I set up a document 8.5 wide by 11 long and inserted some text and some designs. When I printed the document the entire background printed black, even though the background was white.

Any ideas what I did wrong?

Having exactly the same problem. I opened a new doc and changed the page size to US letter and then drew nine circles filled white with a 1px black stroke. The document was intended to be used as a label template but when I printed it all except the circles printed black. Any ideas anyone?

If you installed the 64bit version of Inkscape on Windows (currently affects only builds of this architecture, and only for Windows) - this is known issue, unfortunately:

• Bug #1418865 “[win64] Transparent objects and empty areas print black”

According to user feedback in the bug tracker, saving a copy as PDF (via 'File > Save a copy...') and printing the PDF with your preferred PDF viewer works ok. Printing to a custom PDF printer driver however is equally affected, and does not help to work around this issue.