Site icon Herina Ayot.

Just Human: Black stories are most rewarded when they center blackness — which, in a certain sense, is to center whiteness

It is a cool autumn morn­ing and I am perched on my couch, a cof­fee cup near­by, a few pages into Clau­dia Rankine’s newest book, Just Us: An Amer­i­can Con­ver­sa­tion. My 14-year-old son saun­ters in and asks what I am read­ing when I look up over the brim to tell him: “It’s a book on race by an author I met last sum­mer dur­ing my writ­ing res­i­den­cy.” “Is it good?” he asks. “It’s inter­est­ing,” I say. “But some­times I get tired of read­ing about racism.” “Why… because it makes you angry?” he asks. “Angry is not the right word. Annoyed. Yes… annoyed that she took 300 pages to reflect on what White peo­ple think of us. Who cares?” Black writ­ers

The book details Rankine’s var­i­ous expe­ri­ences with black­ness, white­ness, and the ways in which the two col­lide and inte­grate through­out her life, work, and friend­ships. This work and oth­ers like it are nec­es­sary in a post-slav­ery coun­try where, far too often, White peo­ple for­get that the sys­temic effects of slav­ery are still alive and well: in edu­ca­tion, in pro­fes­sion­al life, and in dai­ly inter­ac­tions between humans, whether they’re the same race or not. Ear­ly in the book, Rank­ine com­ments on a truth she has accept­ed about the “cul­ture of white­ness”: “The lack of an inte­grat­ed life means that no part of [their lives] rec­og­nizes the treat­ment of black peo­ple as an impor­tant dis­tur­bance.” In oth­er words, White peo­ple are often not touched by racial­ly charged events that do not inter­fere with their own liveli­hoods. They quite lit­er­al­ly don’t even notice.

While Rankine’s book con­tributes to an impor­tant dis­cus­sion — one that shines a light on White priv­i­lege, “white liv­ing,” and “white blind­ness” — I won­der, with doubt, if there is a space in lit­er­a­ture for Black peo­ple to explore our lives out­side of, and with dis­re­gard to, the White lens. In a 1993 inter­view with Char­lie Rose, Toni Mor­ri­son famous­ly said of racism, “I’m not a vic­tim. I refuse to be one. If you can only be tall when some­one else is on their knees, then you have a seri­ous prob­lem and you have to find out what you’re going to do about it. Take me out of it.”

There is the real­i­ty of race rela­tions in this coun­try — and the long, sor­did his­to­ry that pre­cedes it — but before I am a Black woman and a Black moth­er, I am a human being.

There is the real­i­ty of race rela­tions in this coun­try — and the long, sor­did his­to­ry that pre­cedes it — but before I am a Black woman and a Black moth­er, I am a human being. Far too often, that real­i­ty gets lost in main­stream art, film, lit­er­a­ture, music. In our cul­ture, White peo­ple get to be “just peo­ple,” and Black peo­ple always have to be “Black peo­ple.” Our black­ness has to be pro­nounced and jux­ta­posed against white­ness in order for it to be rel­e­vant. The result is a lit­er­ary tra­di­tion in which black­ness doesn’t exist on its own. How­ev­er, the idea that Black peo­ple spend our lives lament­ing over what White peo­ple think of us is offen­sive, and dis­mis­sive of the truth: that we are peo­ple before we are Black peo­ple. Con­tin­ue reading…

 

Exit mobile version