Who gets to write what?

When I was in graduate school, I remember a fellow writer bringing to a workshop a lynching scene. The writer was not black. He was, in fact, a Chinese-American man named Bill Cheng, who would go on to write a novel of the blues called “Southern Cross the Dog In class that day, we hemmed and hawed over discussing the scene until our professor slammed the table and shouted at the room, “Does Bill have the right to write this scene?”

“No,” one of my classmates answered, one of the other writers of color in the room, who was also, like Bill, not black. I remember being furious, spitting mad. Of course, of course, I thought, he has a right to write this scene. At the time, I don’t think I could have said why I felt so strongly, was so offended by the fact that our white professor would ask this of a room of mixed writers.

Now I look back and I can say I felt so strongly that Bill had a right to write that scene because he wrote it well. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain – the fact that a reader couldn’t see that shook my core about what fiction could and couldn’t do.

And yet the question was worth asking: Had he “culturally appropriated” an experience – an experience of pain, no less? He hadn’t been lynched, and when most people think of lynching in this country, they do not think of people who look like him. Should everyone get to create the art they feel called to make?

Some would have you believe that if you’re a serious writer, you are not allowed to add questions about who is telling what story and why to the list of things we ask of a piece of fiction.

It can be hard to come up with real answers to those questions. It’s especially difficult if you aren’t doing the work of creating fully human characters, regardless of your or their identity. And it can be really, really, hard to come up against your own blindness, when as a writer, you are supposed to be a great observer. It can be terrifying to come to the realization that it is totally possible to write into this blind spot for years. Whole books, in fact whole genres of fiction, make their home in this blind spot, because of writers’ publishing community’s biases.

When I was writing my first novel, I was determined to include a section in the voice of an 80-year-old, white, Yankee heiress. The character is deeply racist, but the kind of racist who would consider Donald Trump vulgar and never use the ugliest of racial epithets. Bone china and lace tablecloth and genteelly rusted Volvo parked at the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, kind of racist. Her inability to honestly acknowledge her racism leads to her complicity in a large, very awful crime against a community of people, one she spends a chapter of the book attempting to apologize for, without ever admitting guilt. She desperately wishes for black Americans’ approval while still being unable to imagine us as humans with a full emotional range like hers.

It was a personality I thought I knew well, growing up going to the prep schools of the wealthy and connected as a scholarship student. I wrote a draft in this voice, tucked it into my manuscript like a stink bomb, and smugly sent it off to my agent and my professor, waiting for their reactions.

“It doesn’t work,” I was told. “She’s not believable as a character. She doesn’t work.”

“Damn white readers,” I jokingly said to my friends. But once I got over myself, I took apart that section piece by piece. I rewrote and failed and rewrote and failed. As much as this character had begun as an indictment of all the hypocrisies of my childhood, she was not going to come out on the page that way, not without a lot of work. I was struck by an awful realization. I would have to love this monster into existence. The voice of this character had been full of scorn and condescension. I rewrote it with those elements in place, but covered with the treacly, grasping attempts at affection of a broken and desperately lonely woman.

Five years or so after I came to that realization, I wrote to Bill Cheng after reading the novelist Lionel Shriver’s keynote on “Fiction and Identity Politics” at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival. Wearing a sombrero, Shriver spoke out against “cultural appropriation” as a valid critique, arguing that it censored her work as a writer, that she would not have free rein to fully imagine others’ perspectives and widen her world of characters. “Did you hear about this?” I typed into our chat window, and Bill wrote back, “Hold on ...” Then his answer pinged.

“Why do they want our approval so badly?” Bill typed back to me.

This is the question, of course. It’s the wish not so much to be able to write a character of another race, but to do so without criticism. And at the heart of that rather ludicrous request is a question of power. There is the power of rendering another’s perspective, which is not your own. There is the adage “Don’t punch down,” which sits like the shiny red lever of a fire alarm, irresistible for some writers who wish to pull it.

We writers, in the United States at least, have a peculiar, tortured relationship with power. We want it both ways. We talk about the power of the written word to shift whole levels of consciousness while constantly lamenting the death of publishing, the death of the novel, the death of the reader. Those first concerns are valid, but the last become questionable, especially in the face of numerous studies to the contrary that say that people are reading at similar rates as a few years ago. Readership has also grown in certain groups – according to analysis of recent data, the demographic group most likely to have read a book in the last year is college-educated black women. THE ANXIETY about a shrinking audience is accompanied by a dull realization that writing from the perspectives of those who have traditionally been silenced in “great literature” – the queer, the colored, the poor, the stateless – is being bought, being sold, and most important to writers obsessed with status (and we are all obsessed with status), winning awards and acclaim.

Claudia Rankine, when awarded the MacArthur genius grant this past week, noted that the prize was “the culture saying: We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you.” For some, this sounds exciting. For others, this reads as a threat – at best, a suggestion to catch up and engage with a subject, race, that for a long time has been thought of as not “universal,” not “deep” enough for fiction.

An Asian man can write a lynching scene if it’s good enough. So could Lionel Shriver

The panic around all of this is driving these outbursts.

It must feel like a reversal of fate to those who have not been paying attention. The other, who has been relegated to the background character, wise outcast, dash of magic, or terror or cool or symbolism, or more simply emotional or physical whore, is expected to be the main event, and some writers suspect that they may not be up for that challenge.

A writer has the right to inhabit any character she pleases – she’s always had it and will continue to have it. The complaint seems to be less that some people ask writers to think about cultural appropriation, and more that a writer wishes her work not to be critiqued for doing so, that instead she get a gold star for trying.

Whenever I hear this complaint, I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s cool assessment of “anti-PC backlash” more than 20 years ago: “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

The quote is two decades old, but this debate, in certain circles, has never moved past the paranoia about nonexistent censorship.

This debate, or rather, this level of the debate, is had over and over again, primarily because of an unwillingness on one side to consider history or even entertain a long line of arguments in response. Instead, what often happens is a writer or artist acts as though she is taking some brave stand by declaring to be against political correctness. As if our entire culture is not already centered on a very particular version of whiteness that many white people don’t even inhabit anymore. And so, someone makes a comment or a statement without nuance or sense of history, only with an implicit insistence that writing and publishing magically exist outside the structures of power that dominate every other aspect of our daily lives.

Imagine the better, stronger fiction that could be produced if writers took this challenge to stretch and grow one’s imagination, to afford the same depth of humanity and interest and nuance to characters who look like them as characters who don’t, to take those stories seriously and actually think about power when writing – how much further fiction could go as an art.

It’s the difference between a child playing dress-up in a costume for the afternoon and someone putting on a set of clothes and going to work.