. given the tone of what is today considered "normal" in political discourse. Biss isn't trying to make you feel guilty, only inspire the most common bit of empathy. If you feel guilty reading this book, maybe that's cause for some self-reflection of your own.
There's not a word wasted in "Notes from No Man's Land." I'd recommend it to literally anyone.
In other reviews of this book, I see a lot of accusations of white guilt and liberal bias, etc. I don't really feel that. A worthy aspect of this book is that it examines the narratives that White America tells itself about its black citizens, and points out some very obvious hypocrisies that perpetuate racial discord. But again, this book is not damning or accusatory toward anyone, esp. given the tone of what is today considered "normal" in political discourse. Biss isn't trying to make you feel guilty, only inspire the most common bit of empathy. If you feel guilty reading this book, maybe that's cause for some self-reflection of your own.
There's not a word wasted in "Notes from No Man's Land." I'd recommend it to literally anyone.
March 6, 2013
This book helped me understand how essays work. How meandering and studying and processing could work. How writing works as a reflection of living.
There is so much to say. But this book took me a long time to read because I was busy, so I don't have good recall.
There were some essays that were paragraphs jumping from one spot to the next. From one place to another. I want to explore this.
It started off talking about telephone pole lynchings. It talked about black dolls and barbies, teaching and reporting. A story of a white women birthing a black baby and a white baby because of a mistake at the fertility clinic and how people respond to this. Trips to Mexico and the midwest. Buxton. A reflection on NYC. How the Irish became white. Working in white Iowa. Living in a diverse Chicago neighborhood and going swimming. Essay on apologies including presidential apologies or non apologies.
I could also picture Suzy Nadine reading and writing this.
"Possessive Investment in Whiteness" by George Lipsitz
Being White: Stories of Race and Racism by Karen McKinney
The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans by Slavoj Zizek
Not Quite White by Matt Wray
There is so much to say. But this book took me a long time to read because I was busy, so I don't have good recall.
There were some essays that were paragraphs jumping from one spot to the next. From one place to another. I want to explore this.
It started off talking about telephone pole lynchings. It talked about black dolls and barbies, teaching and reporting. A story of a white women birthing a black baby and a white baby because of a mistake at the fertility clinic and how people respond to this. Trips to Mexico and the midwest. Buxton. A reflection on NYC. How the Irish became white. Working in white Iowa. Living in a diverse Chicago neighborhood and going swimming. Essay on apologies including presidential apologies or non apologies.
I could also picture Suzy Nadine reading and writing this.
"Possessive Investment in Whiteness" by George Lipsitz
Being White: Stories of Race and Racism by Karen McKinney
The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans by Slavoj Zizek
Not Quite White by Matt Wray
March 17, 2019
A collection of excellent essays about the complicated identity of the author and of the meaning of race in the United States. Biss covers territory from the use of the newly erected telephone poles for lynching to gentrification to Laura Ingalls Wilder's interrogation of the pioneer's relations with the indigenous people they stole the land from.
A few years ago, my family was able to rent an apartment in an all-white neighborhood in the Bronx. The landlady explained we were "her kind of people". Since we had nothing at all in common, other than our skin color, her meaning was painfully clear. And so began an uncomfortable stint of living in this essentially and deliberately segregated area. We clearly were not their kind of people as our landlady found out (she promptly began to hate us, accusing her of "betraying" her--which in a sense, I guess we did by accepting the apartment under false premises.
There are privileges to being white. But Biss makes the point repeatedly that hatred destroys those who hate as well as the ones who are hated. Not that that makes oppression any more palatable but it's a warning to a world that lives bathed in hatred and fear.
A few years ago, my family was able to rent an apartment in an all-white neighborhood in the Bronx. The landlady explained we were "her kind of people". Since we had nothing at all in common, other than our skin color, her meaning was painfully clear. And so began an uncomfortable stint of living in this essentially and deliberately segregated area. We clearly were not their kind of people as our landlady found out (she promptly began to hate us, accusing her of "betraying" her--which in a sense, I guess we did by accepting the apartment under false premises.
There are privileges to being white. But Biss makes the point repeatedly that hatred destroys those who hate as well as the ones who are hated. Not that that makes oppression any more palatable but it's a warning to a world that lives bathed in hatred and fear.
February 10, 2015
I would say that the central theme that runs through these essays is more about identity than about race, although racism is certainly a big part of most of the essays. The author pulls together a lot of research and events from her own life to illustrate the fluidity of identity, but not just racial identity. Even so, her topics are diverse enough that I didn't feel like she was saying the same thing over and over.
Although there are many references to her own experiences, the author manages to make the essays universally accessible as well. I especially admired her attempts to be as honest as possible about her thoughts and reactions and how she sees herself in relation to others. But she does not push her views on the reader; rather, she leads the reader gently into thinking more deeply about the various issues she puts forward.
There are notes at the end of the book about some of the essays--how they came to be written, where she got the ideas, and so on--that made this book especially interesting for me as a writer.
Although there are many references to her own experiences, the author manages to make the essays universally accessible as well. I especially admired her attempts to be as honest as possible about her thoughts and reactions and how she sees herself in relation to others. But she does not push her views on the reader; rather, she leads the reader gently into thinking more deeply about the various issues she puts forward.
There are notes at the end of the book about some of the essays--how they came to be written, where she got the ideas, and so on--that made this book especially interesting for me as a writer.
July 5, 2017
Read this for my Baldwin class. I don't agree with all of Biss' assertions, and I'm not sure she has the right to make some of them, but the exploration is provoking, which I think is the point. The metaphor of a treacherous "no man's land" where the very ground beneath you is deceptively unstable is a very apt way to describe this text, a fact that makes it clear the provocation is intentional. Her argument that guilt is the racial heritage of white Americans is certainly offensive to some, but I would agree with her even if I didn't have a natural predilection toward offensive women. There were several palpably uncomfortable moments in the class session dedicated to this book, and I think that's the point.
June 12, 2010
This book is so amazing. I really wish I had someone to talk about this book. I just spent all my time reading it wondering how someone could see the world so clearly and then, even more amazing, could write about it with clarity.
Eula Biss has a mind that takes an ordinary object and then looks at it so closely that she can see new things in what we take for granted. Just reading her essay about telephone poles blew me away. And by the time I got to her last essay, "All Apologies", I was ready to start over.
Now I have to find her other work...
Eula Biss has a mind that takes an ordinary object and then looks at it so closely that she can see new things in what we take for granted. Just reading her essay about telephone poles blew me away. And by the time I got to her last essay, "All Apologies", I was ready to start over.
Now I have to find her other work...
December 22, 2015
I found lots to love, consider and explore in this book. A white author who expounds and so carefully considers race is a difficult find, and Biss uncovers contrasts that both acknowledge and defy whiteness as a default. She deals with themes of race, age, cultural experience, ignorance and fear. These essays are sometimes personal, other times academic, often intentionally provocative, and they all reflect the ways we define and divide ourselves up. A great mind is at work here, I can't wait to read back through this with my notes and move on to more of her essays.
May 22, 2015
Some essays are insightful and beautiful. As a whole, Biss walks a fine line between glorifying her own white guilt and actually deconstructing racism in America. I'm afraid she perpetuates more than she challenges. Her privilege seems mostly unchecked. Acknowledged, but unchecked.
September 19, 2018
Incredible. Knew nothing of this book or writer going into it. Did not expect to be blown away. But now I think Eula is one of my favorite writers. This was beautiful and heartbreaking and so good.
January 6, 2022
Summary: A collection of American essays connected to four places the author lived, all exploring the realities of race in which we all are implicated.
Telephone poles. An essay on the introduction of (and resistance to) telephone poles on the landscape becomes an essay on lynching. It turns out that telephone poles were used to hang many black men. Biss writes of how she once thought the “arc and swoop” of phone lines a thing of beauty. Now she comments, “they do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.”
This striking comment captures a theme running through this book. Wherever we go in America, if our eyes are open, we recognize that we are implicated in our nation’s racial history. Nothing is innocent. And yet what also comes through in these essays is that Biss is not resigned to this state of affairs–repentance, a turning, is yet possible.
In her essays we follow Biss from New York to San Diego (and trips into Mexico), Iowa City, and the Rogers Park neighborhood of north Chicago. She describes locking kids into a Harlem school where she is teaching on 9/11 and how New York depleted her. In an essay sharing the title of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” she speaks of how “New York took everything I had” and like Didion, she left, but unlike Didion, she has not returned, and questions how Didion tolerated so many myths about the city.
She moves to San Diego, working for an African-American newspaper. One of her most telling essays describes Eve Johnson’s struggle with Child Protective Services to gain custody of her own grandchildren, and the repeated barriers she encounters because she is “too black” and her persistence. She notes that she never saw such stories in the New York Times.
Her next move is to Iowa City. She writes about her research into the Black company town of Buxton, no longer in existence that seemed idyllic. There was a fabric of community organizations and a strong sense of identity and self-respect among the black residents. She dares to wonder about the kind of “integration” in which Blacks are a small minority in a sea of white, as was the case with dissatisfied Black students at the University of Iowa. Is such integration really a form of assimilation rather than an affirmation of identity? She also discusses the race blindness she encounters as people decry “looting” after Katrina, but downplay thefts by students after a tornado tore through their city.
The title essay, “No Man’s Land” is set in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, bordering Evanston. It was originally called No Man’s Land because of its location. It is also highly integrated with no racial majority, yet she writes both of the racial fears that persist among whites like her in this diverse community and of her husband’s hope that “more white people don’t move here.”
Her concluding essay is titled “All Apologies” and explores the meaning of apologies both in personal life and in our racial history. Amid this is her telling observation: “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”
Biss dares to explore both our implicatedness in racism, and the ambiguities of living among one another with all that history. She recognizes the ambiguity in her own family, the mixed racial ancestry that gives her a cousin able to move between white and black communities, even while on the basis of appearance, she cannot. Her essays reveal a very different version of our national character from what many would have the textbook versions to be. She sees both the beauty and value of people and cultures, and the blindness, the hardness, and the obfuscations that sustain these disparate versions of America. In her spare, reflective prose she does not offer answers but invites us to sit with her and see.
Telephone poles. An essay on the introduction of (and resistance to) telephone poles on the landscape becomes an essay on lynching. It turns out that telephone poles were used to hang many black men. Biss writes of how she once thought the “arc and swoop” of phone lines a thing of beauty. Now she comments, “they do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.”
This striking comment captures a theme running through this book. Wherever we go in America, if our eyes are open, we recognize that we are implicated in our nation’s racial history. Nothing is innocent. And yet what also comes through in these essays is that Biss is not resigned to this state of affairs–repentance, a turning, is yet possible.
In her essays we follow Biss from New York to San Diego (and trips into Mexico), Iowa City, and the Rogers Park neighborhood of north Chicago. She describes locking kids into a Harlem school where she is teaching on 9/11 and how New York depleted her. In an essay sharing the title of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” she speaks of how “New York took everything I had” and like Didion, she left, but unlike Didion, she has not returned, and questions how Didion tolerated so many myths about the city.
She moves to San Diego, working for an African-American newspaper. One of her most telling essays describes Eve Johnson’s struggle with Child Protective Services to gain custody of her own grandchildren, and the repeated barriers she encounters because she is “too black” and her persistence. She notes that she never saw such stories in the New York Times.
Her next move is to Iowa City. She writes about her research into the Black company town of Buxton, no longer in existence that seemed idyllic. There was a fabric of community organizations and a strong sense of identity and self-respect among the black residents. She dares to wonder about the kind of “integration” in which Blacks are a small minority in a sea of white, as was the case with dissatisfied Black students at the University of Iowa. Is such integration really a form of assimilation rather than an affirmation of identity? She also discusses the race blindness she encounters as people decry “looting” after Katrina, but downplay thefts by students after a tornado tore through their city.
The title essay, “No Man’s Land” is set in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, bordering Evanston. It was originally called No Man’s Land because of its location. It is also highly integrated with no racial majority, yet she writes both of the racial fears that persist among whites like her in this diverse community and of her husband’s hope that “more white people don’t move here.”
Her concluding essay is titled “All Apologies” and explores the meaning of apologies both in personal life and in our racial history. Amid this is her telling observation: “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”
Biss dares to explore both our implicatedness in racism, and the ambiguities of living among one another with all that history. She recognizes the ambiguity in her own family, the mixed racial ancestry that gives her a cousin able to move between white and black communities, even while on the basis of appearance, she cannot. Her essays reveal a very different version of our national character from what many would have the textbook versions to be. She sees both the beauty and value of people and cultures, and the blindness, the hardness, and the obfuscations that sustain these disparate versions of America. In her spare, reflective prose she does not offer answers but invites us to sit with her and see.
February 7, 2024
White lady Eula Biss publishes an essay collection in 2009 on whiteness and race in general... which I am now reading fifteen years later... not exactly a recipe for success. The second essay, "Relations," definitely left a bad taste in my mouth. She discusses a 1999 case where a woman gives birth to two babies, one white and one black, after another couple's embryo was accidentally implanted in her womb, along with her own embryo. Biss bends over backwards with empathy for the white mother who lost custody of her "son" when custody was given to his biological and actual parents after a series of court cases, and spends no time imagining the horror and agony of the black mother who didn't get to raise her own son for the first four months of his life.
In addition, Biss doesn't really seem to know what whiteness is, and frequently suggests that whiteness can be given up, or in the case of her mother, that all privilege can be "cast off." In my experience, it can be difficult to understand what it means to be white when you are surrounded by white people and operating under the false notion that your experiences are the default, but as soon as you start spending time in spaces where you are the racial and cultural minority, you can learn all kinds of things about what it really means to be white. In this collection, Biss discusses times she has lived in "diverse" neighborhoods or taught in "diverse" schools, but these experiences don't seem to have deepened her understanding of her own race outside of the historical context, or the framework of guilt/responsibility. I think that it is of course important to recognize our collective responsibility and to orchestrate ways that we can repay our debts and undo our harms, but I don't think that is all whiteness is.
Despite not agreeing with all of her ideas, I still give Notes from No Man's Land four stars because I love Biss's writing. I especially loved reading the Notes section after each essay; I think this is where Biss truly shines - this was the case for Having and Being Had, too. When I think of effective essays, essays that blend memoir and research, Biss is one of the only writers I think of (Maggie Nelson, Jia Tolentino, and Brittney Cooper are the others.) I loved the second half of this book, beginning with the essay, "Is this Kansas."
The thoughts she shared on fear in "No Man's Land" will stick with me for a long time - "One of the paradoxes of our time is... a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted... as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for - a violence" (157-8).
In addition, Biss doesn't really seem to know what whiteness is, and frequently suggests that whiteness can be given up, or in the case of her mother, that all privilege can be "cast off." In my experience, it can be difficult to understand what it means to be white when you are surrounded by white people and operating under the false notion that your experiences are the default, but as soon as you start spending time in spaces where you are the racial and cultural minority, you can learn all kinds of things about what it really means to be white. In this collection, Biss discusses times she has lived in "diverse" neighborhoods or taught in "diverse" schools, but these experiences don't seem to have deepened her understanding of her own race outside of the historical context, or the framework of guilt/responsibility. I think that it is of course important to recognize our collective responsibility and to orchestrate ways that we can repay our debts and undo our harms, but I don't think that is all whiteness is.
Despite not agreeing with all of her ideas, I still give Notes from No Man's Land four stars because I love Biss's writing. I especially loved reading the Notes section after each essay; I think this is where Biss truly shines - this was the case for Having and Being Had, too. When I think of effective essays, essays that blend memoir and research, Biss is one of the only writers I think of (Maggie Nelson, Jia Tolentino, and Brittney Cooper are the others.) I loved the second half of this book, beginning with the essay, "Is this Kansas."
The thoughts she shared on fear in "No Man's Land" will stick with me for a long time - "One of the paradoxes of our time is... a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted... as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for - a violence" (157-8).
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