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owlectomyApropos of something, I've been thinking about children's and YA novels written from a standpoint of Well-Meaning Privilege. Remember when all the books about black people were about how awful slavery was? And all the books about Jewish people were about how awful the Holocaust was?
It seems to me that there's a genre of books where
1) The assumed audience is a generically privileged reader;
2) The purpose of the book is to educate readers about the lives and experiences of a marginalized group;
3) The most relevant emotion for a privileged reader to feel, when confronted with the experience of a marginalized group, is pity.
1 and 2 are problematic in themselves -- 1 for the way it assumes that people of that marginalized group aren't even readers, 2 for the ways it can slip into a viewpoint that's othering/exoticizing/ethnographic and for the way they tend to reduce every character to some kind of iconic emblem of their own culture. But it's the pity that's really toxic.
When I started intensely reading YA novels, Christopher Paul Curtis's Bucking the Sarge was one of the first YA books I read by an African-American author. It's a book about a teenage boy whose mother is a slumlord. It left a big impression on me because, first, it's very funny; and second, it never presents its characters as victims, or pitiable. Curtis is writing about the world of ambulance-chasing lawyers and loan sharks and slum lords who prey on the black community, and also are black themselves -- and lest you think this is some kind of Bill Cosby rant about how black poverty is the fault of black people, it's emphatically not. The Sarge is kind of a terrible person, but she was also deeply shaped by her own experiences with racism and the knowledge that she could never get ahead with honest work. I'll be the first to acknowledge I don't have direct personal experience here, but I have been working as a librarian mostly in poor and black communities for my whole career and Bucking the Sarge rang true to me in a way that narratives of how terrible life is in the ghetto with the gangs and the drugs and the shootings just didn't.
It is important to learn about slavery or the Holocaust or transphobic violence. But we have to be careful about letting those stories become the only story, as if the experience of not being straight, white, and middle-class consisted solely of oppression and victimization. And to leave that learning at pity is singularly unproductive.
Because there's another set of toxic assumptions that come into play where privilege is concerned. "I can't do anything but feel bad about the privilege that I have; people want to educate myself so that I can feel worse." Feeling bad, in a vacuum, doesn't deconstruct privilege. It reinforces it. Pity can't exist except in a context of hierarchy.
Marginalized groups have their own histories, their own self-advocacy, their own activist communities. The narrative of pity flattens that to a transaction where the marginalized character suffers, and the reader's job is to feel sorry for them. There are enough books about the able-bodied main character's pitying (and often tragic!) friendship with a disabled person (Cynthia Lord's Rules is a nice deconstruction of that), but even books that avoid this dynamic tend to create it between the marginalized character and the pitying reader. At that point, literally, all you can do is to feel bad. Feeling bad is the point. That's bound to fail when you try to take it out to the real world.
Pity is utterly incompatible with the true nature of literature which is to recognize a fellow human being living in this world.
It's also incompatible with being a real ally; characters in a book may not have any agency, but real people do, and you can't grant that to people if you can't get past feeling sorry for them.
It seems to me that there's a genre of books where
1) The assumed audience is a generically privileged reader;
2) The purpose of the book is to educate readers about the lives and experiences of a marginalized group;
3) The most relevant emotion for a privileged reader to feel, when confronted with the experience of a marginalized group, is pity.
1 and 2 are problematic in themselves -- 1 for the way it assumes that people of that marginalized group aren't even readers, 2 for the ways it can slip into a viewpoint that's othering/exoticizing/ethnographic and for the way they tend to reduce every character to some kind of iconic emblem of their own culture. But it's the pity that's really toxic.
When I started intensely reading YA novels, Christopher Paul Curtis's Bucking the Sarge was one of the first YA books I read by an African-American author. It's a book about a teenage boy whose mother is a slumlord. It left a big impression on me because, first, it's very funny; and second, it never presents its characters as victims, or pitiable. Curtis is writing about the world of ambulance-chasing lawyers and loan sharks and slum lords who prey on the black community, and also are black themselves -- and lest you think this is some kind of Bill Cosby rant about how black poverty is the fault of black people, it's emphatically not. The Sarge is kind of a terrible person, but she was also deeply shaped by her own experiences with racism and the knowledge that she could never get ahead with honest work. I'll be the first to acknowledge I don't have direct personal experience here, but I have been working as a librarian mostly in poor and black communities for my whole career and Bucking the Sarge rang true to me in a way that narratives of how terrible life is in the ghetto with the gangs and the drugs and the shootings just didn't.
It is important to learn about slavery or the Holocaust or transphobic violence. But we have to be careful about letting those stories become the only story, as if the experience of not being straight, white, and middle-class consisted solely of oppression and victimization. And to leave that learning at pity is singularly unproductive.
Because there's another set of toxic assumptions that come into play where privilege is concerned. "I can't do anything but feel bad about the privilege that I have; people want to educate myself so that I can feel worse." Feeling bad, in a vacuum, doesn't deconstruct privilege. It reinforces it. Pity can't exist except in a context of hierarchy.
Marginalized groups have their own histories, their own self-advocacy, their own activist communities. The narrative of pity flattens that to a transaction where the marginalized character suffers, and the reader's job is to feel sorry for them. There are enough books about the able-bodied main character's pitying (and often tragic!) friendship with a disabled person (Cynthia Lord's Rules is a nice deconstruction of that), but even books that avoid this dynamic tend to create it between the marginalized character and the pitying reader. At that point, literally, all you can do is to feel bad. Feeling bad is the point. That's bound to fail when you try to take it out to the real world.
Pity is utterly incompatible with the true nature of literature which is to recognize a fellow human being living in this world.
It's also incompatible with being a real ally; characters in a book may not have any agency, but real people do, and you can't grant that to people if you can't get past feeling sorry for them.
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1/7/11 02:34 (UTC)