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.
