by Dish Staff
Jess Row ponders why “most white writers, like most white Americans, particularly those over 30, still feel a profound psychic distance between themselves and black people”:
[T]he defining experiences for people my age (that is, Generations X and Y) fall in the tumultous years between 1988 and 1992—the years of Tawana Brawley, Howard Beach, the Central Park Five, and the L.A. Riots—when a furious debate over canonicity and inclusion raged in the academy, when Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton came to prominence, Malcolm X superseded MLK, when Ice Cube talked about killing blue-eyed devils, and t-shirts everywhere said “It’s a Black thing…you wouldn’t understand.”
That era seems like ancient history now, but it has everything to do with why American fiction and poetry remain relentlessly segregated spaces, even though many of our greatest and most visible artists are artists of color. For many white Americans, the takeaway message of that complicated time, consciously or sub- or un-, was like a second, post-Civil-Rights response to “The White Negro”: that for a white person to try to say anything meaningful about race, or racism, was not only ridiculous, but shameful, and also somehow dangerous.
Row concludes by addressing a likely counterargument: So what if white writers ignore race?
It’s a valid question, and one I’ve asked myself many times: if the world is full of artists of color talking about race, why do I need to get in on that action? If there’s this vibrant, rich, visceral, scary conversation already underway, who cares if white writers choose not to participate? The best answer I can give, the only honest answer a writer can give, is a selfish one: it’s interesting to me. It’s good material: the tension, the friction, the rich possibilities of embarrassing oneself for a good cause. (As the white rapper Sage Francis says of himself, “Poorly developed, yet highly advanced / the black music intertwined with the white man’s line dance.”) It’s about writing honestly and going deeper into life, yes, but it’s also just a source of happiness. You could even take a cue from Talib Kweli and call it “the beautiful struggle.” For me, it’s been a relief, too: to realize that this bitter earth is the one place we all have standing.
The Dish 