Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays Book

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.