Still Pissed Off After All These Years

Go read Nathan Ballingrud's post about Pam Noles's essay on the Earthsea whitewash and the color of science fiction. Go there with the foreknowledge that I'm the Clarion classmate Nathan is talking about.

You can scroll down below Nathan's post and read my comment, but let me make it easy and give you the gist, as entrée to related thoughts:

Well, I'm that writer who was arrogant enough to write about a black character without being black. I was taken completely off guard by Harlan's comments (not least because he was a friend of my dad's, and so knew full well my race).

I'm not a space alien, either, nor a male, nor handicapped, nor a priest, nor a widow, nor any of a number of other things that describe characters I've written about. Never gotten any grief about any of those, but Harlan wasn't the only one to react with discomfort at my writing from the POV of a black character. (He was just the biggest asshole about it.)

To say that one can't write a race one isn't a member of grants race a special status of alienness--it's approximately akin to saying that race makes us sooo different we can't possibly get inside each other's heads about anything, can't understand any part of each other's lives and experiences . . . and just a bit farther down that same path lurks the justification for racism ("they're just not like us; I'm uncomfortable around them"), slavery ("they're not the same as us, they don't understand things the way we do, they're more like our livestock"), and genocide ("they are other, so it's okay to get rid of them").

The story was not, by the way, in any respect about the Black Experience (if there is one monolithic Black Experience), but rather about the specific experience of specific events of one specific character whose specific characteristics include being black. Her being black certainly played a part in those events, as did her being a woman, as did her being a schoolteacher. Oops, I'm not a schoolteacher, so I shouldn't claim to grasp the schoolteacher experience. What on earth was I thinking?!

Now that I've got that mostly off my chest, let me elaborate.

Long before that episode, the story was critiqued by my Clarion-mates, at least two of whom said explicitly that it didn't feel right to them for me to be writing a black character. Neither of those people were black, FWIW. Had Pam or Jackie criticized my portrayal of a black woman, I would have taken that to heart as telling me my character was badly drawn, much as I remember a couple of us womenfolk telling a male classmate that he wasn't getting his female characters right. Only two people said that I shouldn't be writing a black viewpoint character; Nathan wasn't one of those two. But if he was, as he says, secretly cheering Harlan at the time, then probably others shared that view. Nobody pointed to anything specific about that character that didn't ring true except the color of the author's skin. (Yes, I still have all the critiques and yes, I did go check.)

The very fact that Harlan felt it necessary to inquire about my race and thereby make a point of it (especially since he did know the answer--convenient for having his laugh line ready) says that the race of the author was all that mattered to him. Ho--wait! Isn't that racist?

Nathan talked eloquently about us as writers not being afraid to write about people we aren't, but how about us as readers? How about us as humans? As soon as we decide that some group of people is sufficiently alien that only their own kind can write about them--and judge the validity of the work by the color of the author's skin, or whatever--we're engaging in a subtle sort of exclusion.

I can't claim to know what it is like to live as a black person. I asked above whether there is any such thing as the monolithic Black Experience. I don't question that changing that one variable, skin color, will change a lot in a person's life, at least in the part of the world I know. (Changing the variable of gender similarly has cascading effects.) I do question whether that coordinate shift is a constant: is the experience of being black identical for all black people? I sincerely doubt it. To think otherwise is to deprive a whole lot of people of the individuality of their experiences and perceptions, in fiction and in fact.

(And my White Experience is, for the record, radically different than Dick Cheney's or Jimmy Carter's, or heck, even my mother's.)

Oddly, this "you can't write about black people because you haven't lived the Black Experience" often comes from people who are liberal, who would be shocked to be called racist. (I guess if you know you're a racist, you aren't going to consider reading a book about people of another race, no matter who wrote it.) But let us, if you'll pardon the expression, call a spade a spade. If you think black people are so different as people because of the color of their skin that it is impossible for a white writer to imagine any black person accurately, you might want to reexamine your own assumptions.

And to attribute arrogance to someone who attempts to cross that great divide? No, it's not arrogance on the writer's part. Nor is it courageous--sorry, I'm just not that impressed by it. It has nothing to do with the writer; it's about the reader. It's the reader who has to learn that the same leap of imagination that lets him or her believe in axe murderers written by lawyers or knights written by grandmothers (or women written by men) can bridge the chasm of race.

If we ever get over race as The Great Divide in our reality, maybe it will cease to be an issue in our literature. But maybe if we attempt to get over it in our literature, that will be a little less scary and threatening, and a small step in getting over it in our lives.

And Now, Your Moment of Zen

Thanks to Nathan for pointing me to this. It is unforgettable (though possibly not in a good way).