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.”
