Who Can Write About What? A Conversation With Roxanne Gay and Jay Caspian Kang

New York Times | Roxanne Gay, Jay Caspian Kang, Jane Coaston

In this 30-minute NYT’s The Argument episode, writers Roxanne Gay and Caspian Kang discuss writing across identity lines with host Jane Coaston. “When does creative license become cultural appropriation? Take ‘American Dirt’ and ‘The Help,’ two books by white authors that drew criticism for their portrayals of characters of color. Artists’ job is to imagine and create, but what do we do when they get it wrong?”

Coaston’s and Gay’s arguments against crossing identity lines focuses primarily on writers who “just do it very badly.” Coaston calls the book, The Help, “A bad attempted by a white woman to write what she thought Black people in the South, at a different time from the time she lived in, would have been like. It’s a projection experiment all the way down.”

Regarding American Dirt, a book by a white woman about a Mexican immigrant, Gay thinks it’s “an objective truth” that it’s “a bad book.” She says there were things in the book “clearly written from someone who certainly knows nothing of what it means to cross borders undocumented.”

As for the issue, Gay says, “I don’t think it’s that complicated…it’s not that we divorce identity from the conversation. It’s that we treat it as inherent because we can’t separate out parts of ourselves.” Gay clarifies that “the beauty of fiction is that the author had every right at least to attempt it.”

The conversation veers into college admissions essays and how candidates have to write about their “group” in a very specific way. Caspian Kang expounds on this point by saying, “there is an incentive for people to play up the sort of traumatic parts of whatever the people in power are going to associate with the group….[making] yourself as sympathetic as possible by mining every single details that you can to makes your life seem as squalid as possible.”

They talk about the difference “between telling story with empathy and telling stories that become exploitative” and the anxiety and pressures with intra-identity writing, i.e. getting your own group’s story right and writing it well.

What is the ultimate goal? All three seem to agree that we have can have “bad” books without making a big deal about the identity—that it’s a just bad book.

As Gay says, “It’s the burden of representation that everything that marginalized people do has to be excellent in order for any other projects in that vein to ever exist. It’s unreasonable. It’s unfair. And it’s racist… I would like us to get to a place where there’s less pressure placed on marginalized creators and there’s less pressure placed on representation, where we are not discussing how effectively someone represents an entire identity, and we are reflecting more on, what is the quality of the story…we deserve a better level of criticism than, thank you for representing us well.”

In closing, they discuss the tendency for a work produced by a person of color to get positive reviews. As Caspian Kang says, sometimes “it just feels like they have to pretend that they like it and just kind of want to give it a pat on the head…like, oh, this is wonderful that this exists.”

Gay agrees, “and that’s racist, too…the condescension.”

Listen to the Episode (transcript option as well)