The Task of a Writer in the Current Moment
I gasped out loud when I saw the headline last night: Mississippi votes to strip emblem from state flag.” I’ve been holding my breath ever since the protests began over George Floyd’s brutal death at the hands of police officers, hoping maybe this time will be different. Maybe there will be real change. The news that Mississippi, my home state, the last in the country to cling to that symbol of hate, is finally letting it go, is as hopeful a sign as any that we are, indeed, in the midst of a sea change.
Growing up in Mississippi, as a privileged white girl whose family owned a plantation, I have long been aware of the racial injustice that permeates our culture. I was fortunate to have a mother who was not from the South, and an older sister whose probing intelligence and unflinching integrity would have made her an abolitionist if she had been born generations earlier. Thus, I was keenly aware of and appalled by the racism around me. But with the worst extremes on display—blatant discrimination, hateful slurs, outright bigotry—it was harder to the see the more subtle, insidious forms of racism.
I inevitably breathed it in, like the toxic fumes of the crop dusters that flew over the fields surrounding our house. There was no escaping it, no matter where I ran. Eventually, I ran north to Massachusetts, where I have lived more than half my life now, but still there is no escaping it. Like the exposure to toxic pesticides, likely the cause of one of Mississippi having one of the highest cancer rates in the country—I know the toxic residue of racial bias lurks within me. It feels like a matter of survival—perhaps not of my body, but of my soul—to root it out.
I started my career with a sense of purpose. When I was getting my M.Ed., I requested to do my student teaching in the inner city, wanting to work with students of color. But that meant taking over several classes taught by my mentor teacher, an African American woman, thus denying the students a year with a teacher of color they could look up to. One of my students never forgave me for it and refused to engage at all, no matter what I did to try to break through the wall she had erected. Despite successfully engaging and connecting with the majority of students, my failure with her needled me. I had to come to terms with the fact that I did her harm, despite my best intentions and efforts. Good intentions were not enough, I realized. They did nothing to change the context.
Floyd’s death was not really a wake-up call for me—I have long been aware of systemic racism and the staggering damage it does to individuals and our country as a whole—but it was a call to arms. I just began an MFA program in creative writing and one of the first books we were assigned was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, in which Rankine catalogs the daily onslaught of micro-aggressions that even the most successful and celebrated African Americans have to contend with on a daily basis, many of which come from unwitting friends and colleagues. It gives readers a sense of the weight that these constant slights add to an already heavy burden of navigating a world in which you are an “other.”
In E. Dolores Johnson’s recently released memoir Say I’m Dead, she sheds light on this burden: having to adjust her body language and expressions, her speech and clothing to fit in and avoid drawing attention to her otherness in the white male corporate world. It sounds exhausting! And on top of that, she had to suffer a constant barrage of insults, both subtle and blatant, in silence and “carry [them] back home in the pit of [her] stomach,” unable to call people out for fear of risking her job. When she described her experience being ignored and talked over at work meetings, my initial thought was, I know that feeling! I had similar experiences while working at a large publishing company. But then I checked myself, realizing that, as bad as I thought I had it, she had it far worse, contending with both gender and racial bias.
I feel an imperative to read as many accounts like this as possible, and to monitor my reactions and examine, in particular, those moments when I feel myself pushing back. For example, in Tre Johnson’s article “When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs”, he writes “when things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.” I bristled at this critical characterization; But I’m a reader, I thought. That’s what I do. How is that bad? His point, however, is that’s not enough. I need to act. And it’s a point well taken.
As a citizen, I am donating to causes led by people of color to promote racial justice, such as Color of Change, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Center for Policing Equity. As a mother, I make sure my children are aware of their privileges and of systemic racism; as a teacher, I volunteer for an organization that provides writing enrichment to disadvantaged students, teaching them how to tell stories and helping them find their voice. And as a writer, especially one who grew up in the South, I have to tell stories that confront racism in its many forms, which will invariably bring my own racial biases to the fore. A scary prospect, but a necessary one.
In a recent Guardian article, Rankine discusses her new initiative to study whiteness. She says, “As writers and artists . . . “it’s our job to point this out, because I really believe that people don’t know” – about what makes whiteness, or about how broad the life experiences of white people are.” But to make whiteness visible requires including non-white characters, without whom it is impossible to bring that whiteness into stark relief. To not include African American characters would rob my stories of any meaning and seems racist in and of itself, like silencing their voices in my head. Yet it is a risk, considering the recent debate in literary circles regarding whether a writer has the right to tell a certain story.
It was heartening to read in Lila Shapiro’s article in Vulture about a course called “Write the Other” that is trying to shift the conversation from whether to how to write other perspectives. The class is predicated on the idea that “writing the other” is a skill that can be taught and learned, like any aspect of the craft. Applying myself to learning how to faithfully, genuinely and with proper empathy write fully-realized African American characters is the best way I know how to walk a mile in their shoes, and to confront my own racial biases. As Tre Johnson concedes, “The confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening. . . And yet, you’ll figure it out.” That’s my task as a citizen and a writer.
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