IBAR: International Blog Against Racism Week

Thanks to fabulous YA author E.Lockhart for the heads up on this guerilla campaign to talk about/blog about/ or whatever about race.

It’s kind of funny … during my MFA days the question of race in writing came up over and over and over again. Could we as writers of whatever color or stripe slip into the lives of writers of other colors and cultures? We wrangled this topic as we chewed through novels by the old guard, the canon, who were writers of paleness who tackled characters found in Robinson Crusoe, characters like Uncle Tom and also Jim, from Huck Finn. We explored our discomfort with novels like The Bluest Eye, tested our perceptions of race and gender and kept asking. Finally, the answer emerged:

If you’re going to do it, do it WELL.

This seemed reasonable. We did not stop to question each other anymore as we embarked on our literary journeys. True, there were mostly Caucasian students at the school, who mostly wrote stories about Caucasians, which would possibly be sold in bookstores and read by other Caucasians, encouraging those Caucasians to write…a self-reinforcing circle, but there were glimmers. We were less afraid, now, to explore. And, we were merciless with each other: caricatures of race or gender, no matter if they were done by a person of said race or gender were usually shot down (as well as storylines with holes in the plots, and sometimes perfectly good stories if someone was in a sucky mood. Fortunately there weren’t many days like that.). These were good times, for the most part, and made us forget that the rest of the world isn’t really like that.

My agent was one of the first to remind me of the world outside the embrace of school. I wrote a novel which he admired and enjoyed, except that the character was biracial. He hemmed and hawed and finally asked me straight out if I were. (We’ve never met, as we have one of those bicoastal things going.) Were what? I wondered. He finally coughed it out… “Biracial.” I told him no. He seemed to relax. “If you’re plain old black, you should probably just leave your character that way,” he counseled me patiently. “It’s a fascinating topic, biracialism is, but it really just adds too much to your plot — it’s too burdened. I keep expecting her to deal with it sometime, and she doesn’t.”

Deal with it? I scrambled for a reply, telling him she could “deal with it” if he felt that was relevant, but adding that I only felt it worth a sentence or two. To me, it just wasn’t a big deal. Ironically, we heard from Hyperion Books for Children and the editor who reviewed it said that she loved that the character wasn’t hung up about being biracial. As a matter of fact, she called it “refreshing.”

My agent still wasn’t comfortable with it, and in the end, I took it out. Mistake? I don’t know. The character being biracial isn’t really germane to the plotline – changing it has had the impact of changing a character’s sock color, so it doesn’t so much bother me. There are so many other edits about other things that I did, the whole incident faded from my mind. It wasn’t that important, right?

The second novel my agent reviewed practically rocked him back on his bum. The characters were — gasp — CAUCASIAN!! How could I… What did I… How would he… I mean, he was really shocked. He kept saying, “But you did it well, you did it well,” as if I needed to be somehow reassured. I began to ask myself if a.) I was just weird, b.) my agent was a racist, c.) if my perception of race and writing was different from “normal people’s” (because that’s what we do: when in doubt, accuse ourselves of abnormalities). I was relieved that I wasn’t asked to change the characters, but my agent did suggest that I remove overt racism from the two adults. “They’re smarter than that,” he objected. And again, because I was making myriad other edits, it worked out better if their objections weren’t because of race. BUT. I am beginning to see a trend. My agent is Jewish, and the cultural history of racism is close to him as well. He seems to want to head me off from sort of ‘making waves’ in my writing. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Confused, mostly… I’ve dealt with people more ignorantly and blatantly racially biased as my characters in this case and I was a little surprised that he felt that was over-the-top. I’ve seen worse. I’ve heard worse. My partner’s parents told me we’d have “little ugly yellow children like O.J.’s” if we were ever to breed. My character wasn’t that over the top. But my agent was uncomfortable, and I do trust his judgment, so…

Understandably, writing about race is sticky and tricky because we’re all racially biased in one way or another. Certainly we’re culturally biased. I am biased against people who don’t use proper punctuation… if I see ‘your’ vs. ‘you’re,’ I automatically assume I’m reading the words of an idiot, not just someone who was in a hurry, isn’t good with punctuation or doesn’t have spell-check (which, incidentally, doesn’t really catch usage errors.). If I see people with saggy pants or using slang, or blasting music that shakes the asphalt, again, I assume that person has a certain level of education and intelligence that doesn’t necessarily measure up to mine. Humans make assumptions. What makes SMART humans is acknowledging those assumptions, and thinking again…

Have you ever felt that people expect certain things of you because of your race? I kind of feel like my agent expects me to write Black novels. My characters must always be having ‘the Black experience,’ whatever the heck that’s supposed to be. And I don’t know how to let them have it any other way than I’ve had it, which is surrounded by Caucasian and Latina and Asians, mixed and mingled in with plain old Life — that’s my experience. And I can only write my experience.

Two new novels in progress are both peopled primarily with African Americans, although one character is biracial Black-Filipino. I expect to hear something from my agent soon (eye roll, sigh), but I don’t think I’m going to change anything. Not unless he has a really good reason to say something. What makes me nervous now is wondering if my version of ‘the Black experience’ is authentic enough for him… for others. Crazy, crazy, crazy-making this is. I hate even having these thoughts. And I used to think that writing about religion would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m going to keep what I’ve written, keep talking about this and thinking about this, and carry on. That’s my goal.

Don Tate, a Texas children’s book illustrator and author asked the question, “Where are the books for African American boys, those who fight off dragons; who defeat the bully; who spend their summer vacations bucking broncos?” Don was blogging about a dearth of books for boys of color, but I realize anew that there is a dearth of books for kids of color that has them involved in ordinary adventures. My every day life is not about forcing school districts to let me go to class or sit in the front of a bus. Mostly nobody’s life is like that all the time… so why do most books about people of color focus on problems like poverty and teen pregnancy and hypersexuality and drug abuse? Is that all writers can think of for people of color to do?

I came away from that blog with the thought that I have a lot of writing to do to create a balance against the ‘crack-baby’ books… to people the literary world with the characters I create, knew, and grew up with… ordinary Jills and Joes, people of color, and people of the dominant culture who. just. live.

And that’s my two cents during International Blog Against Racism Week. Join in the discussion on your own blog and then comment and post your link at Rilina’s Live Journal IBAR round-up. Think about it, talk about it, and thanks for listening.