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.

Rankin and Loffreda’s Essay, “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary” alludes to not only white writers, but also white actors. Or any art for the matter. “The point of view of a character” is exactly what actors must see when they take the role of a character. Over the summer I took an acting class for a couple extra ‘easy’ credits. The main insight I received from it was that acting is not really acting at all. You must actually feel the pain, happiness, confusion, etc…and it has to be real. If you are not feeling what your character is feeling, you must bring it from your own life and expose it on stage. Rank and Loffreda try to tell readers that white people cannot stand on stage and become black for a moment and go back to living in their “whiteness.” 

This is why actors dive deep into method acting. The authors hint at this aspect in their essay while discussing the ‘research’ white writers do to write a black role. Method acting can be very intense and very beneficial for empathizing. Actors have even joined the army for an army role. This sounds like what white writers try to do when they “meet race and [travel] to Africa…” To know of injustice is not to feel it. Their ‘method acting’ for their work just simply cannot serve what they would like it to.  The research that would suffice to take on a black character as a white writer would need a time machine. To write about knowledge is not good enough. For white writers to method act themselves into their black characters they would need to relive (or in fact live) the racism, prejudice, discrimination, and injustice. The equal type of treatment could never be empathized for. It’s impossible, and the world in which it can is referred to as a “utopia.” Rankin and Loffreda’s utopia in their essay is summed up by a world that does not acknowledge race. In another world you acknowledge all races and be able to “transcend” into another race, which again is a utopia. In this utopia, where all transcendence is accessible Rankin and Loffreda’s question would remain. Why are you doing this? What is coming from it? If white writers were to actually step into the shoes of black characters their reason would change. White writers or actors posing as black for a temporary amount of time have the luxury of going home and not having to live that role. Black people cannot do the same, and this is the stigma the authors discuss. This stigma lies in acting as well. Black people are limited to black roles, while white actors get cast minority roles. The character role and writing of a character hold the same criteria in Rankin and Loffreda’s essay.

Happened to catch Claudia Rankine on NPR this weekend. Check it out: she covers some of the same issues we’ve been reading about this week:

Poet Claudia Rankine And ‘Just Us’ : It’s Been a Minute

Poet Claudia Rankine is back with a new book called Just Us: An American Conversation. Much like her acclaimed 2014 book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, her new volume offers an unflinching examination of race and racism in the United States – this time in conversations with friends and strangers.

Paralysis occurs when you lose a function in an area of your body, or even your entire body. Your muscles slowly wither away. Physical therapy can help prevent muscle deterioration, but it still doesn’t help with your mobility most of the time. In Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” he speaks of his anger towards the world that view him as ‘the other”,  he shows anger to the fact that the world judge him based on his color,  shows anger to the world that views him as something “wrong”; because he is a black man in a white man’s world. And Fanon also shows sadness, sadness because the world he lives in won’t change, at least not in his lifetime. The white man’s world paralyzed him in every aspect possible, paralyzed in his mind to be subjected as only  a “negro”, paralyzed because of the box bestowed to him from birth. That he must act on the basis forced upon him and only them.

Fanon starts out straight to the point stating  “‘Dirty N*****!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a negro!’ I came into the world imbued with the will to find the meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other things,” (Fanon, p.1). Here, Fanon illustrates how in a white man’s world all that they see is a negro, but Fanon criticizes that, he questions it because he knows it isn’t right. Because why is it right that a person can be stripped of their humanity and described as an object because of their skin color? Fanon shows dreams and aspirations, but you see that he comes to a realization that those dreams are blocked because of how the world views him. Fanon states “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that winter day. The Negro is an animal, The Negro is bad, the Negro is mean,” (Fanon, p. 3). Fanon illustrates descriptions that were put into people just because they have a dark complexion. No one is born with these thoughts; it was society that put those conceptions in place. Similar to Du bois he explains his confusion on how it is possible that he is a problem he states  “And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, peculiar even for one who has never been anything else,”(Dubois). Fanon, states how the white man’s world views black people, but he repeats these words as if he knows deep down they’re wrong. As he waits  for someone to say that he is beautiful, that he is a person, and everything that makes him who he is, makes him good. 

Fanon constantly tries to show that his color doesn’t define him, but society wants to put him in that box. It wants to keep him there because that’s where he should be. Fanon states “ The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims.’ Nevertheless, with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple…I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep,”(Fanon, p.9). This illustrates that Fanon wants to fight the prejudice, he wants to be able to prove to the world that he is more than his color, he can soar into the sky and accomplish the unlimited because he can. But the world, and even some black people want him to accept the world for what it is, and stay in the box so we don’t become a problem. Fanon later weeps in defeat, because no one was there to tell him that he doesn’t have to stay in the box, he’s trapped; he’s paralyzed. 

Have you ever seen a caged bird? People have birds to look at them, stand still in that cage; paralyzed. Clip their wings to prevent them flying; so they can sit and sing for them. The bird does the same thing every day, 

“good bird”.

You’ve never allowed the bird to fly for so long that when it does you get surprised. 

“It’s soaring!It’s flying! Look it’s flying!” 

It continues to fly, it flaps its wings, it breathes the air of freedom, and it continues to fly. 

“Wait! Come back!” 

The bird continues to fly. The next week, you get a different bird and you put it in the cage,

 “This time you won’t leave.”