As writers, we struggle with conflict and identity, and ultimately agonize over what message we will convey through our medium. Particularly if we are born of privilege -- be it through constructs of race, gender, class, orientation, religion, or other such categories that place us in favor within society -- the idea of reaching beyond ourselves, to the struggles of others whom we cannot immediately identify with from our
own experience, is one of the greatest challenges we face. It is, perhaps, the
only way such privilege can limit us, an unfair trade for all the real life struggles others endure, day in, day out, sometimes simply because there is no other option.
So when it comes to trying to accomplish something
more with our writing, we can't just settle for stereotypes or simply what others have written before us. We have to
accept our status, accept what it means, and instead of outright refusing that privilege, use it to resist the very systems that gave it to
us and not to those who suffer for, really, arbitrary reasons. Only then can we move
past it, into a greater cultural consciousness, to write some
serious shit. After all, if you're stuck on feelin' guilty for being white, or unconcerned with the way women are depicted in various media, then how the
hell will you ever write a convincing character that isn't a white dude?
Especially to an audience that maybe
aren't white dudes themselves?
Or maybe that's just my own projection; fuck knows how many writers are out there today, getting steady work who have
never attempted to look at things through a multicultural lens, let alone turned socioeconomic struggle into part of a writer's
raison d'être.
So that's why it bothers me when I write something, and I find myself asking, "just who
was that," because there are certain aspects to identity I never bring up in my work -- and, usually, those same aspects are the ones that opened this essay. And I find myself asking if I've just gone and
ignored all this myself, or if I've done something
completely different and subverted the entire process
by not making an issue of it.
As an example: someone once pointed-out to me that, after reading one of my pieces about a same-sex couple, she was actually
encouraged by the fact that their sexuality was never pointed-to; that it was just some sappy romantic piece between two lovers who shared the same pronoun was actually
far more significant than, say, another story talking about the struggle of a society that refuses to accept them. Y'know, something
embracing their love as being special just for
who they are -- somehow more optimistic than anything else. I'm not writing this to toot my own horn or some shit like that, but that I was able to pull something like that
off is encouraging, and has made me wonder even
more about my approach.
It's something I wish I could pull-off more with women in my works -- half the time, they're just waifish personifications of wistfulness and beauty; momentary expressions of my own personality that I identify as "female," but almost
always to the characters' disadvantage. It's a maturity thing, I know, and I at least hope I've gotten better about that kinda shit with time.
But the one stumbling block has always been
race, and it's something that's always weighed heavy on my mind. Some of it stems from my father's own explicit racism, and some of the shit that went down in my younger days; anyone who tells you "small town values" hasn't seen what those places can do to a black or Persian kid. Maybe because I'm so conscious of it -- or try to be, anyway -- that I get paranoid easy, and back down from approaching it in my work. "Porcelain" gets used more often to describe characters than "tawny," "ebon," "swarthy," or "sable," and whenever I
don't mention melanin at all, it comes out in other ways.
And at this point, it's not even about race, but the
culture, and staying true to multicultural form by
not making what's "white" the normative experience in my work. Which really might be why I stick with fllash fiction and soft sci-fi, because it's easier to cope with in "slices-of-life" and works that assume, in some way, that the future (or the fantasy) will be at least
egalitarian in nature. But it's a sign of immaturity for certain, and one that I need to actively push back against
without coming-off as employing "tokenism" or stereotypical perceptions of race . . . or anything else, for that matter.
And that's ultimately what it's all about. What good am I, as a teller of stories, if I can't be
true in my work? I'd be just another dude who's setting the stage for further complicity in an unjust system -- a failure among my own ideals -- and a complete and utter
hack -- a failure of my own
dream. So I'll experiment, try my best to keep it real, and hope like hell that I can go somewhere with that whole "subtle subversion of norms" thing...
