For many years and till this day our biggest challenge has always been using the terminology of race to describe one another. The question that is always ask in every important document… what is your race? I say why is it so important? Is race itself a form of racism? The stigma of always using race is a form of racism it puts this barrier to break down in what group of people you belong. At the end we are all humans.
“On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” The discussion of race is brought up and how it influences our everyday living. One major problem is the idea of being capable of writing about a certain race. Not only white writers but all writers in general do this. They write about a certain race and they put themselves in the characters shoes without having any real sense in how it feels to be part of that certain race they are writing about. “But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are”(Rankine & Loffreda). Just like ourselves our imaginations have limits too. What gives writers the right to think that they are capable enough to write about a race only because it has been learned, heard, and seen. For example what gives white writers in particular the right to think they know how it feels to be a colored person when they have certain privileges. These privileges will built this fence on how the white writer writing will be influence on how they portray a person of color. Seeing that ones imagination is built in a position that illustrates their writing.
Everyone has a different perspective in life and it makes up these different scenarios in our imagination. We are only capable to write what we portray in our imagination as we create how it feels to be part of a certian race based on what we heard or seen. It’s not wrong to do this but it’s a problem. To be able to understand you need to experience it. “That what white artists might do is not imaginatively inhabit the other because that is their right as artists, but instead embody and examine the interior landscape that wishes to speak of rights, that wishes to move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power, that wishes to inhabit whomever it chooses”(Rankine & Loffreda). The problem isn’t about writing in character of a color person is using our imagination to do so. Instead of relying so much on our imagination all writers should experience the race culture and like said embody that race.
However how much research can make our imagination right and form itself to not have limitation? Based on this article you can’t at the end of the day we are still stuck with the same problem. We all have different perspective in life and no matter what some races will have more privileges then others. What can be said is that it’s not a problem for a writer to illustrate a different color as long as they are aware that it isn’t 100% accurate and that this perspective is shaped by their imagination.




You dig into some of the difficulties here that R&L raise. On the one hand, we can’t imagine an imagination that’s radically free, that somehow avoids entanglements with the complexities of race that make us who we are in so many ways. On the other, we can’t promote a narrow “authenticity” that dictates who can write about what topics in search of a purity of expression.