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White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope. This is even more apparent in the kind of reading most enthusiastically trafficked by the white liberal literary community that has such an outsize influence, intellectually and economically, on the publishing industry today. The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy,
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All the “representation matters” rhetoric in the world means nothing if we do not address the fundamentally fucked-up relationship between writers of color and white audiences that persists in our contemporary reading culture.
The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.
The museum Jane Austen’s House in the English village of Chawton recently announced plans, according to The New York Times, to “include details about Austen and her family’s ties to the slave trade, including the fact that her father was a trustee of a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua,” thus contextualizing the broader sociopolitical reality in which Austen lived and worked. Incidentally, the Chawton House features pieces from the Wedgwood dinner service set belonging to Austen’s family.
Being capable of engaging with both Austen’s work and the historical realities of its time period is not a mutually exclusive exercise, but a mutually formative one, the very stuff of being a reader in the first place. To insist otherwise only reinforces the false universalizing of our art that Morrison once called tantamount to a lobotomizing of our art. The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.
I am impossible, not to others, but to myself sounds like the exact kind of edgelord narcissism that dudes who hit their girlfriends and kill animals use to justify their mysterious grimdark ways, but go off, I guess.
but the idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal. It asks us to keep those
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When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader.
The American origin story is written in Native genocide, transatlantic slavery, and imperial subjugation overseas. That is its originating fact, and so to write the next chapter of that story means contending with this prologue, which most Americans find themselves constitutionally unable and unwilling to do. And so we remain willfully illiterate to ourselves.
After a PG&E pipeline exploded in 2010, killing eight people, state regulators started investigating the company. They found that PG&E had collected $224 million more than it was authorized to collect in oil and gas revenue in the decade before the explosion. At the same time, it spent millions less than it was supposed to on maintenance and generally fell short of industry safety standards. “There was very much a focus on the bottom line over everything: ‘What are the earnings we can report this quarter?’ ” Mike Florio, who was a California utilities commissioner from 2011 to 2016, told The
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“What is interesting about wildfires is that the wealthy often put themselves in harm’s way—the second home in the woods phenomenon,” Dr. [Bob] Bolin [professor of environmental social science at Arizona State University] wrote. “The difference between the wealthy and the poor is the wealthy can afford losses, they have insurance, health insurance, secure jobs (typically somewhere else) and the poor don’t.”
It’s impossible to untangle our disastrous climate present from our disastrous colonial past.
The fact that so few people know that the Philippine-American War produced a genocide in the archipelago is an obscenity.
in writing The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood has described being inspired by, among other things, the murder of dissidents in the Philippines under the regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the Argentinian junta’s policy of child abduction;
(Here I’m also reminded of the fact that Chris Claremont’s original art direction for the iconic X-Men character Rogue—the white Southern belle cursed to never be able to touch anyone without draining their life force—was that the character should look like Grace Jones; but artist Michael Golden didn’t know what Jones looked like.)
separating the art from the artist, an impulse of exceedingly mild intellectual rigor, which has only ever really served the powerful and protected abusers (we never hear about separating the art from the artist when a writer of color wants her work to be read beyond the autobiographical, for example—people seem very keen to connect the art and the artist in that case—but god forbid someone tell the fuckboy who wants to read you another mediocre love poem that Pablo Neruda freely admitted to raping a Sri Lankan chambermaid during his posting as a diplomat there).
“These hypersensitive past years” is a description that would be at home with the sweatily pious conservative commentators who call progressive activists “snowflakes”; a way of pathologizing and thereby intellectually minimizing the effect of the political movements of the 1960s, when Didion’s essays were published. It’s a way of making the struggles for racial and economic justice seem like an epidemic of “hypersensitivity”—which, as we know, is precisely how many people in our country still view these ongoing struggles.
That it was paramount for white settler colonials to believe the lie that the land they were occupying was “a blank page waiting to be inscribed,” that it was this lie that allowed America to tell the story of itself (and fifth-generation white Californians like Didion to tell the story of California)—is the lens through which all writing about the West must be scrutinized. Who is this writing for? What vision of California and the West is it upholding, and why?
As the queer Chicana writer Myriam Gurba deftly notes in her essay “It’s Time to Take California Back from Joan Didion,” describing the way Didion’s settler colonial language inflects her writing about both Californian and Mexican landscapes: “México is something for gringos to do in their piyamas, o quizás en cálzon, on rainy days. . . . The further south [Didion and her family] drive, the more her prose approaches the infernal.”
it reinforces the idea of California and the West as a fantasy space for non-Californians; a place that remains—intrinsically, anxiously, seductively—at once alien and alluring, fecund and hostile forever.
the humor of people who’ve known intergenerational trauma is also nearly always a defense mechanism, a way to deflect,
if the settler colonial “I” was ever tasked to focus on its debts rather than its dread, the whole tawdry American story would collapse in on itself, like
“In the seemingly barren Mojave Desert, Paiutes developed irrigation systems to grow food,” Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr. tell us in We Are the Land: A History of Native California, showing us the California that writers like Didion could not, would not, see:
There is no definitive historical record of the number of Filipinos killed as America became America. Some of the more conservative estimates by historians place the number at around 600,000 deaths in Luzon and Batangas towards the beginning of the conflict alone; more comprehensive anecdotal reports suggest a number close to 1.4 million. The water cure—now more commonly known as waterboarding—was first used by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines as a form of torture during this period.
the impulse to political unity “for the greater good” often ends up enforcing a politicized type of silence: to not speak about sexual assault in already beleaguered communities of color or activist circles, to not prioritize trans women in feminist liberation; to not speak about the racism, classicism, and sexual fetishization perpetrated upon certain Asian groups by other Asian groups
Sometimes the silencing takes a soothing, paternalistic tone: minority groups within minority groups are told to “wait their turn,” to save their niche concerns for later, and that their immediate political duty is to support, applaud, and identify with, effectively, their conquerors, employers, and bullies.
The way we reckon with our history has a bearing on how we reckon with each other, and how we reckon with our art—the kind of art we’re able to imagine, the ability of our art to truly imagine us.
Our mainstream literary discourse continues to read writers of color ethnographically—as if they provide crucial data about a certain subjugated group of people—and white writers universally, regardless of the particularities of their artwork.
