Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for April 9th, 2008

How Can We Talk About Race If We Don’t Talk About Race?

Senator Barack Obama’s forthright speech on race has certainly got some writers talking. Certainly, Obama’s speech is about mutual respect and racial unity — what it most certainly was not, was a call for creative writers to censor themselves with politically correct language at the expense of their individual creative license. I think this debate over political correctness has already been taken to an absurd extreme in this country. Rather than promote unity, the use of politically correct language has only deepened the wounds and further divided us as a country.

Just yesterday, I was reading an opinion piece by wellness coach and author, Lynn Capehart about racially neutral writing — an essay suggested by the Obama speech but, I believe, somewhat misrepresents the speech’s intent. In this piece, Capehart makes the point that writers should “support racial equality” by using racially neutral language. In other words, we should give equal weight to a character’s race by refraining from the use of labels and stereotypes:

“. . . writers never mention race unless the character isn’t white. They often use race alone to delineate the character, as if she were a generic stand-in for the entire race, a stock character that can be substituted for any other in the group, and not an individual with a unique set of talents and ties.”

While I would agree with this generally, I don’t think we should apply a racially-neutral standard to all instances of writing — particularly fiction writing. That smacks of political correctness — a trend which I’ve already condemned as being bad for the language and bad for our culture. While it’s usually a good idea to refrain from using stereotypes, I believe there are instances where stereotypes and labels are useful.

Reader sensitivity is not a legitimate standard by which writers should decide how best to express something in their writing, whether it be about race or anything else. The individual needs of story and character should sort that out. For example, there are occasions where it would be better to simply refer to a character as “a black guy” or “white girl” rather than go into a long, writerly description of skin color or where failing to mention race at all wouldn’t meet the needs of a piece of writing. Indeed, some descriptions aren’t even as informative as a simple indentifier. One of the examples Ms. Capehart gave as an acceptable alternative is to depict a family carrying a Mexican flag, speaking Spanish and eating a Mexican meal. Correct me if I’m off the mark, but wouldn’t such a description be just as stereotypical as an ethnic label? Without being told that the family is Mexican, would those facts automatically tell you the family’s nationality and ethnic make-up? They could be a white family on vacation for all the reader would know from just those facts — which is fine if the family is white, but if it’s somehow important that the family be Mexican, wouldn’t you need to know that for certain? Certainly, depending on the location, it would be suggestive but that’s a lot of description to arrive at suggesting what a simple indentifying label tells you outright. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t also add description and other facts as appropriate, just that I don’t see how stating that a character is Mexican or Black or Martian if those characters are one of those things promotes racial inequality.

Hypothetically, let’s say you have a scene in a story that takes place in an elevator. You have four people on that elevator: 3 men and 1 woman. Let’s say for the sake of argument that at the onset of the story that the race of these characters hasn’t yet been identified. All we know is that two of the guys and the woman are wearing business suits and the other man is a pizza delivery person:

” . . . so they’re both standing there naked as the day they were born,” Chad says to Bob, “and she says to him, ‘I thought you guys had big cocks’.”

Bob looks at Chad nervously and glances over at the pizza guy who is chortling loudly. Barbara is standing close to the door, her face tense. As the doors open, Barbara shoots Chad a disapproving stare.

“What’s the matter, Babs? Can’t take a joke?” Then, as she hurries out of the elevator, Chad points to the pizza delivery guy who is still laughing — laughing so hard, he drops his pizza box. “See,” Chad says, “The black guy gets it.”

The pizza guy finally stops laughing as the elevator doors close and begins moving to the next floor.

“You’re a funny man,” the pizza guy says, his eyes hardening to a dark point.

So, why did we simply identify the delivery man as “the black guy”? What was the rationale? In the scene, Chad relates a story that is obviously offensive to both women and blacks — or at least should be. Although no one else is identified by race, we can assume at the very least that Chad is white because it’s likely that only a white guy would identify a black person as “the black guy” (this is also rationale enough to tell you that Bob and Barbara are also white). Describing the characters’ race in any great detail would not necessarily add anything to the scene and could, in fact, bog it down in superfluous noise. It’s enough to simply identify the pizza guy by a label — why? Well, why did the pizza guy laugh? Do you think he thought Chad’s story was funny? Was his laughter genuine? What was it he “got” from hearing Chad’s anecdote? Do you think he was offended and was as uncomfortable as Bob and Barbara, who didn’t laugh? The pizza guy’s laughter is inappropriate and jarring largely because he is “the black guy”. Would describing the man’s skin color or hairstyle tell you anything you needed to know about him that a simple label does not in this particular instance? Secondly, if the pizza guy weren’t identified at all, most readers would assume he’s white and that would change the scene dramatically, wouldn’t it? Obviously, if the pizza guy were central to the larger story, the reader would need more information about him beyond the fact that he’s a black pizza delivery man. However, in this scene, the pizza guy is a very minor character — the kind of minor character I’d call a “mirror character” or a cookie-cutter stand-in who is reflective of the main character’s attitude and point-of-view and, hopefully hardens and reinforces, in the reader’s mind, what the main character is about. The pizza guy is a “stand-in” for the black race in this scene because that’s the way Chad sees the man. Again, these decisions are predicated upon the mechanics of the individual story and nothing more. Hopefully, the reader is intelligent enough to understand that. Overly sensitive readers are likely to find any excuse to be offended because they tend to bring their own baggage to their reading experience instead of taking a piece of writing on it’s own merits which is why it’s a mistake to give those people any thought when writing a story.

And this brings me to another point: how does writing about racist characters perpetuate racism or even suggest racism, ignorance or laziness on the part of the writer? There may not be a perfectly acceptable way to deal with race in fiction — at least so it’s acceptable to everyone. But, isn’t it better to acknowledge these realities and talk about them openly rather than bury them “outta sight, outta mind,” and hope they go away? To the extent that racial tension is still a part of American society, American literature will continue to reflect this. The purpose of literature isn’t to paint the world the way we want it to be, but the way it actually is. Enforcing some racially neutral standard of gray won’t change that and won’t make for “better writing.” Witness the white writers Ms. Capehart uses as good examples of racially neutral writing: James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Sara Paretsky and Lee Child. Popular writers to be sure . . . but truly great writers? I rest my case.