Learning from Black Writers

Americans talk about segregation. We bemoan how Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the American week. We have some politicians decrying America as a racist country and others that it is not.  We've got problem with racism in this country and we need to address it in our literature. I am white amn wanting to be a writer. 

I put William Faulkner ahead of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald because Faulkner does address race.  But neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald address American history. Fitzgerald comes closest in The Great Gatsby when he brings Benjamin Franklin into the novel. 

But Toni Morrison addresses American history. So Ross Lockridge, Jr. in his Raintree County and William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Those three share with Faulkner an interest in American history. Whoever writes about American history without addressing race is missing a big chunk of American history. What has been stuck in my imagination is the history of this country as it has played out in my part of Indiana.

Furthermore, understanding America seems to me to require knowing non-white perspectives of America. This I found in an article on Wendell Berry, When Losing is Likely:

Underlying this habit of mind is a second, which is by far the graver threat. We are tempted, Berry observes, to believe that these problems exist “out there” but not here, in my life, where I live. This temptation we must resist root and branch. For “there is no public crisis that is not also private.” He instances “all the Northerners who assumed—until black people attempted to move into their neighborhoods—that racism was a Southern phenomenon.” It turns out that neither the causes nor the consequences of major social problems can be restricted to something called “public” as opposed to “private” life.

Here is the key point: Try as we might, we will not have a racially just society that remains full of racist people, or a peaceable society full of violent people, or an environmentally healthy society full of people who litter, pollute and daily despoil the earth. We must be a certain kind of people to attain certain kinds of virtue, including justice. We cannot have one without the other.

Keenan Norris'  How Black Writers Capture the Comedy and Dark Absurdity of Life in America lists several books by Black writers satirizing American. I am sorry to say I know only of Luster; which I have not read.