Writing in Color:
Confessions of a Serial Appropriator
As a white male writer, I have been consistently drawn to matters of race and class, developing
characters who've been backed into corners, who have to fight to gain some sort of foothold.
Yet, as I continue to walk the line between authenticity and appropriation, portraying such characters continues to be something of a mine field.
In an American culture that still considers itself socially fluid, writing blue-collar characters has, no matter what station the writer occupies, generally been deemed acceptable, the salient metric not being the social station of the writer, but the quality, the authenticity, of the writing. Moving from class to class is one thing, however; moving from race to race is a different matter entirely.
For another less salutary feature of our American mythos is its fixed, binary, racial categories. Never mind that race is a political construct, with boundaries that, as my own mixed-race children demonstrate, are indeterminate, ever shifting; for a white person to write from a person of color's point of view is generally regarded with skepticism, if not outrage. Given our shameful history of white usurpation, I have been, and remain, firmly on the side of those who take offense. Yet at the same time, as the boundaries loosen, such absolute restrictiveness runs the risk of becoming dogma.
For no matter how legitimate the feelings of the offended, it is my firm belief that it is not merely the writer's right but her solemn obligation to portray the other, whomever that may be—whomever, that is, the writer is compelled to imagine. This is how we discover and affirm our common humanity—by you telling me who you imagine yourself to be and who you imagine me to me, and by me telling you. The fact that we white writers have done such an awful job of this in the past points to a flaw in our execution rather than in the attempt. If the white writer's imagination is bereft, short-circuited by racism or xenophobia, it is because the culture in which it incubates—the culture which publishes it—is bereft. But we've got to keep trying.
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In each of my five works of fiction, all self-published—or, in the case of my play, Fremont's Farewell, self-produced—between 2017 and 2023 (though several were begun earlier), I take a number of liberties, most of which I didn't think of as liberties until the books had been released and I began to get some distance, along with the occasional comment from a reader. (As I learned years ago in my graduate school fiction workshops, even the most wayward comments often contain a grain of truth.)
The first example concerns a story included in the first edition of my collection, Louse Point: Stories from the East End. A Rashomon style story about an interracial brawl on a high school basketball team, "Morris Park" is written from the points of view of three characters, two black, one white. When a woman who had read the story mentioned how incongruous it was, seeing a middle-aged white man writing in young black voices, I began to grow uncomfortable with the very thing I had earlier taken pride in—the ease with which I had skipped over racial boundaries. The story had, after all, been originally published (as "Throw Down") in the respected African-American journal, Callaloo, the editor never asking what race I was, perhaps because he'd assumed I was black or, more likely, because he didn't care.
The doubt, however, did not go away, and two years later when I released a second edition of Louse Point, I removed "Morris Park," not as a capitulation to anticipated blowback so much as an acknowledgement of changing times. For no matter how natural writing in black voices may have seemed to me, there was a broader truth at play: the poetic license I took in the '90s might for good reason, in the identity-conscious 2020s, be seen as presumptuous, condescending, a result of white privilege.
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Next up, Fremont's Farewell, a short story from Louse Point that evolved into a full, two-act play, which includes a pivotal scene midway through Act One in which aging white English teacher, Ronald Fremont, reads to his all white, mostly affluent, Hampton Country Day students a poem written by a black student during Fremont's earlier stint teaching in New York City:
Fuck the S-A-T, by Cory Johnson
Went to school with all the rest
Wasn't easy climbing out them sheets
But Mamma told me nothing good would come
Spending my life on the streets
Saw my old man standing on the corner
Didn't even know I was his
He and his boys with their same old stories
Soda pop lost its fizz
Fuck the S-A-T, uh huh
Fuck the S-A-T
Walked into that big old warehouse
First day of the eleventh grade
Security guards scurrying 'round
Wanted to spray 'em with a can of RAID
Mr. Dingle assigned an essay
Asked how many books we'd read
Miss Loudmouth told us trigonometry
Was the key to getting ahead
Fuck the S-A-T, uh huh
Fuck the S-A-T
For six solid months I packed my books
Like a mule totin' his load
Got me some Cs, got me some Bs
Counselor told me I was on the road
You gonna do good, counselor said
Separate yourself from the rest
All you gotta do, counselor said
Score high on that aptitude test
Fuck the S-A-T uh huh
Fuck the S-A-T
Fuck the S-A-T uh huh
Fuck the S-A-T!
Taken on its face, removed from the context of the play, the poem may appear to be a clear case of appropriation, presenting a stereotypical inner-city black kid to represent a middle-aged white man's alienation. But I think there's more to it. Although the poem invokes the black trope of urban anger, directed toward Cory's school—especially toward his teachers and counselor—what surprised me as I wrote the poem, was, first, the depth and particularity of the anger, which at first seemed generic, anti-institutional, though ended up zeroing in on a counselor whose seemingly beneficent wish for Cory "to separate himself from the rest" turned out to be deeply hurtful, "the rest" being the people he most needs—his community, his family. And second, it's not Corey's poem at all, but Fremont's. It's Fremont's volcanic anger the poem voices—indeed that Fremont himself, our first-person narrator/filter, voices when he reads it aloud to the class.
Am I using the trope of the angry black kid to bolster Fremont's anger? Of course I am. Though I do so transparently, without guile or stealth, neither stating nor suggesting that either I or Fremont is doing anything else. Also, there are two other context-providing scenes, one in which Fremont visits Cory in the hospital after Cory's surgery, and another in which Fremont visits his English Chair's apartment to demand Cory's poem be entered into a citywide contest—the sum of these scenes being the discovery, by me as author and, hopefully, by the audience, that it is Fremont who is unable to move past his bitterness, not Cory*.
*The Cory Johnson character was inspired by an actual student I had my first year of full-time teaching in NYC in 1985, a Latina girl, like Cory, whom I, like Fremont, visited in the hospital after she'd had cosmetic surgery to smooth out her face which had been disfigured in a foster home fire, and who had written a poem, hers titled "It's Raining on the Inside," that had, again like Cory's, been overlooked and not submitted to a citywide contest, which it likely would have won.
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My next book, a self-published novel called Sparrow Beach, included a self-created Native American folktale, as would, to varying degrees, my two subsequent novels, Amagansett '84 and Wonderless. Sparrow Beach also had a prominent Native American character about whom I never felt comfortable, and was one reason I recently revised and re-released the novel as East Hampton Blue.
I had originally rationalized Native American, Hope Dreyer's fleeting presence—she shows up late in the novel, stirs things up, and then disappears—as true to my personal experience growing up on the easternmost tip of Long Island where Native Americans had been significant more for their absence than their presence. Although as a child I had heard of the Shinnecock Reservation 20 miles west in Southampton, I neither visited nor knew anyone who lived there. Yet, having since gone to college and learned of the devastation we colonizers had wrought on indigenous peoples, I felt obliged to backfill the lacunae Hope represented, and to bolster her belated appearance with a fictional Corchaug* folktale placed at the beginning of the novel.
*In an attempt to create a bit more aesthetic distance, I used the name of the Corchaug, a tribe with roots in the north fork of Long Island, opposed to the Shinnecock and Montaukett, two tribes from the south fork where the novel is set.
Yet, fed by the steadily growing firestorm in the media regarding appropriation**, and also by my desire as a writer to improve the novel, the form of the novel, the doubt came roaring back stronger than ever. To be convincing and/or authentic, I think, a novel must not merely offer a truth (in this case, the truth of my personal experience) but must be written truthfully, allowing for the blossoming of other, even contradictory, truths. This is, I think, why so many novels with political agendas, including those by white authors writing about race, fail; their form is limited to a single controlling idea rather than being elastic, expansive. It is the difference between, on the one hand, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that, despite its commercial success, portrays Tom as a sentimental stereotype, and on the other hand, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Jim's humanity bursts forth in surprising, groundbreaking ways.***
**Most memorably, In 2015 former director of the northeast chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, was outed as a white woman "pretending" to be black, followed in 2017, by the publication of Dolezal's memoir defending her choice to identify as black, and in 2019, by the publication of white writer, Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt, a tale told from the point of view of a Latina migrant.
***In addition to the more famous scene in which Jim scolds Huck for playing a prank on him, which sets up the climactic scene—of Huck Finn and perhaps of American literature—in which Huck chooses to "go to hell" rather than turn against Jim, I'm reminded of an earlier scene in which Jim, lamenting the way he mistreated his daughter, whom he thought was intentionally disobeying his orders when in fact she was deaf, displays that singular quality so sorely lacking in the novel's other characters—a fully formed conscience.
In my overhaul, I tried to develop Hope or, more specifically, the context in which she appears, so that she is not merely marginal but is recognized as such by the white people in the novel, in particular, the focal character, Michael Dorian. For me, the weakness of Hope was due less to the briefness of her appearance and more to the way she failed to reverberate in the consciousness of the novel's principals. Present or absent, Hope, I decided, needed to have more of an effect. She needed to be felt.
For the more truthful story, in contrast to the story of absence I personally experienced, is one in which the brothers Dorian reap the benefits of their ancestors' cruelty. And though this shameful land-grab does not directly implicate Michael and Willie, or any other descendent, their legacy is a tainted one that requires some sort of reckoning, especially by Michael as the central point-of-view character, and by me as author.
Guilt being, in this case, a fruitless exercise in self-indulgence,* the only way to genuinely reckon, it seems to me, is to actively relinquish power, to lay our white male selves prostrate before our subjects, leaving our fate in the hands of those we had—either politically or, as does Michael Dorian, by sitting in judgment—formerly controlled.
Granted, it may be too late for any such abdication, much of our white male power already wrested from our grip, but either way, with or against our will, the loss of power must be accepted as permanent, incontrovertible, and it must be grieved. Only then can we white men begin to construct newly humbled, authentic selves.
*One example of the fruitlessness of white guilt can be found in Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility. Although DiAngelo received praise for exposing the widespread nature of unconscious racism, in failing to propose any action plan, she ends up, as many critics have argued, promoting a white guilt that is inert, unproductive.
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Ricky Hawkins, the adolescent protagonist of my 2023 novel, Amagansett '84, finds himself in a dilemma similar to that which I experienced in my youth, as he finds himself floating in wistful limbo between the idealism of his parents on one side and the reality of his friends on the other. It is into this division that Wesley Brister, the leader of the last family of barely-hanging-on haul seiners, expresses the grief that has been latently coursing through the novel.
At two key moments of loss, Wesley refers to a bit of Native American folklore—fictitious folklore—saying, "The Indians out here used to say everyone gets a season of fish," the second time, in what amounts to a closing eulogy, adding, "Some get it this life, some not till the next."
Never mind that Native American lore rarely, if ever, refers to reincarnation, the larger trespass is for me, a white man, to create an indigenous story to suit the narrative—my narrative. Yes, it is fiction—I make no claim to historical accuracy—yet it isn't hard to see how placing my words—not just my words but a made-up lore, a made-up history—in the mouths of people my ancestors displaced and nearly destroyed, might be offensive.
But what if the sin—the oppressor usurping the voice of the oppressed—is committed in an attempt, not to enforce political advantage but to renounce it? What if the actual story being told is not of Native American grief but of white grief?
Or is the distinction moot, a case of me taking a short cut, blithely skipping past the trial—the opportunity for the accuser to stare down the accused and finally demand her hard-earned recompense—and moving straight to the sentence, which I myself have determined?
Perhaps it comes down to whether the appropriation is convincingly folded into the novel's larger sense of loss, in Wesley Brister and the haul-seiners, and in the narrator, Ricky Hawkins. Perhaps it comes down not to what story is told but to how it is told. Perhaps the issue is, once again, one of form.
****
Whether or not the "season of fish" trespass is forgivable, it might be considered tepid compared to my attempt to obliterate all racial boundaries in my next novel, Wonderless, my more experimental, somewhat meta, story of a racial hodgepodge of Gen Zers who maraud—on foot, hitchhiking, ziplining—across the entire country, from New York City to San Francisco.
The core group of teens in Wonderless (which I'm hoping to re-release as Homer's Dream) consists of the narrator, Little Man, who, having a light-skinned, absentee, Colombian father and white American mother, grows up racially neutral, by-default white; Moses and Smiley, two NYC black kids; Connie, a NYC white kid; Seed, a white transplant from Iowa; and Muzzy, a Muslim immigrant from Tunisia. There is also a similar hodgepodge of girls who journey alongside the boys, as well as two Native Americans and a pair of Chinese boarding students who join the migration late in the novel.
Although the kids themselves are mostly unfazed by their differences, the novel details a good deal of cultural exchange and, during a couple of its more meta moments, explicitly addresses the issue of white appropriation.
The first time concerns the use of black vernacular by the group's white kids, in particular Connie, who has been described by Little Man as having grown up "like a white puppy in a black litter, no idea at all he was different." Four of the boys—two white (Connie and Little Man) and two black (Moses and Smiley)—have stopped to play basketball at a YMCA in Indianapolis when a local black dude overhears Connie talking trash after Moses and Smiley's team has just won a game.
Big dude, looks older than the rest, wearing jeans with white stitching and black loafers with little chains, steps over to where the four of us are talking. Caramel {another local kid} sees him and steps over too.
"What up, Landscape?" Caramel says.
"Wondering what all the fuss about over here," he says.
"New York boys with some game," Connie says.
"New York boys with some mouth," Landscape says.
"That too," Connie says.
"Why you talk like you from the hood?" Landscape says. "You white as a cloud."
"You mean the cloud my boy Smiley jumping over?" Connie says, Moses covering his mouth, turning away.
"Nothing worse," Landscape says, "than a white boy tryin be black. No bigger insult."
"Nah man," Connie says, "take it the other way. You know, imitation as flattery."
"Ain't imitation, it's y'all tryin take over. We make it, you take it."
"I ain't taking nothin," Connie says. "I'm a blank canvas, and y'all spillin your colors on me."
"Shit," Landscape says.
"That's what us white boys do," Connie says, throwing me a glance. "Turn whatever color gets throwed at us. Cause we some neutral motherfuckers."
"Them police ain't neutral," Landscape says.
"I hear you," Connie says. "But that shit startin to swing back the other way."
"What, cause we got Barack and Lebron? Oprah?"
"Y'all got language," Connie says. "Style. That shit win out over the law every day. Me and my boy here, Little Man, are exhibit A. We goin your way, you ain't comin ours."
"We are some cultureless motherfuckers," I say.
Landscape looks at me and nods, offers a hand, then reaches out to Connie, then to Moses and Smiley.
"Be careful," he says. "That culturelessness can lead to some nasty shit," and he strolls on back to the other side of the gym.
This scene, in which my white character explicitly adopts the language of his black mates, may be seen as another case of me trading in black stereotypes. To my mind, however, I am trying to represent an essential, albeit dystopian, truthfulness about cultural exchange, the natural flow of language, style, within American society—to portray a world in which, the politics having exhausted themselves, the PC damper lifted, it becomes clear the white kids are not appropriating so much as absorbing—not using black language to demonstrate their political advantage but the fact that, in the dystopic world of Wonderless, such advantage no longer exists*.
*Nevertheless, later in the novel, the most prominent black character, Moses, forces the white kids to reckon more fully with the complicated, deeply rooted nature of racism in America.
Another meta scene occurs a few chapters later, once the band of kids, having been joined the day before by two Native American boys, Tommy and Hotah, from the Yankton Reservation, has made their way into the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Ensconced for the night in the mountains above Mount Rushmore, Hotah recites a folktale which he heard from his mixed-race grandmother about the Utah Salt Flats:
"My grandmother was half Coeur d'Alene, half white," Hotah says. "Grew up in Idaho, used to tell us stories, most of which she made up. I'd always ask, 'Is that real or made up?' and she'd just say, 'You tell me.'
"She told this one story," Hotah continued, "about when the world was young and every winter the Coeur d'Alene women would cry and cry because they couldn't keep their children warm, the Great Salt Lake back then a hundred times bigger, filled with the tears of crying women."
"Lake Bonneville," I say. "Largest paleolake in the Great Basin." {Little Man is a self-taught science nerd.}
"One day," Hotah says, "Coyote brought deer and buffalo pelts for the whole village and, everyone warm and comfortable, the women stopped crying. But then, by the end of the winter, they were so busy asking Coyote to bring them more furs and other things, they forgot how to cry. The lake began to dry up, but the women only worried about what Coyote would bring, and as the lake disappeared, they worried more, and soon they were begging Coyote to bring water. But Coyote was busy helping other people. And now there is nothing left of the women's tears but a layer of salt on the valley floor and lines on the mountains, worry lines, that show how high the lake used to be."
"So which was it?" Muzzy asks. "A real story or made up?"
"I asked some Coeur d'Alene elders one time at a cousin's wedding and they said they'd never heard it," Hotah says.
"So she created it," says Muzzy.
"Drip drip," Connie says, and I reach over, swipe his palm.
"Shit swingin back," I say, then to Hotah and Tommy, looking at us confused. "Y'all dripping your colors on the woman," I say. "Storytelling colors."
Although I confess that having my characters explicitly refer to the issue was, at first, an attempt to inoculate myself against the charge of appropriation, I think doing so ended up strengthening the novel, folding the question of appropriation into the plot, making it a formal rather than political issue.
For me, the beauty of these kids, their lightness and liberty, stems directly from the darkness out of which they rise, and into which they are doomed to return. They manage, over the course of their epic trek, to transcend, or shed, the last vestiges of racial difference, not as a facile gesture toward a utopian post-racialism, but as the opposite, a recognition that the post-racialism they achieve is dystopian—their newfound freedom only possible because they are marching toward the end.
This is where the exploration of the particular tragi-comic form of Wonderless led me: to the surprising, wholly unexpected truth—not a political but a formal truth—that our American racism is so deeply ingrained, so burnt into our cultural DNA, that the only way to exorcise it is to destroy the host. Indeed, the characters recognized this well before I did.
Dark, yes—though only by implication. The surface remains placid, facile, unironic, to the very end.