Talking White

Regular readers, to the extent that there are any, know that I have been amusing myself in recent months by writing about various skirmishes in America's on-going culture wars.

With respect to literature, the conflict is mainly an attack on the status of whites, and particularly white males, as being inappropriately in control of how writing should be crafted -- what is good, what is bad; what is noteworthy and what is not; what should be included in "the canon."

The other day, I stumbled on another skirmish, from which I will present an excerpt without comment.





This is from an essay biracial writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan spun out of a keynote speech she gave at NonfictionNOW in Reykjavic, Iceland, earlier this year. Here's part of what she has to say in her essay, which was published by Literary Hub:

There is this thing that we take as a given in "traditional nonfiction," a voice of “neutrality” that explains things. It says, “Hi. I am me. You are you. This is that.” We are told when to laugh and how hard. You know the voice. But that neutrality, that idea that “hello, this is a hop skip and a jump from journalism, now I am going to tell you my story. I’m going to tell you some facts.” Or, “I am going to tell you a story about something that happened the other day.” That framework, that presumption of a singular historical reality, all that linearity, is a concession toward whiteness. This is talking white. 

The following is from Ms. Sloan's website:

Aisha was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film and pop culture. She studied English Literature at Carleton College and went on to earn an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was just chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and will be published in 2017.

Maggie Nelson, author of "The Argonauts" and "The Art of Cruelty" among other works, received a "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation.