racism and writing about "the other"

[mckitterick]

Tonight, jaylake really got me thinking in this post on writing about "the other." Here's what I had to say about his post:

It's important to think about this stuff, examine one's self honestly, and then act (write) in honest and respectful ways. Ironically, I think those of us who lie for a living - er, write fiction - have a huge obligation to honesty.

I write the "other" frequently in my fiction, including gays and women and people of other ethnic groups than myself, because a story needs one of those particular characters. Some groups are easier to write than others, because they're closer to my own groups, and it's simpler to get those right. Others, I need to ask representatives of those groups to give it a read and let me know how I did. Over time and with feedback like that, I get better at writing the other and get more confident at it, too, which makes it better, and so on.

I haven't tried some characters because their other-ness was too challenging, even when such a character would be important to a story... something I'll have to explore.

This reminds me:

I have a friend who came from lots of money. He went to college and discovered that many people in the college town were homeless, often hungry, and addicted to this and that. He couldn't understand them, and this bothered him. So what did he do? He gave up his apartment, stuck his few belongings into a storage unit, and lived on the street with these folks for a year... in British Columbia. Where it gets nasty in the winter. All while working on his degree. He learned a lot about the other side of the economic coin, made friends with people he would never have met hadn't he been brave in this way, and became a more-rounded person. The only reason he gave it up after a year was that his girlfriend freaked out when she learned he was living with "those people."

Anyhow, though he was never in the same danger as those folks - in fact could have escaped that life at any time, unlike "those people" - now he can talk at length about what it means to live on the street. He cares more about the homeless than most anyone I've ever met, because he understands them in ways most of us simply can't. And he sure as hell could write about it better and more convincingly than I. That's dedication to researching and trying to better understand the other.

Still, I don't think true homeless people would accept him as an authority on what it means to be a homeless person, because he never really was; rather, he was just observing at close range, like an anthropologist observing a tribe that the West has only just discovered. Living with that tribe for a year doesn't make him part of the tribe, but now he can write about the tribe in ways that enlighten the rest of us - and perhaps better than they could write about themselves, for the Western audience.

Such a dedicated researcher can do great service to the "other" by being honest and brave, really observing with open eyes and mind, and then writing for his or her own culture in ways that the audience understands, if s/he can communicate clearly, honestly, bravely, and without prejudice or judgment. The best fiction can change the world by helping us understand the other, because every one of us is "the other" to everyone else. I believe that this otherness is the root of most human problems.

Anyhow, that's what I feel. I guess this topic really got me going!
____________________________
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you write about the other or use characters who don't come from your background? Were you raised in a different culture than the one where you find yourself today, and how has that affected you? How do you feel about people from other cultures or sub-cultures writing about your culture or sub-culture?

Best,
Chris

Comments

a little OT

[normalcyispasse.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I never really understood other-ness until I moved here. After this, though, I have a feeling I have more of an inkling as to how to approach it.

I thought that modern racism would be more of an aggressive thing. It's not; rather, it is a more subtle and pervasive thing. Growing up a white, middle-class male I never thought I would have the experiences of being homeless and being a minority. Well, I have. If I still wrote I can't help but think that these experiences would color my characters.

Re: a little OT

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

You're a great example of this. Right now, your culture is not American and not Korean; instead, it's that little sub-sub-culture of Americans in Korea. You're a super-minority.

Reminds me of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun.

[gwyndolin.livejournal.com]

Everything we write in fiction is "the other" -- by definition. Unless I'm writing my autobiography, even if I'm writing about a middle-class white woman who grew up in the midwest, she is going to be other than me because she is not me. The rest is only a matter of scale.

In spec fic, we cheat. When writing about other worlds, we're writing about as extreme and other as if we were a wildly different ethnic/cultural background here on Earth. The difference being no one can check our facts. But I see no reason why if I'm qualified to write about a male-only religious order of lizard man on my imaginary world, I can't be qualified to write about people different from me on Earth -- it's just a matter of whether the research is inside my head or outside it.

The world is full of so many different people, and writers hamstring themselves if they fear to write outside their experience. Just because I am a female WASP of comfortable economic background doesn't mean I necessarily understand what someone else who fits those labels has experienced. I probably will make better guesses about her than I would an Indian boy who grew up on the streets of Calcutta -- but in both cases, I have to put in the work to make a consistent, accurate character.

Good fiction gives you no idea the race, gender, or background of the writer, and a good writer should never have to apologize for writing about the other.

[everflame.livejournal.com]

I think that my women's studies degree instilled me with a deep terror of writing Otherness. I think about it *all* the time, and I want to do it, I want to purposefully do it, to delve into these concepts that are so crucial to our society... but I've read and experienced so much vitriol in the feminist community in relation to multiculturalism, global feminism, etc.

But then, that's one of the reasons I turned back to fiction.

(Not that I didn't get a lot of value out of my feminist studies - especially here at KU. The benefits by far outweigh the detriments. But this happens to be one area where I feel haunted by the badness.)

[fortyozspartan.livejournal.com]

Well, I followed yon link over to the other LJ:

"Still, I am a racist. Not by intent, and not where it can be corrected, but I have, for example, driven into gas station at night to find half a dozen young black men wandering around the pump area shouting good-natured insults at each other. I left again, without buying gas. My passenger called me on this, accusing me of being a racist. I told her I felt unsafe. Would I have felt as unsafe if they'd been young white men?"

I'm not sure if this is racist or just "smart." Or both. I went to the University of Cincinnati for my edumucation; a place that can have pretty high racial tensions. I ended up living one year in quite a bad part of town. The experience "touched," me and not in a good way. The house my buddies and I had leased was robbed three times in a year. It was not uncommon to hear gunshots in the wee hours of the night. For me, if I avoid a group of people because they are black and dressed in a certain manner, it is because I perceive a threat there. That perception is based on my personal experiences.

Perhaps if I had ever been robbed by white people or yellow people or had a gun pointed at my head by any other race, I would also have a second-nature fear of them. Maybe it's racist, but I think it is also a defensive reaction enforced by the desire to stay alive, even if it is a bit politically incorrect (HA really since when was looking out for your well-being politically incorrect anyways?). In that sense, I can't hold the person in the above quote accountable for reacting that way. From my perception, the passenger should be thanking the fellow for looking out for the passengers safety. Not "calling them out" over racial profiling. Whether it is white people avoiding suspect blacks for fear of their safety or blacks targeting whites for crime, I would ask what's the difference?

It's also hard for me to ignore the "war-like event" that you see when you graph the population of blacks and see a huge dip for young ones. At some point I realized that yes it's about racism, but it's also about not being ignorant (and walking into a crime).

[roya-spirit.livejournal.com]

Being a military brat is knowing what "other" means during our entire growing up years, and it also meant being in a very small community filled with "others" who were more often culturally similar to us regardless of our races or nationalities because we all were part of the military overseas culture.
Military dependent schools were racially integrated long before stateside schools, and so we also grew up in close contact with our differences, and had no qualms about discussing them.

On writing "other", once we step outside of anything not ourselves, we are hopefully writing from a perspective different than our own, whether that means gender, age, orientation, race or nationality.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

Good insight there, McKitterick.
In grad school, we had to do an exercise where we spent 24 hours simulating a disability. I chose hearing impairment and went through a day with earplugs in. Then I wrote the paper we had to, and pointed out that my "hearing impairment" hardly bothered anyone on top of my orthopedic impairment, and that it hardly works to "show people what life is like," because the thing about my real disability is that *it never ends*. Anyone can strap their arm to their side for a day, and say, "Oh, I know what it's like to lose a hand now." But like your college friend, the way out is there if it ever gets desperate. While I'm very impressed that he made it through a year, he did, as you say, chose the situation and even circumstances.

You can live with anything if you can see the way out looming ahead.