Being a writing ally

9 May 2008

For a variety of reasons, I’m thinking a lot lately about oppression, privilege, conscious and unconscious bias.

I’m a white bisexual hearing currently-mostly-physically-able woman. I am in a relationship of nearly 20 years with another woman. I am a class-jumper, currently living well above the economic level I was born into. I am over-educated for my birth class. I am under-educated for the class in which I currently live. I am an artist, and I have also been a corporate executive. I have what most folks consider “professional” artistic accomplishments, but in some parts of the writing community I lack professional credibility because I don’t publish “enough.”

That’s just a list off the top of my head, and I offer it because although there are many ways to discriminate against me, and many ways in which I experience bias or oppression, I know that being white, well-educated and hearing are the things that will always save my ass. They are my mobility. They are my access to opportunity, to choice, and to the culture itself.

The benefits of being white are obvious. And if they aren’t, please go get educated about it, okay? Start here and here. And order a copy of Uprooting Racism by Paul Kivel.

It helps that I’m smart, but it’s the education that showed me that there were other layers of the world beyond the ones I knew, and gave me the tools to get there. I absolutely got the first part of that education because my parents and I are white — my mom took a job as librarian at a private grammar school and stuck it out for 12 years so I could get an education we couldn’t otherwise have afforded. I am certain she would not have been given that job if she were black. I got the second part of that education — on scholarship at an exclusive prep school — as a direct result of the first.

And none of us who are hearing should underestimate the power of that: there are still way too many deaf kids in America who are denied access to native language as babies, who don’t get the same chance I did to pattern and process language in infancy. Language is the door to participation in our culture — not having the brain’s language system fully primed in infancy makes English harder to learn and is a huge obstacle to participating in the culture.

I’ve been the different one. I’ve been one of only two white kids in a black church. I’ve been the kid who would have killed for a pair of LL Bean boots like the ones the kids in my prep school wore in the snow, when I was wearing plastic shoes because I was too ashamed to tell anyone that I couldn’t afford anything better. I’ve been the only hearing person in a room of Deaf people. But I didn’t have to have those experiences — even the class experience at prep school — unless I chose to, and I don’t have to have them every day. That’s privilege, baby.

I learned the concept of being an ally pretty young, because my parents were allies to black activists in the 60’s. I didn’t always understand why people were angry about a particular experience, but it was pretty clear they were angry — and my most valuable lesson from that was being told that assuming that other people’s experiences were true for them was almost always a pretty good starting point if I actually wanted to have a conversation.

The lesson was hugely reinforced for me when I studied American Sign Language and Deaf culture, and my Deaf and hearing teachers made it very clear to me the myriad ways in which I benefit from being a hearing person in a hearing culture. Because I could “experience” that for myself if I wished. If I went out for lunch with a Deaf friend, I could allow the hearing server to believe I was deaf too simply by refusing to use spoken English with him. And I had to be slapped around the first time I did it without permission from my Deaf friend: she had to point out to me that “playing deaf” was a privilege that she didn’t really appreciate my exercising in her company, any more than she appreciated my using voice without including her by also signing what I was saying.

Okay, so where am I going with all this? To writing.

Because this week I read this story, and the firestorm of conversation (132 comments as of this writing) it sparked. Go read it, see what you think.

Are you back? (I’ll bet it took a while…)

Same old thing, no? People refusing to believe that other people’s experiences are true for them. People (on all sides of the issues) stating opinions as if they were universal facts, and presenting experiences as if being true for one person means they must be true for everyone. People trying to listen. People not listening at all. People getting defensive. People speaking their own truth as best they can.

These conversations are hard for me because there is no way to be seamlessly rational and perfectly non-racist. I’m used to thinking of “being right” as something I can achieve if I work hard enough (that’s another privilege). But there is no way I can be “right” in these conversations — because if I start from the place that people’s experience is true for them, then, well, it’s true for them. It’s hard not to get defensive. To just listen. But what am I going to do, argue with someone about her own experience? After all the things I’ve seen for myself about denial of experience?

Denial of experience is one of the most effective techniques humans use against one another. Oh, they didn’t really mean that (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you a jerk for making them feel so guilty!). Oh, you’re overreacting (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you just being a big baby and making your feelings so important!). Oh, you probably heard / saw / took it wrong (and so it didn’t really happen and aren’t you stupid for making such a fuss?) And so on.

And there are other ways to fuck up these conversations. Here is a very good list that I learned a lot from.

Because the thing about personal truth is that it’s not all equal. Of course your experience is as real as mine, of course it’s as “valid” in the fuzzy way we so often use that term. But some truths are bigger than personal. Racism is real in the world. It’s a systemic abuse that happens to entire groups of human beings (as do other kinds of oppression). It’s not just “your perspective” versus mine. It’s not strictly a matter of opinion. Racism, sexism, heterosexism and the thousand other ways we have of “othering” people reduce us all to walking cliches, and that’s how we end up treating each other, and that just makes the conversation harder.

How does this fit into writing? Well, as a white writer, I have the privilege of writing about characters of my race without having to explain how their experience of race affects them. I can describe a character strictly by hair and eye color if she’s white — everyone will “get it.” If she’s not white, then I can find a lovely food- or nature-based metaphor (coffee, candy and trees are favorite choices) to describe her skin color, which I must do immediately upon introducing her so that everyone knows she is not white…

/irony off/

Okay, so here is my sole piece of advice to white writers. Do not ever ever ever accept a “human” cliche in your own work (you shouldn’t accept cliche of any kind, but you’ll have to figure out the non-harmful applications of this principle for yourself). Unexamined cliches about any “kind of people” are the worst kind of bad writing. They hurt people directly (it can feel like a slap in the face to read it), and indirectly (you have just reinforced the stereotype, and contributed your drop of thoughtlessness to the ocean that other people have to swim in).

If you are going to write about characters who are not white, then please make these characters as particular, as emotionally complex, and as real as your white characters. Please do not make them white people in non-white skin. Please use your relationship skills to seek out people of color and listen to their experiences. This will help you in your work (and I’m not trying to suggest you should be treating people as if they were simply research projects… but if you ask people respectfully for their help, many times you will get it). Please use your reading skills to read stories by people of color about people of color. This will help you in your work. Please use your imagination to apply your experiences of being stereotyped or mistreated because of class or sexual orientation or just because some other white person was being an asshole. These experiences will help you in your work.

Does this mean you can never write about a black inner city drug-dealing kid? Well, no. You can write whatever you want. You just have to be prepared for people to respond to what you write — not to your intentions or your personal history of working for social reform. You have to accept that you may never “get it right.” But honestly, there are lots of other things about being human that you probably aren’t going to get right either, in your fiction or in your life. If that stops any of us from trying, then we are all the poorer for it.

A lot of white writers throw up their hands at some point and decide to just write about white people all the time, because it’s not such a minefield. And that’s true. And that’s your privilege.

But if you choose to, you can be an ally to writers of color and readers of color by being the best writer you can. By making the black inner-city drug-dealing kid so real, so true, that she becomes a living, breathing human on the page. Make her human, and make sure that her humanity reflects to the best of your ability her experience of being a black inner-city drug-dealing kid in a white world. Don’t apologize for her. Don’t condescend. Get inside her as much as you can and show us who she is. You can do this, if you choose, with any character who isn’t part of the dominant culture.

It’s harder when characters aren’t like you. You’re a lot more likely to get it wrong. The internet will sometimes fall on you (as I expect it will fall on me if I have screwed up in my part of this ongoing conversation). Dust yourself off and keep going.

Here’s a story that I tell in an essay that Nicola and I wrote together, forthcoming in Queer Universes. It’s about one of the most important writing lessons I ever learned, at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop.

Samuel R. Delany was one of our teachers. He was fairly impatient with us — a bunch of wide-eyed, white, mostly middle-class not-exactly-kids, many of whom who saw writing as the necessary process to the goal of getting published. One day he went off on us for having worldviews the size of grapes, for imagining everyone in our futures as white, middle-class and polite (except for the dangerous characters, who were allowed to be gay or black as long as they died or were otherwise redeemed). Seriously, this is what many of us were writing. I remember one student in the workshop who wrote a lesbian character that looked and talked exactly like Nicola, because she was the only out lesbian he had ever met. And he didn’t understand why she might be offended. But Delany did, and he challenged us to do better. To take (although he did not put it this way) some fucking risks.
 
Red flag to a bull. I offered one of my stories up for dissection. Tell me what assumptions I’m making, I said, and he gave me an impassive look and answered, Are you sure you want me to do that?
 
An hour later I was in tears, mortified by my assumptions and even more so by my utter lack of awareness of them. Here I was, with all my liberal childhood credentials, my race and class consciousness, my experiences of poverty and powerlessness, my carefully-forged autonomous identity, my hip new still-emerging bisexuality, revealed as fatuous — I may have been some of those things as a person, but as a writer I was straight, white, resolutely privileged, protective of the cultural status quo, and embarrassingly safe.
 
It’s one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had as a writer, and I’ll always be grateful for it. I have no idea if Chip would approve of my work now, but he would certainly find it different.
 
– from “War Machine, Time Machine” by Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge

Do I think that writers have a responsibility to write about race or queerness or disability? Nope. To me, writing “about issues” is the kiss of death to most fiction — as opposed to writing about human beings and what happens to them, how they live and love and hope and fear and die. To me, a writer’s responsibility is to create those human beings as truly as possible. To avoid the lazy and sometimes harmful choices of cliche.

Because it’s never “just fiction,” you know? If we have any skill at all as writers, then our words get into other people’s minds and hearts. We touch each other with our words. We create, even if only for a second, a real experience for other people (and here we go back to mirror neurons). And that matters to them, and I think it’s better for everyone if it matters to the writers too.

And if you’re interested in more about this, here are some conversations with readers of Solitaire about race (resurrected from Virtual Pint):

(in chronological order):
Stereotyping and writing questions — Don’t exoticize characters.
Not just a white world — Don’t hang “race tags” on characters.
Multicultural writing — Why I don’t get a cookie.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog 

Comments

10 Responses to “Being a writing ally”

  1. Cheryl on May 9th, 2008 12:19 pm

    What you say works for me (magnificently). I wait with interest to see how other people take it.

  2. la gringa on May 10th, 2008 9:33 am

    Well said.

  3. Marguerite on May 10th, 2008 9:51 am

    Fricking fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.

  4. Aerin on May 10th, 2008 10:25 am

    All right. I am going to be extremely transparent and forthcoming, and I hope that your readers will not jump on me.

    I’m currently trying to write a story from the perspective of a white child whose life is touched by a black woman who is her neighbor.
    I am worried about getting the voice of the neighbor “right” and even more worried about asking for help. You’ve given me a lot to think about.

    I’m off to read your links, but I appreciate this article. It’s well-written, and pertinent not only because of the Fantasy Mag story brouhaha but also the current political climate, as the issue of race is addressed in (what I hope will be) healthy dialogue.

  5. Arachne Jericho on May 11th, 2008 5:23 pm

    Thanks, this was quite interesting and well said.

    I’m not white, and have had some interesting experiences in regards to that. My favorite graphic novel currently is American-Born Chinese.

  6. Fritz Lives on May 11th, 2008 5:42 pm

    First you write

    Racism, sexism, heterosexism and the thousand other ways we have of “othering” people reduce us all to walking cliches

    and then

    hip new still-emerging bisexuality

    I see a real mismatch between these quotes.

    I realize you’re bisexual, and I won’t speculate about your motives for writing this. But the word “hip” just re-iterates, without examination, one of the most pernicious myths about bisexuality - one that’s affected me, and others in our community, for decades.

    “You’re really straight/gay/lesbian - you’re just saying that to be trendy.”
    “I hear that’s in these days.”
    “You just think it’s cool to say that.”

    It’s a dismissal that’s been around for at least forty years - older bisexuals were informed in the sixties that they were just latching on to the free love trend. Nowadays it’s Angelina Jolie’s name that’s dropped - like Madonna, Elton John, and David Bowie in past years - but the message is the same:

    You bisexuals aren’t who you say you are. You’re shallow. You’re lying to others and yourself. Your relationships aren’t real.

    When people who hold these prejudices read your words, what are they going to think? Do you believe that they’ll be challenged? Or do you believe they’ll go on saying the same things, smug in the reassurance that a bisexual woman tosses around these same words herself, so it must be all right?

    This was an ugly, nasty, hurtful thing to say anywhere, much less in the middle of an article about challenging stereotypes.

  7. Kelley on May 11th, 2008 6:47 pm

    Fritz –

    First, I’m sorry that what I wrote offended you.

    Second, thanks for not speculating about my motives. That’s a real conversation-stopper, but it’s hard not to do it when one is upset. I appreciate the restraint.

    I think we may be having a misunderstanding about timing and context. The story I’m re-telling happened 20 years ago. I was younger, and yes, I did think it was hip. I would not describe it that way now. I was trying to disclose it in my story to help illustrate my own cluelessness about my assumptions. Clearly, that didn’t come across to you. If it helps to apologize for what I thought and did 20 years ago, I certainly will do.

    I’m sorry that my story made you feel that I was being hurtful and ugly, and I’ll certainly think more about how to express clearly the difference between who I was then, and the hopefully more aware person I am now.

    Thank you for telling me how you felt in a way that made your feelings clear and still left me room to respond.

  8. Fritz Lives on May 12th, 2008 10:23 am

    If it helps to apologize for what I thought and did 20 years ago, I certainly will do.

    I’m not commenting about what you thought and did twenty years ago. I’m commenting about the words you use to write about them now - here in this article, and in the larger piece that’s about to be published in what appears to be a college textbook.

    In Samuel Delany’s autobiographical work, he recalls how, in the sixties, he described his life as a gay man to his straight friends and acquaintances in terms of shame and degradation - not because of any internalized homophobia (he didn’t in fact feel ashamed or degraded) but because that was the existing discourse of gayness at that time, and he had fallen into it as easily as a car slips into the ruts in a road. In trying to tell his own story, he had inadvertently reinforced a larger homophobic paradigm.

    Nicola Griffith has written elsewhere about phrases like “admitted homosexual” - in which a word like “admitted”, which would be neutral in another context, implies a larger frame of reference, a certain set of values and assumptions. I wouldn’t equate one sexual orientation with another, or “hip” with “admitted”, but I would say that “hip” and its synonyms have a long history of being used to dismiss bisexuality. These specific words are part of a larger discourse, in which bisexuality is characterized as a shallow, fashion-following choice.

    I appreciate your concern for my feelings, but I don’t think my feelings are important. What I think is important is that larger discourse, and the ways that this quote - whatever its intent - seems to reinforce it. (In addition to the word choice, I think there’s some ambiguity in the words immediately following. Is the antecedent of “revealed as fatuous” “bisexuality”, or “I”? By “may have been some of those things as a person”, do you mean “even though I was some of those things”, or “I may not have actually been some of those things”? While I might guess that you mean the former in both cases, I could imagine a reader who’s accepted that dominant discourse to assume the latter.)

    To your larger point in the article itself - the importance of examining our received ideas about other people - I would add another: even when we’re writing about our own selves and our own experiences, our words are read by people who think that they already know something about people like us. If we don’t consciously challenge those assumptions, if we write the usual words without signaling that they shouldn’t be read in the usual way, we run the risk of strengthening the very things we could be challenging.

  9. Kelley on May 12th, 2008 10:44 am

    …even when we’re writing about our own selves and our own experiences, our words are read by people who think that they already know something about people like us. If we don’t consciously challenge those assumptions, if we write the usual words without signaling that they shouldn’t be read in the usual way, we run the risk of strengthening the very things we could be challenging.

    Yes, this is true. I’ll be thinking about how to express myself more clearly.

  10. jean r on May 12th, 2008 1:17 pm

    I wouldn’t know how to write a single word if I considered all of these points–worthy, inclusive, non-inclusive, important or not. I couldn’t do it; nope, I couldn’t shape a single paragraph if I kept such a universe of audience alive in my being as I wrote. There’s at least a semester’s worth of study, if not enough education for a lifetime, contained in the above musings and links and the ensuing responses. It reminds me to pay attention to how to grow ever smarter about just about everything. I take my curiosity and my clumsiness and my willingness to grow into walks and talks with the world around me, I do, I do, but I give myself the grace to write from the life and knowledge I wake up with each morning. It’s enough.

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