In Which Their Own Faces Shine

Last time I wrote in this space, I talked about our need for diverse books, diverse books and diverse authors . . . a point on which, I assume, we all agree. All children, when they enter the world of books, need to be able to find their own cultures, their own families, their own faces there. If they can’t, how can we possibly expect them to value a world that excludes them?But even as I proclaimed the need for such diversity, I acknowledged that I, as a white writer, have neither the ability nor the courage to produce the needed books. Why? Because my own knowledge is so bound up in whiteness as to be blind. Not colorblind, just blind.A bit of history. I grew up in north-central Illinois in a community bound by an unspoken, unwritten “sunset law.” “Don’t let the sun set on you in this town.” And people of color knew for whom the unwritten law was created, and they stayed away. Far away. When African-American artists came to entertain us in our community concert series, we applauded mightily. But then we chose not to notice as they drove fifteen miles to the county seat to eat a meal in a restaurant or spend the night in a hotel.I grew up knowing this restriction to be wrong, deeply wrong. What I didn’t understand was how thoroughly my community’s restriction deprived me. In all my early years, I never knew a single person of color, leaving me so encased in my own whiteness as to be stupid.Of course, I have the privilege of having friends outside my white circle now, but that leaves me understanding only the most obvious surfaces of their lives. To try to write such a person into one of my stories? Mistakes would fly.Cross-cultural writing is always complex, even fraught. I know a book, for instance, in which a Jewish writer presented a Jesuit seminarian as agonizing over the fact that someone he loved hadn’t been “saved,” a muddling of Christian culture so profound as to be almost funny. The difference, though, is that Christians have had centuries to portray themselves with accuracy and insight. One outsider’s mistaken stereotype is a drop in an already replete ocean.Am I saying that no one can write outside her own culture? No. I’m saying only that I know I cannot, because my experience lacks a deep enough foundation.I once discussed the topic of who-can-write-what with Ashley Bryan, a black writer and artist. He pointed out that there are black singers who specialize in German music and that these singers are much loved in Germany. But to do that successfully, he said, they immerse themselves in German culture. That’s what few white writers who cross over to write about people of color choose to do. It’s what I feel incapable of doing in a deep enough way to be authentic.There are people, however, who manage such a crossing, at least to my eyes. Two alumni of Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I once taught, come immediately to mind: Nancy Bo Flood is white. She lived and worked for many years on the Navajo reservation. She writes about the people she knows and loves with both knowledge and empathy, but she also takes great care to have native readers vet her work. Is that enough? Some will say no. It seems enough to me, but I stand outside the culture she is writing about.Debby Dahl Edwardson is white, also. She has lived since she was a young adult in Barrow, Alaska. She married an Inupiat man and raised seven children with him. She writes about her adopted culture with insight and grace. Enough insight? Enough grace? Clearly I’m not the one who can judge. The bottom line for all of us is that we should judge the book, not the author. If the book gets it right, it doesn’t matter the color of the author’s skin. If it gets it wrong, it doesn’t matter either. Call out the book’s successes or failures.Having said that and believing it, I still have a confession. When I taught at VCFA I would occasionally have a student, someone I perceived to be heterosexual, give me a manuscript with lesbian characters. Now, I am a lesbian, and I always tried hard to judge only the manuscript. Did the story work? Was the depiction of the lesbian experience authentic? But even as I reminded myself to stand behind my own beliefs—judge the book, not the author—I bristled inwardly. How did she dare . . .? What gave her the right . . .? Each time, because I had a solemn responsibility to these students, I managed to talk myself down to fairness. But the talking down didn’t come easily.Cross-cultural writing is never simple.It is a reality, however, we need to keep wrestling with. For too many years we wrestled with nothing at all, because we simply left people of color out of our books or included them only in little-black-Sambo stereotypes. And I wish now that we are at least trying to be inclusive we could be more gentle with one another’s mistakes, that every one of us on every side of this issue could be more gentle with one another’s mistakes.What we need is for people from all the parallel cultures, the term Virginia Hamilton preferred, to write their own worlds. But we also need others with a deep enough understanding to dare to write across lines, even knowing some will object to that line-crossing for their own justifiable reasons.We also need, not incidentally, more publishers and editors of color. And we need more sales reps of color, too, so that we don’t have white men saying in acquisition meetings, “I can’t sell that.”And we need, finally, equity across every racial divide, equity in the economy, in education, in work opportunity, so that more people of color can walk into a book store and buy a book in which their own faces shine.