Know Your Lane

08-06-2018

Know Your Lane

The Nation in July published a short poem "How-To" by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poem will not be remembered as a great work of art, but it is easy to see why it appealed to the editors at The Nation. As Carlson-Wee explained, he "intended for this poem to address the invisibility of the homelessness." Speaking from the position of a black homeless person, the poem offers advice for beggars on how-to tug at the heartstrings of petit-bourgeois marks.

"If you're young say younger. Old say older. If you're crippled don't flaunt it. Let em think they're good enough Christians to notice. Don't say you pray, say you sin. It's about who they believe they is. You hardly even there."

Carlson-Wee, who it must be said is white, seems to have had his heart in the right place, showing his sympathy with the homeless and his contempt for those who offer charity in order to boost their self-esteem. Or at least that is what he and the editors at The Nation thought. Until the gates of the twitter verse opened loosed a tsunami of moral condemnation, as Jennifer Schuessler reports in The New York Times:

"But after a firestorm of criticism on social media over a white poet's attempt at black vernacular, as well as a line in which the speaker makes reference to being "crippled," the magazine said it had made a "serious mistake" in publishing it. "We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem," the magazine's poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, wrote in a statement posted on Twitter last week, which was posted above the poem on the magazine's website a day later, along with an editor's note calling the poem's language "disparaging and ableist." "When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which member of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization," they wrote. But "we can no longer read the poem in that way." Mr. Carlson-Wee also posted his own apology. "Treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me, and I am profoundly regretful," he said in a statement posted on Facebook and Twitter."

Carlson-Wee's offense was that he imitated black dialect. One of the critics leading the assault was Roxanne Gay who wielded her weapons via Twitter, hardly the medium for thoughtful criticism.

"You will note that I, a black person, do not use AAVE [African American Vernacular English, rsb] in my writing because I was never exposed to it. I would fuck it up if I even tried. Know your lane. This isn't complicated."

It is one thing to say that Carlson-Wee's poem is bad and suffers from poor use of African American vernacular. But Gay raises the stakes. No one can write in black vernacular who doesn't speak it naturally. That certainly includes white writers: "The worst thing about white writers trying to use AAVE in their work is that they do it without recognizing the syntactical rules or that there are syntacticalrules. Instead they racist all over the page."But it also includes black writers who don't speak speak AAVE. Similarly, Gay argues that men shouldn't write women characters. The demand to "know your lane" is the mantra of arguments against cultural appropriation. And while Gay suggests that even she cannot use AAVE either, it is white people who use AAVE alone who are racist.

"The reality is that when most white writers use AAVE they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy. And using AAVE badly is lazy so I am entirely comfortable suggesting that writers stay in their lane when it comes to dialect. The great thing about writing is that you can develop new lanes through research, immersion and."

There is a difference between criticizing a poem and policing who is allowed to imagine a fictional reality that offers insight about our real world. The charge that a poet is racist because he is white and failed to fully succeed in his efforts to express the true language of a homeless black person-as well as the demand that poetry editors prostrate themselves to prove they are not racist simply because they published a poem that others don't like-is evidence of the confusion of our moment around race. It may very well be-indeed it is certain-that Carlson-Wee and the editors at The Nation harbor prejudices. To hold prejudgments is necessarily human. It is the work of politics to overcome unjust prejudices; thus, the effort to raise people's consciousness about their prejudices is a political necessity. But the demand that certain opinions expressed by certain races and sexes are to be banned and condemned as racist, that is to turn a self-proclaimed cultural clique into a censorious force. And it is to make ever-more-difficult the anti-racist effort to dissolve the petrified prejudices of the past and the present. It may be that what we need today is fewer people who know their lanes and more of us willing to imagine ourselves traveling new roads. -Roger Berkowitz  

Form more information visit: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-to/

Imagining The Real

Laurent Binet has written a philosophical thriller featuring sex scenes with Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler and the murders of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althussier's wife. Wyatt Mason does not think much of Binet's novel. Instead of wringing one's hands at the impossibility of imagining the complexity of the real world, we should, Mason argues, embrace the challenge of imagining the real through good writing.

"I wish to confess to my exhaustion with this anxiety, an anxiety that a great many writers in various languages have lately been expressing over the part that reality should play in our conception of fiction, the degree to which they feel self-conscious before its imaginative foundations. How rich the real world is, and how down at the heels the novel form is, so calcified is it in its conventions, etc. In such expressions of anxiety, Philip Roth will typically be dragged forward to testify, with lines quoted from a talk he gave at Stanford in 1960 called "Writing American Fiction."You know the line: "Actuality is continually outdoing our talents."How true it still is! Only worse! says the sad novelist today feeling incapable before reality and before the novel's suffocating history, failing to note that Roth, following that speech, produced twenty-six novels, each of which exhibits a different tone, and form, and substance. Anxiety over the real, Roth was arguing, is the goad to the imagination, not the easy neutering of it. A novel can be anything, if one believes in novels. I appreciate that there is reason to despair in such belief, in much belief. It is very hard, isn't it, to believe that a long, serious attempt at investigating imaginary human beings would be needed in a world where real human beings in and outside our country are being treated with unprecedented cruelty, and when the president of the United States acts like precisely the kind of human being whom hitherto one could barely imagine. The only useful thing about The Seventh Function of Language is the idea that one would need some magical means to persuade through language, some secret spell. Useful, because perfectly ridiculous. The spell, we know, exists: it is 140 characters long, and it can make anyone believe anything. Language, it is turning out, doesn't need to do much to make someone believe what it says. Sometimes, the spell can be a novel, one that gets translated into forty languages and is fundamentally terrible, terrible because it doesn't believe in novels. Rather, it believes that novels should be great again, but has no idea what that means."

Form more information visit: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/laurent-binet-imagining-real/

Disrupting Whiteness

Ryan Wong asks how visual attempts to disrupt whiteness do and do not succeed.

"The scholar Sara Ahmed opens her essay "A phenomenology of whiteness" with a series of questions on the project of examining whiteness: "If whiteness gains currency by being unnoticed, then what does it mean to notice whiteness? ... Could whiteness studies produce an attachment to whiteness by holding it in place as an object?" In other words, how do we talk about whiteness without solidifying, even strengthening it?... Here, Ahmed's conclusion is useful. She writes: "If we want to know how things can be different too quickly, then we might not hear anything at all." That is, she encourages us to keep critique and possibility open while wrangling with the "ongoing and unfinished history" of racism. Whiteness is so embedded into our political, social, and artistic lives, it might not be clear what the most effective forms of dismantling it are. Whiteness, if we don't know it already, is a slippery, shifting set of markers, actions, and institutions. If, during the Obama years, whiteness was characterized by dog-whistling, evasion, and liberal blindness, it is having a resurgence today as open pride, supremacy, and terrorism - as the Institute's online statement puts it, "the volume on whiteness has been turned up." Amid the noise, this exhibition, and hopefully others like it to come, might be a place to start listening."

Form more information visit: https://hyperallergic.com/452388/on-whiteness-the-kitchen/