Writing Characters and Method Acting

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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.

 

Rankine interview on NPR

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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.

The Mystery of the Invisible Whiteness

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      I found that the most interesting part of Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s essay “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” is the idea that “to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race… acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made ‘me.’” Similarly, it is very easy to imagine that the current moment in history is disconnected from the moments of the past, but we must ask ourselves if that’s a perspective that comes out of the myopic view that whiteness creates. These limits on creativity, be they literal creativity or the mental kind that allows one to better conceptualize the world around them, are intrinsically tied to race in the American consciousness.
      The work of Hurston itself is a great example of how race in writing is treated by white society. In describing her experiences growing up in the South, Hurston is far beyond making explicit the divide and differences between racial groups. Her very existence is split; for her Black neighbors her dancing is something to leave unacknowledged, while the White visitors to the town treat her as an amusement. In a way, this is a clear parallel to the way in which the reader with unexamined views on race may read Hurston. Rankine mentions that “writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn’t and shouldn’t enter” and this is something that writers even project onto each other. For Hurston to write about her youth, an inherently Black experience, would not raise any eyebrows among the (white) literary elite because it is assumed that a Black author would write on Black topics; the dialect that she uses phonetically in her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was only really objected by Black writers. White writers, by contrast, assume that a Black author is not only qualified to write about Black topics, but indeed almost required to do so. Although the tide of history has reversed these opinions somewhat, Hurston’s work is still representative of the unconsciousness with which whiteness accepts the limitations that it itself places on blackness.

Paralyzed

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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.”

Whiteness, The Racial Imaginary, and American Dirt

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In “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary”, authors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda discuss the tension between writers and their attempts to interact with race in their storytelling. In their opening paragraph, the writers jump into the conversation by listing examples of what ‘tropes’ one might find in writings about race, such as the exotification and othering of racialized characters. They also mention the spectrum of race that is often ignored in favor of a Black/white dichotomy. 

 

The authors go on to interrogate the white imagination, specifically as it is often a space considered to be free of race and yet qualified to conceive of racialized experiences outside of the creative’s mind. The authors clarify that the imagination is in fact informed by the real world, therefore a character of color cannot be written by an author without embodying the author’s own impressions of that character’s race or perceived experience. This place of imagination is not afforded to authors of color whose work cannot escape their real-world racializations; while an author of color’s race will always be tied to their work, a white author can speak from a place of universality.

 

The writers go on to address how it is difficult to write even of one’s own experience and that it can often be difficult to read about how a white author perceives you or someone of another race, and I think what this is getting at is that white voices are often seen as a sort of law, where their characters of color go on to influence the perceptions of that race, but then once perceived by real-world people of that experience they cause a sort of questioning of oneself.

 

The authors go on to give a hypothetical example of a white author getting upset and misunderstanding the ‘wounds’ that they are witnessing, and I think a real-world example of this would be Jeanine Cummin’s book ‘American Dirt’, which was widely talked about at the beginning of the year. In this novel, which Cummins claims to have researched for over 7 years, the fictionalized story of a Mexican woman and her son crossing over into the US is told. Historical and linguistic discrepancies aside, the book was particularly controversial because the author acknowledged in the text that she wishes someone “slightly browner” than she had told the story. Additionally, although the writer had previously considered herself white with no Latinx heritage, she began to identify herself as Latina by way of a Puerto Rican grandmother. As the controversy surrounding the book grew finally it was revealed, perhaps to gain sympathy, that her husband was an undocumented immigrant, therefore allowing her to write about the experience. Of course, it was later discovered that her husband is from Ireland, and although he may very well be undocumented, that experience is completely different from someone coming from Mexico.

I think it’s interesting to note how rather than defending her role as a writer to tell whatever story she wants, the author tried to establish points of relatability to the story that she published and I think with this example, it’s important again to note that the author herself acknowledges that there are opportunities to tell stories but they don’t go to people who are “slightly browner”, they go to people like Jeanine Cummins.  As Rankine and Loffreda state. perhaps it is not the question of “can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how.”