I have very carefully not participated in most of the race/cultural appropriation discussions, because there's a great deal of hurt (and a great many people I like and respect) on all sides, as well as a lot of good things already being said by others that I wanted to listen to and think over. (If I added you during this, it's because you said something that was said well, and which made me think. I probably also added someone you disagreed with, and that doesn't mean I agree 100% with them, or with you.) So this post is not about the majority of it, but about just one little corner of it, that being
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davidlevine's
post about how, as a result of all this, he doesn't think he wants to write non-white characters into his stories anymore.
From where I'm sitting, Levine still has the same three choices he started with: he can write non-white characters well, he can write them badly, or he can choose to not write them at all. Writing them well is the best course of action for everyone concerned. He, evidently believing that he cannot write them well, is choosing to not write them at all over writing them badly and taking the consequences of that. I get the impression he feels that's a Bad Thing; in fact, the Worst Thing Possible, and the anti-racists who made him feel this way Should All Be Very Sorry Now. I can't speak for everyone, but here's my story, and we'll see if I can explain why, to me at least, this is not a negative outcome.
Most of you know by now that I was born and spent my childhood in Trinidad. We read British books, we eventually got some American TV, but except for Sanford and Son and Sesame Street, I can't remember watching any foreign TV that had non-whites in it, and most of the books had nothing in them about non-whites either. To counteract that, though, we had two local TV channels, full of people just like us, and if I devoured Tolkien and Shakespeare and Enid Blyton, I was also fed a steady stream of Earl Lovelace, Paul Keens Douglas, V. S. Naipaul, and Michael Anthony, who were darkies or coolies or douglas, just like us, and they were
our people doing brilliant things. (And I'm willing to bet that if you didn't grow up in the Caribbean or make a study of Caribbean literature and writers, you've never heard of any of them.) We still "knew" equestrian sports and ballet were for little white girls and boys, but I
could turn on Panorama after my homework was done and see people like me dancing and singing and acting and reading. I had very few toys, but one of them was a doll with skin the colour of mine, and my aunt had several more that she crocheted beautiful clothes for and displayed prominently. Carnival, despite the influx of white tourists, was all about us: it was our calypsonians bringing out their new works, our creativity and joy and history on display. The near-silence from abroad let us fill the gap at home and not have that much to undo.
Then I turned twelve, and we emigrated. That near-silence turned overnight into a dull roar, almost all of it purely poisonous:
here is what people who look like you are, and here is what you're expected to be and do. Christal was four; Candace was six. By the time we had been here two years, neither of them would have voluntarily owned a black doll. Neither of them ever expressed any wish to be anything but the highest accessible,
acceptable profession for black girls -- nurses. They played instruments only because
I had already fought to play the violin, and won the fight to not be shuffled off to the chorale (funny how that sounds like corral) where the rest of the black girls were.
This is not, in any way, shape, or form, to say I got off scot-free: I didn't. You can't swim in the water without absorbing some of it and drinking more. For instance, that short story Douen was my own first try at writing non-white characters, in a story from home, and I made all the same mistakes you'd expect; Tante Odile is as stereotypical as they come, even if she wasn't entirely two-dimensional, and nobody's skin colour is obvious but hers. Papa Bois, in fact, speaks and acts in such a way that though I didn't envision him white, that's the way he'll be read. I've got a great fascination for and desire to write stories based on the mythology of other countries, but I'm afraid of doing them badly; it's one thing to do a disservice to what's mine by birth and nurture, and something else entirely to
drop someone else's babies. (I believe I got pointed that way by
kynn, but I've lost track of who's made which great post, so please forgive me.) I'm fairly comfy with my skin colour, but that isn't saying much, because my different background gives me an out. When the pressure from outside gets too rough, as in the looks I still get for dating whomever I please, including the white man I plan to marry, I can step back in my head and say: "Wait a minute. That may apply to you, but it doesn't apply here, not to this island girl." But I'd at least seen what clearer water looks like, even if it wasn't completely clear. Trinidad has racial tension too, it just happens (or happened, when I was growing up) to be focused more on black vs East Indian* than white vs non-white because there were so few whites. (I only knew about four white families at all while I was growing up.) East Indians were clever and grasping and good at making money, blacks were shiftless and lower-class because we came over as slaves and not indentured laborers, lighter skin and straighter hair were still better, but because they made you look more East Indian, not more white. My mother, though, is half and half; there's no winning that struggle for her or any of her children, so we didn't participate in conscious ways. The less poison there is, the easier it is to dilute.
If one writer who, by his own apparent evaluation, would have been poisoning the water a little more, decides instead to be silent on the subject, we haven't gained anything, but we haven't lost anything either. The water may not be clearer, but at least it's no worse. American culture and media is filled with poison, and a lot of it's poison that's been around long enough that it's now considered classic and can't be pulled -- ie, Huckleberry Finn. Is the writing great? Absolutely. Is it poisonous in the way it deals with non-whites? God, yes. But you can't get rid of it. So the best you can hope for is to apply filters to the newer stuff so that eventually you get so little poison coming in fresh that you can start to work on the effects of the older stuff, and you can say "well, people used to think that way, but it's not okay anymore and we know better now." I wish Levine had decided to try his hardest to do it right, and accept (and learn from) a little criticism if he stumbled, but if he wasn't up to that, then his
not doing it wrong is not a tragedy.
* East Indian, as in descended from natives of the country India as opposed to West Indian, which everyone was, or Carib Indian, which some people, myself included, can still trace back to.
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