The Unbearable Whiteness of Southern Writing

Guernica's Anjali Enjeti: Politics and Possibility had this passage which caught my attention as being relevant to my own concerns about blinders upon not only Americans but also American writers.

Guernica: In the essay “The Unbearable Whiteness of Southern Literature” in Southbound, you write about how, in the wake of Vincent Chin’s murder, you didn’t have the right language or imagination to work through those [questions]. It wasn’t until much later that you began to find it. Can you say more about that?

Enjeti: In college and beyond, I came across work that I wish I’d encountered a decade earlier, including Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior — the first book I’d read from a brown woman who was unapologetic about her opinions, about the world, her childhood. She just made a space for herself. Also, in Sister Outsider Audre Lorde was completely unapologetic about her identity as a Black lesbian, her interracial relationship, and expounding on and pushing for the kinds of equality we’re still grappling for today. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was forthright and fearless, like: Here I am, I’m not going to meet you halfway, you have to come to my space and listen to me. Baldwin knew he was smart; he told people they had it wrong and needed to change. That was revolutionary for me to see. In the small Southern city where I grew up, you didn’t talk to people like that. In the Deep South in the 1980s, likability was everything. To see Baldwin being confrontational, which I’d always been told was rude and made you look conceited, was inspiring.

These were all writers making their own rules for how they wanted to live their lives and move in this world. They were not here to serve anybody, but to create a world that saw their value. There are so many others I wish I’d discovered earlier. Instead, in middle school and high school — crucial times in one’s cognitive development — I read white-authored classics that didn’t push me in my personal and emotional growth. They didn’t teach me to think critically about the world in a way I needed to. From seventh through twelfth grades, I read four of Shakespeare’s plays. What a difference it would have made to substitute these other books for three of those plays. 

I have heard of Maxine Hong Kingston and even read an interview of her, but is she taught in any high school literature class. Perhaps a college class? Audre Lord, I have heard of but that is all. Still, is she being taught? Why not?