Eula Biss's Essay 'Time And Distance Overcome'

In the opening essay “Time and Distance Overcome” of her book Notes from No Man’s Land, Eula Biss beautifully contemplate the invention of the telephone in the first part of the essay; and makes a shocking turn to the terror lynching as another American invention in the second part. Telephone poles started to appear at the same time when white Americans began lynching black Americans. She uses a lot of data in order to guide us into the connection between two American creations; and how white Americans accept both of them. She implicitly equates two huge American inventions - the telephone and racial lynching. Biss goes on, showing how telephone poles, which were created to unify people, becoming a remorseless litany of white racial violence.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds about E.Biss’s essay. On the one hand, I agree that the phone invention was connected with race lynching in America. How one, exceptional creation, which supposed to connect all people, in fact, had disconnected races in the US. New technology leads to greater freedom for most people while extracting a harsher price from an unfortunate few. This essay made me think: does each leap forward require a human sacrifice? Biss does a great job putting two unlikely things together. After reading the essay I even felt I’m doing something wrong by using my phone. But on the other hand, I feel anxious about her style choices. As for me, she is too gentle in the conversation about racism in America, particularly during the lynching war. In her essay, she is not making direct references to racism or direct arguments against it. She never uses the word “racism”. Possibly, Biss doesn’t want to alienate her readers. But I think that in dialogs about racism we must be more distinct and transparent. We have to find more beneficial and less implicit ways of writing about it. Racism is a horrible reality, which we all try to bury even