Tag Archives: Beth Loffreda

A Writer’s Racial Block

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Representation in storytelling is relatively a new topic to get attention, and a lot of the conversation revolves around the most popular form of storytelling that we consume: film. A conversation sparked when the hashtag “OscarsSoWhite” trended nationwide because of the lack of racial diversity in the critically acclaimed films that were being celebrated at the awards show. It’s been five years since that happened, but has representation in the stories we tell actually gotten better? “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” caused me to re-evaluate this through opening up my mind to the way race is viewed in the stories we consumed. As someone who not only loves to consume fictional stories in both film and literature, but also as a writer myself, it challenged me to think about the way white writers shape race, or even, the absence of the way they shape it.

It’s obvious that white writers may decide to ignore race in their stories instead of recognizing it because of not wanting to write characters outside of your own race. This is because one can fall in the line of thinking that it is not within your right to write a character that is outside of your own race. Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda beg writers to not ask the question of can they write outside of their race but ask, “Why and what for”. This forces the writer to consider more of the purpose of “inhabiting” a character outside of their race and what exactly they are trying to say by incorporating that into their story. This could exponentially help in not only increasing the representation of people of color in mainstream stories but in the type of representation that they receive.

Going back to cinema, a huge critique of the “OscarsSoWhite” movement was not just that only white stories were being told and celebrated but that in the way they were represented when they were. For example, many took note that stories that included black characters or tackled the subject of race, were frequently period pieces about slavery or just in general fell into a trope/stereotype of that race. It’s quite a dangerous pattern that writers of all types tend to fall down and this advice to more deeply examine the purpose of race in the stories we write can potentially help to stray writers away from this path. If there is one thing that is certain, it is that representation is needed and racial diversity has to exist in the stories we write and consume in order for them to represent our society’s reality.

When race is ignored completely, when white writers choose to ignore race and just write characters with an absence of race, they end up writing through a lens of white privilege, because it is a privilege of that white writer to ignore race in the first place. This is how we end up with stories upon stories that are not representing our diverse society and the racial complexities within it. What Rankine and Loffreda did in their essay is essentially map out a stepping stone for writer’s to open up their mind to the way they can represent race in stories. If writer’s take that step into asking themselves the same questions that is asked in the article, they will be opened up to much more deeper way of thinking of race in their writing and the effect could then be the proper representation that we have all been asking for.

 

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.”

The Process of Letting in Light

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Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s article “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary” converses with Ralph Emerson’s “Nature” on the subject of discovering “Truth”. Even though they both investigate the subject in two completely different fields (literature for Rankine and her compatriot, and physical nature as well as the inner nature of our very being), they both arrive at polarizing conclusions as to how to arrive at Truth and who has access to it.

The Truth, according to Emerson comes from within oneself as well as from Nature. “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he comprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.” Emerson argues that though one needs a code to “break” the “hieroglyphic” Truth they are unconscious of, this Truth is nonetheless present within man and nature; and is therefore integral to what it means to be human. However, it is only the poet, “…whose eye can integrate all the parts…” In other words, only a poet can synthesize the various “forms and tendencies” of Nature in order to define Truth.

On the other hand, Rankine and Loffreda say that the “Truth” is not a definable entity that can be excavated from within all human beings. The separation of the human from the imagination is impossible because they are eternally intertwined. The imagination is just a scrambled office of opinions, and the “racial imaginary” – which is heavily informed by the cultures we grow up in and the people and ideologies we surround ourselves with – are the inner beliefs we are not readily conscious of without deeper intentional self-investigation. They purport that the inner caverns of the human imagination, in understanding others’ similar or dissimilar experiences of race, are inherently incomplete and faulty; as are all human beings. “But to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race – that it’s the one region of the self or experience that is free of race – and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination – acts as if imagination is not part of me…” According to them, it is a mistake to assume that the human, or at least the artist’s, imagination is a transcendent arena for perceiving the unseen Truth, the inner lives of human beings whom are not shaped by and affect the world the same ways they do; certainly not enough to recreate a real-life human experience in art and literature.

According to the authors of “Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary”- “It should also conversely not be assumed that it is “easy” or “natural” to write scenarios or characters whose race matches…one’s own.” Therefore, unlike the Emersonian ideas of arriving at Truth, Loffreda and Rankine believe that to arrive at a truth within oneself is very unlikely. However, the authors do support the notion that the “racial imaginary” can be “stretched” and enlightened toward empathizing with others more authentically, or as close to authentically as one can. Authors and artists can achieve this enlightened state of empathy by some deep self-reflection and being just plain honest with oneself, asking themselves, “… what [they] think [they] know, and how [they] might undermine [their] own sense of authority.” An author wishing to write from the aspect of the “other” (one foreign to oneself, “whatever that might mean”) one must ask why one is including an “other” in the first place, what their intentions are in using this fictional person as a plot device – what do you think you know about them and how are you trying to use that information. This king of reflection is encouraged in everyone (though to artists in particular), while Emerson excludes everyone but the poet from such knowledge of transcendent, all-encompassing truth.

Both articles “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary,” by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda and “Nature,” by Ralph Emerson explain the methods of arriving at truth. For Claudine and Loffreda they venture toward truth in the vein of artistic expression of racial experiences and whether one can write from the perspective of another and what that means for the subjectified party and the subjectifiers. In “Nature” Emerson writes that truth is a thing that can be excavated and that it is not only universal but reachable by the synthesizing  and sensing abilities of the poet.