It’s scandalous because it ridicules the purity of struggle. Sometimes how one frames a story determines whether or not we will see the fullness of a character. “An invisible man is an expendable man,” Victor tells us, by way of Ellison. Its white author, Ben H. Winters, suddenly deleted the personal Twitter account he’d used to promote it. Can he actually pull it off?” Because when you’re Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner, the act of writing a decent novel ought to be taken as something of a given. “If a white member of the workshop wrote something from the point of view of an illegal Guatemalan immigrant—as I recall someone did—there were some people who said there were issues of cultural imperialism involved in doing that, that you shouldn’t do that. But black characters remained secondary. White writers are not used to being objectified in this way. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness. He cavorts and capers and kowtows to earn his keep, revealing comic instincts entwined with survival strategies that practically carbon date him: Sometimes I forget how funny Hominy is. McQueen’s point was that slavery is a continuous, expanding evil, which is why narratives like Northup’s (and Tubman’s and Douglass’) didn’t just become powerful salvos in the abolitionist movement—they resonate also in the age of Ferguson and Trump. And it gives us someone to aspire toward, even if her experience is something that we can never reach. Lionel Shriver, known for the chiller We Need to Talk About Kevin, made enemies not long ago by mocking complaints of cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero at the Brisbane Writers Festival. And the price which is given us for this is only enough so that we will have the strength to labor longer for the profits of others. They go beyond mere facts, putting a singular voice to atrocity. As a white writer myself, I found this failure interesting, and read Airlines with an eye toward tone-deaf detail and misguided messaging. “That’s where I learned it was an issue and that it was something that some people considered problematic,” he says today. For a great example, see Underground Airlines by Ben Winters. His true talent, music, can’t be properly commodified—it’ll take America another couple centuries to get there—and, in the end, he escapes again, leaving another black man to be hanged for his crimes. “It had the musicians I liked and the movies I liked. What truly grates are the spurts of performative wokeness inspired by black authors, who are acknowledged neither in the meat nor at the back of the volume. And haunting it all, of course, is the crucial gimmick, repeated and tweaked so often as to nearly invalidate its importance—the shadowy sense that another existence lies somewhere in the seams of this bleak landscape: Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. There are in fact many Bengalis who can write about Bengali girls—and it probably doesn’t feel “insurmountable” to them. To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories. The only contemporary writer who approaches McCullers’s breadth of characterization is Caryl Phillips, the novelist from St. Kitts, who can inhabit a male slave owner so in love with a black slave that he frees him, and then reverses the crossing to chase him to Liberia; or a white woman in the eighteen-twenties, discovering the Caribbean for the first time; or other masterful illuminations of perspectives not his own. By McKenzie Jean-Philippe. Chabon grew up in Columbia, Md., a suburb built with the utopian ideal of economic and racial integration in mind. A novel has to be about people, not abstractions, and Whitehead brings Ridgeway to terrifying life with a minimum of cliché: He liked the night work best, when they lay in wait for a buck who sneaked through the Woods to visit his wife on a plantation up the road, or a squirrel hunter looking to supplement his daily meal of slop. The impact of the controversy, Crouch argues, was that white writers “opted for folding instead of holding, convinced that the challenge of writing across the color line was too big a risk to their careers and their reputations.” The idea of cultural ownership took root, mutually agreed upon by both sides. Todd VanDerWerff of the Onion’s AV Club goes even further, telling us that, because of the book’s racial element, it “might be Chabon’s riskiest novel yet, as he remains very much a white male author.” Riskiest novel yet? Jackie explained that this concern about hidden racial mixing was a white anxiety. Years before Caitlyn Jenner or “Transparent,” I started to notice that McCullers had issues with her gender. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. It’s because for one of these men, slavery is a dramatic theme, a hook on which to hang his hat, and for the other, it is reality. Similarly, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help—the book, not the terrible, terrible movie—was driven by the author’s personal curiosity about the intimate and emotionally fraught relationships between white families and the black women who hold such an intimate and complicated place in their lives. This yearning for a grand universal correction owes a debt to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, in which the Allies lost World War II. She wore men’s clothes, and was often photographed in a suit. Besides, this self-seriousness and exploitative interest wither against the high-wattage satire of something like The Sellout, where Beatty riffs appallingly on the potential positives of slavery in contemporary California and, eventually, at the federal scale. The numbers are only numbers, and may obscure the cruelties they aim to describe, the magnitude of misery. Plus, once again, Whitehead bests him: When she told of her escape, she omitted the tunnels and kept to the main contours. This one’s about two guys who own a record store. In fact, Carson invented this American prototype of the queerish tomboy girl, now a classic, later seen in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Bastard Out of Carolina,” and “Harriet the Spy.” But there was more to it than that. But then it became more overt. Relying on the kind of literature analysis work writing matters ought to be chosen and analysis paper define created. My first book, “Sophie Horowitz Story,” published in 1984, included what I believe to be the first Asian lesbian character in an American novel, not that the characterization succeeded beyond mere existence. The book is a sprawling narrative about the intertwined lives of Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, two proprietors, one black and one white, and a used vinyl store trying to survive on the shifting, gentrifying frontier between hippie-dippy Berkeley and its neighbor, the historically black enclave of Oakland. And “disadvantaged Bengali girl” is a very troubling way of framing an idea of a story. You should always celebrate Black voices (not just during Black history month, y'all), and literature is one of the best ways to honor some of the community's most illuminating stories. I’ve been reading for a long time. Written by the lily-white Styron but told from the point of view of Turner, the insurrectionist leader of a slave revolt, Confessions was a well-intentioned gambit to join the canon of Great Books About Race. Shriver conveys an image of white writers besieged by fierce and powerful forces that are leveraging punitive controls. That coincidence of experience, in combination with a hugely original natural talent, with a supportive mother who recognized her genius, with an organic understanding of the difference between justice and injustice, and with a writerly lens of a dreamlike surrealistic quality, much like the hanging heat of West Georgia, produced a model white writer for all of us to learn from. Culture. Quite the opposite, he says. Not everyone has that hang-up. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. It was the shock premise of Airlines, of course, that landed a TV deal, with Winters on script duty. And you'll never see this message again. Wells and all of those people, that they were my forebears, too. In questioning whether or not a white author is capable of writing a book about race, ... writers who created and inhabited black characters as they would any other. Of course, some of Oprah's favorites made the list. Photo Illustration by Amanda Suarez/Culture Trip | Source: Jamelle Bouie/Flickr, continually returning to headlines about Trayvon Martin, mocking complaints of cultural appropriation. That’s why I do this. That’s as far as most readers got with Airlines, unhappy that Winters was commended for his audacity in piggybacking on Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. Wed 3 Aug 2016 14.54 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.50 EST. I was proud of my research, my listening, my delving into plays and novels by black writers to attempt the re-creation that McCullers found with “ease”—the room of black people where no white person is present. It was just the case that Harriet Tubman, Dr. Charles Drew, and Ida B. ‘An Outtake From the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution’ follows the renegade Zion, who seeks the only unlawful liberties he can and is perpetually sold back into submission: Most seriously the young slave had beaten up an Irish laborer outside a public house in Waltham, and threatened the man’s life if he reported the beating to authorities, local or the King’s. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, white writers willing to step up to the color line nearly vanished from existence. For example, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” defies most black characters created by white authors, in any era. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Creating only white characters to avoid writing about race is writing about race, albeit in a manner that is unrealistic, sad, and boring. In Winters’ northern inner cities, like ours, wearing a hoodie can get black teens shot, and mixed-race marriages fall under a peculiar gaze. Cora’s story is one of deep, inherited pain, while Victor’s journey hints at the unsatisfying conclusion that race is “complicated.” It’s grayed-out rather than black-and-white. And, in what could have been a direct quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me: “Lesson 1: your body is not your own.” Little wonder white critics were comfortable gushing over a man who hit these marks, for as soon as I feel the impulse to argue against Winter’s use of that rhetoric, I sense the jeopardy of further privileged assumptions about what it is to be black, or devalued due to my genes. “She has a down look when spoken to, and not remarkably intelligent. He then promptly flogged Zion himself before restraining the boy in a stock behind the cow barn. McCullers was deeply in love with a Swiss journalist, a lesbian drug addict named Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who in photographs appears to be a butch goddess—yet it was never consummated. Thanks to the work of African American authors, the world can better understand both the struggles and … At Yaddo, the artists’ residency where she lived for two years and wrote “Member of the Wedding,” McCullers was famously attached to Katherine Anne Porter, whose fame was parallel to Philip Roth’s in our time. You’ve run out of free articles. Then came Railroad, literalizing metaphor (Cora, a teenage slave, must navigate actual train tracks to freedom) and edging into phantasmagoria that grasps at the soul of American trauma. But all of that changed, as critic Stanley Crouch noted in his 2004 essay “Segregated Fiction Blues,” in 1967, with the backlash to the publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Porter hated Carson, and kept her protégée Eudora Welty seated at a separate table for dinner from the rowdy queers: Carson, Truman Capote, and Newton Arvin (later fired from Smith College for ordering muscle magazines in the mail). The first evidence was the most superficial. Chabon is right. Instead one asks, at long last, why we tell slave stories at all. We can consider, however, how Airlines wants to be read: as a counterfactual that reveals the tragedy of our own circumstances. Save. The Root Staff. Other patrollers carried guns and eagerly cut down any rascal dumb enough to flee, but Ridgeway copied Chandler. And as black America confronts the toxic legacy of life under white rule in police violence, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement, black authors have taken these stories back from the white authors who like to borrow them. We are forced to sell at any price, at any time, for any purpose. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of people who knew her before her tragic death, in 1967. But it had the severe misfortune to be published right at the ascendancy of the Black Power movement. Pelecanos, whose father owned a diner downtown, never joined the actual white flight to suburbia, and so saw no reason to join the literary one either. And, within the context of racist police violence and obstructions to voting, it is particularly striking that the current incarnation of this old question has reëmerged in the language of “rights.” As Shriver told her audience: Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. His uncle by marriage was heir to the largest real estate fortune in the city, a fortune built largely through the use of discriminatory housing covenants. The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, in the Los Angeles Times, contextualized the debate in terms of material realities: It is possible to write about others not like oneself, if one understands that this is not simply an act of culture and free speech, but one that is enmeshed in a complicated, painful history of ownership and division. Mostly the work I do is mundane, I help authors flesh out characters, I point out when their attempts at AAVE are wrong, and occasionally I have to tell them that the thing they wrote is a hot mess. It’s easy to fall into these traps because they’re so common, but perpetuating them just increases the likelihood that other people will do the same. For this series of offenses, which broke the patience of the Watones, the General Court of Middlesex County arraigned, tried, and convicted the slave, to the penalty of thirty-five stripes, and a fine of £10, payable to the victims. And this is why I write white characters, because it’s easier. Know that some readers, respectfully, will not read your book if you are a white author writing a novel which features a character of color. I have since written a play about McCullers; I am currently writing a movie about her, and am about a third of the way through a novel in which her death plays a central role. On the surface, the story looked like a standard-issue lesbian trajectory, starting with a deep attachment to a music teacher, Mary Tucker, who helped McCullers attend Julliard in classical piano. For all his skills as a novelist, Chabon’s whiteness must be reckoned as a disability when it comes to writing about race, an asterisk next to his name. Although she was married twice to the doomed Reeves McCullers, who himself may have had a brief relationship with the composer David Diamond, Carson notoriously chased women whom she never got. And at the heart of that rather ludicrous request is a question of power. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie this summer answered questions from Guardian readers and touched a nerve when she told a 50-year-old white man stuck with the desire to write about “a young Bengali girl” that there were still stories to tell from his own point of view. This was followed by a typical McCullers misadventure, with a prostitute she met in New York who took all her money, forcing her back home to Columbus, Georgia. Jackie pointed to a scene where one of the black protagonists, a young woman researching her family’s history, comes to believe that her beloved grandfather, a proponent of “uplift,” was once married to a white woman. Or, as Chabon neatly puts it, “the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted.”. © 2020 Condé Nast. And yet they were always about her making a scene, or creating problems, usually having to do with drinking. I started to realize that McCullers’s gender trouble was not of the homosexual kind, and it slowly dawned on me that, had she been alive today, not only would McCullers (and Williams and Capote) have probably been in A.A. and on antidepressants, she might have been living as a transgender man. They get to publish their slavery sci-fi as high literature. The source of the money, in polite WASPy fashion, had never been discussed. White writers need to write BAME characters knowing there are many more white writers published. And we sell our bodies every day we live. I use my imagination to imagine myself living lives I don’t live and being people who I’m not.”. The movement demanded ownership of its turf: black studies, black history, black theater, black art, and black fiction. Why am I still writing black characters as a white author? And the results, Crouch adds, “have been both dull and dismal.” All the potential William Faulkners and Harper Lees stayed home, playing it safe. Can White Authors Write Black Characters? Airlines finally sounds like the authentic runaway slave ads Whitehead uses at the beginning of chapters, oversimplified and oddly generic: “She is about 16 years of age, with straight hair and tolerable good features,” reads one that mentions a neck scar. This is at the heart of the #ownvoices movement in YA fiction. “Disadvantaged” people also have agency, and dream, and think, and desire. But McCullers remains the standard-bearer for white authors, and for almost twenty years now I have been on a journey to try to understand how she did it. Opening with Cora’s grandmother’s abduction—she “had never seen the ocean before that bright afternoon in the port of Ouidah and the water dazzled after her time in the fort’s dungeon”—Whitehead swiftly takes us to her death “in the cotton, the bolls bobbing around her like whitecaps on the brute ocean.”. One of our conceits has been to imagine ourselves as neutral, objective, and value-free. This they promptly did despite the rapidly deflating of the local currency, for the sum of £5, to a distant relative of Watone’s, the merchant Jabez Pennyman, then living on a small estate in the Dorchester Neck. It may be worth pointing out that he wrote the book because he “was broke.” And as Winters’ narrator Victor wrestles with the slave economy in existential terms, Beatty’s nameless slacker, whose stubborn community organizer father was slain by indifferent police, rolls his eyes at each predictable beat of the nullifying role he was born to. McCullers showed up with three drunken sailors; chaos ensued. All rights reserved. The whole blaxploitation element of my book derives from my reading of Ebony, which is where I learned everything about blaxploitation because I was too young to go to those movies.”), Chabon’s book arrives at a time when similar issues of gentrification and racial tension are being explored by white artists like playwright Bruce Norris (in Broadway’s Clybourne Park) and by David Simon and Behn Zeitlin (in Treme and Beasts of the Southern Wild, respectively). I understand it politically. During this time, the Watones considered their options, and agreed it would be in their best interests to sell their intractable chattel, who, they supposed, still had arson and murder waiting in his kit. Artistically, there can be no limits imposed, or even encouraged, in what subjects storytellers choose to approach. "Usually, white people who write meaningful books with black characters, they do have black people in their lives who they know deeply and respect," said Golden. Either he’s crazy for wanting to “go there,” or, like a toddler learning how to walk, he is to be applauded just for getting in a few good steps before the inevitable stumble. If you value our work, please disable your ad blocker. Who does a white writer have to be in order to overcome the institutionalized ignorance in which we are shrouded? Thanks to the novel’s essential marketability by way of controversy—the action takes place in the not-entirely-alternate reality of a 21st-century United States that never endured the Civil War, narrated by an escaped slave forced into service as a government slave-catcher—we’re stuck debating not the quality of Winters’ work but whether it should exist. Zion is not good, but we root for his rebellion because it counters sin with more of the same. 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