Structured in four sections-'Consumption,' 'Work,' 'Investment,' and 'Accounting'-each filled with more than a dozen one-to-three-page chapters, Having and Being Had behaves less like a collection of essays and more like poetry, reminiscent of Claudia Rankine. While Having and Being Had does reckon with race, Biss's project here is broader: an inquiry into the American value system of buying and owning, and what we trap ourselves in when we invest in the trappings of the middle class. Once again Biss uses the purchase of her home north of Chicago-she is a professor at Northwestern University-as a jumping off point. If 'White Debt' was about the ease of colluding in whiteness, Biss' new book Having and Being Had maps out the ease of colluding in capitalism. I thought then that it was enough to expose young writers to work that dismantles the narrative of race in America.

We put Biss in conversation with James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son,' Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, and Claudia Rankine's Citizen. I themed my courses around race, identity, and narrative, and assigned the Biss essay. I was a white woman at the head of rooms filled with largely Black, Latinx, and Asian students, many of whom worked while in school and had long commutes from the outer boroughs of New York City. At the time, I was an adjunct teaching first-year writing at CUNY Baruch College, which made me acutely aware of my white debt. I kept returning to 'White Debt' because I was in awe of how Biss completely reframed whiteness. The essay begins, 'The word for debt in German also means guilt.' From there, we hopscotch to what Biss is really in debt for-her white privilege, which she has done nothing to earn, and which is easy to forget, be complacent about, and complicit in. A few years ago, I couldn't stop thinking about Eula Biss's New York Times Magazine essay ' White Debt.' The essay is, in a sense, about literal debt-Biss had recently bought a house with a mortgage-but she immediately takes us beyond the prosaic meaning of the word.

Having and being had book