Claudia Rankine is a monster. Not your typical definition of the word monster found in the white washed Webster dictionary, but the slang term monster, denoting one whose power alone scares those who oppose her. Yes, she indeed is quite the monster, exemplified by her writing against the white writers who believe themselves capable of covering and understanding black issues. Rankine crash lands onto Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary guns blazing with an ideal question: why do white writers fit tropes when writing about other cultures? The question itself sounds slightly combative, but like she says “it mistakes critical response for prohibition”. Rankine’s waltz-like response dances around a singular idea: you’re trying to beat us instead of join us. Although it’s not stated in the passage directly, she juggles this idea of the “white savior complex” which has been a trope in America since 1899 in Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden. The idea is that the white man (or woman or non-binary cause this is 2020) is burdened with minorities and it is their duty to save minorities from themselves by utilizing their own privilege to elevate the voices of those deemed “less fortunate”. Yeah, no. She challenges idea with a very simple face: how can you elevate voices that already elevate themselves? And this leads into the main part of the article that she tackles with Beth Loffreda which is this idea of the impossibility of an expansive and limitless racial imaginary. Rankine and Loffreda go toe-to-toe with Emerson’s decades-old idea of transcending beyond the confines of human understanding. They ground his idea by stating that ” our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are”, understanding that every idea which comes to us was drawn from some sort of real, tangible inspiration and not just taken out of thin air. This applies heavily when it comes to writing context outside of one’s own race as it requires you to essentially step into the shoes of that person and assume their role for not only accuracy, but for the realism that makes a story come alive. This is where the limitation of the racial imaginary comes into play as it becomes almost impossible to correctly assess the culture of what you’re writing about without living it. It’s been done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always been done well. So until then, Rankine AND Loffreda will be the monsters that they need to be.

In Hurston’s How it Feels to be Colored Me, she explores the idea that W.E.B DuBois spoke on in his book The Souls of Black Folk: the idea of a “double-consciousness”. This idea, introduced in the title, states that every Black American has two identities: Black and American. Hurston tackles this idea by speaking on an idea that still persists to this day (and one that I’ve even experienced myself) and that’s the idea of predominantly _____ areas. Coming from a completely segregated colored neighborhood didn’t allow for her to understand that not everyone in the world gets treated exactly the same. This disconnect allowed her to live peacefully until she had to leave her town and experience life as an outsider based solely on her looks as shown when she says “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”. To her, the idea of colored essentially only exists when the races intermingle.

Hurston segways perfectly into the confine’s of Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness as he shares similar views, but through a completely different lens. He too does not understand the issue of his blackness until he is faced with interacting with white counterparts. Unlike Zora, who takes it upon herself to attempt to be lighthearted, Fanon is more bleak, adhering to the poor experiences he faced early on. Although he was initially unable to understand why the world viewed him as a problem, he dug into the history books and came back with one main sentiment: “The Negro is an animal”. By relating black people to animals, he was able to view himself from the perspective of white people and understand why they saw him as such. One instance was when he was shivering on a winter day and a young, white boy believed that he was shaking with rage instead of being cold.

Both Hurston and Fanon understood their differentiation and their place in society, but the difference comes in the HOW. Hurston sees her difference almost as a neutral anomaly as she believes she just understands things in more different in interesting ways such as when a white friend complimented the music while she herself felt as though she could feel it in her spirit when she said, “The great blobs of red and purple emotion have not touched him”. This portrays her blackness as almost a “sixth sense” which is unattainable by white people. Fanon sees blackness as quite the opposite, a disease which most black people want to get rid of just to fit in, but have to accept and embrace to survive within their own bodies. Being seen as different or as he put it “savages, brutes, illeterates”, bothers him extremely as he KNOWS that these stereotypes are incorrect (as shown in his writing style) and he actively sought to remedy these false pretenses in the eyes of white people around him. While Hurston accepted her place in the world as she believed white people “denied themselves the pleasure” of her company by discriminating against her, Fanon was attempting to solve the issue at hand to become more widely accepted rather than just accepting himself and who he was, but he never wanted to be white, just not seen as “ugly” and “mean”.

Among the cascade of extended and deep vocabulary, within both Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, that’ll have you frantically Google searching every third word to actually be able to completely understand what you’re reading, you’ll find a meaning. This meaning is quite apparent as between all the brilliant words lies a valid point, whether that be Emerson telling us to become one with the nature he so adores obsessively or Du Bois’s call for a rally to change amongst his fellow “problems”. This is the easy way out. The way to be able to raise your hand and answer the question we already had the answer to. You have to look deeper to find the needle within the literary haystack thrown at you by two prolific writers.

It began with Emerson whose fascination with transcendentalism in Nature almost distracts you entirely away from the reading itself and makes you ask yourself the question, “How high was this man while writing this?”. Emerson states in his introduction that, “…all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”, which is completely correct as philosophers believe that nature is everything that exists externally away from one’s self. Emerson believes that we appreciate nature in our youth because our lack of understanding as children leads us to being both vexed and fascinated about simple things such as stars. We lose this fascination after maturing and understanding what we’re witnessing unless the occurrence is rare as stated when Emerson writes, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Even Plato, millennia ago, recognized the curiosity of children that allows them to have such a deep interest in things they don’t understand like children’s stories such as when he said “Don’t you realize that we start by telling children stories which are, by and large, untrue, though they contain elements of the truth?” (Republic, Plato, pg. 49) After opening up to us, Emerson reaches his main point: we’re all blind to true “nature” as he says “few adult persons can see nature.” According to him, barely any of us understand nature as we haven’t ever fully immersed ourselves inside of it to figure out its complexities and the only people that understand nature are poets. It’s because unlike the farmer who seeks to reap the benefits of nature for his worldly gains, the poets look beyond the physical and transcend the boundary that exists between Soul and Nature, later becoming one with it entirely. This understanding leads Emerson to say that the poets actually own the land and no “warranty-deeds” can take that away from them. Finding the vision of Emerson’s true “nature” is all the freedom that a could ever want.

Completely on the other side of the spectrum is Du Bois with The Souls of Black Folk. While Emerson called for people to find an understanding of nature to become one with it, Du Bois would rather his people to focus on themselves, their souls, to achieve the freedom that they so strongly desire. He describes his fellow blacks as “A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.” Du Bois’s people don’t have TIME to be searching to “nature” for the answer to their issues as their issues are real and in dire need of a solution. Although the similarities between Du Bois and Emerson are few and far between, one major similarity is that they want people to see not with their eyes, but with their souls! Du Bois argues that black people don’t look past the obvious as they believed “The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him.”, but he later argues that just because they lawfully gained freedom doesn’t mean that they’re actually free to live normally such as the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, voter fraud, etc. This blindness is what Du Bois believes holds black people back and he calls for the unification of his people by saying, “Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race”. Instead of the one by one race to success, a unified approach that allows them to finally see with their souls.