On writing black characters – when you are not

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/03/on-writing-black-characters-when-you-are-not

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I think Lindy West’s article “It’s hardly unusual in white America, but Jonathan Franzen’s lack of black friends is still unsettling” (G2, 3 August) shares too much common ground with Jonathan Franzen’s position to effectively criticise it. Franzen states: “If you have not had direct, first-hand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.” Lindy endorses this: “Yes, absolutely. White people should stay in our lane.” In adopting this position she undermines the universality that has to be the starting point for any effective anti-racist stance.

Black people are not some different species. They don’t think, feel or fall in love in a different way to white people. What’s different is the way black skin is treated by the state, or by those who, like Franzen, think “there are real stark differences between people”. If your starting point is difference rather than commonality, you’re already sharing territory with the intellectual right. This is a losing game for the left, and a dead end in terms of building solidarity.

I also think the idea that “the boundary he senses there is a healthy one” is wrong. Norman Mailer was the son of a South African accountant but able to write sensitively about the experience of the poorest sections of white America in The Executioner’s Song. John Steinbeck came from the rural middle class but consistently charted the hardships endured by migrant labourers. Fiction can be an act of imaginative solidarity in both its production and its reading.Nick MossLondon

• I was interested by Jonathan Franzen’s explanation of why he doesn’t write about black people, quoted by Lindy West: that he had never been in love with a black woman and “I have to love the character to write about the character”. The idea that a writer must have been or known intimately a character to write about them seems strangely parochial. It suggests Shakespeare, for instance, must have been or known intimately a murderer to write Macbeth. The ability to find out the sensibilities of those who are other and convey that otherness is surely the mark of a good writer. It is why good writing, in extending our understanding of otherness, matters.Salley VickersLondon

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