Octavia Butler
Reblogged
A Frank Chimero joint
Angst is easy. Doing anything, really doing anything, is harder. Nihilism offers nothing, and yes, I do realize that is its point.
This is a time for sharp edges. This is a time for ruthlessness. This is a time for taking sides. You cannot be neutral when you are under threat.
Do you think you are not under threat? Whose safety have you mortgaged for your own?
At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary. Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line—how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.
This passage changed my writing process.
We still live in a culture in which white people are very seldom stopped from doing anything they want to do, and when they are stopped or challenged, get extraordinarily upset about it. I’m one of them. I inherited this attitude and have inhabited it all my life. My term for it is “white dreamtime.” And waking up in the middle of a dream, as we all know, is an unpleasant experience. Shriver seems to believe that white writers—and white people generally—are entitled to a kind of public dreamtime, in which nothing they imagine or fantasize should be challenged, critiqued, or even interpreted; Franzen, on the other hand, describes how fastidiously he limits his powers of imagination and empathy. The white writer, in this Shriver/Franzen formulation, is entitled to a zone of absolute privacy and limitless artistic autonomy; if a critic makes an observation about their work on the order of, “this person is depicted stereotypically,” or “this wide-ranging, ambitious urban American social novel lacks a single nonwhite character,” that critic is attacking their private imaginative process, their dream-life, rather than simply reading the work itself.
Jess Row, What Are White Writers For?
Ann: “Who gets to speak and why” feels very relevant to this moment, too.
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Chris: I got into that question in a little more depth with a book called Video Green that I published in 2004. That book was written just before I was losing my job in this high-profile MFA program. But while I was there, I got a really inside view on how careers are made. And that doesn’t really have a lot to do with the work; it has a lot more to do with how these people relate to power, the friendships that they cultivate, the protectors that they find. You know, the girl who goes to the party in a bubble-wrap dress and sits on the lap of a 25-years-older successful male artist, this is the girl who’s going to have a good career. The girl who paints landscapes on Styrofoam cups and keeps to herself and looks a little bit dykey, maybe not so much. That was true when I was writing the book in the early 2000s and thank god it’s changed somewhat. It hasn’t changed enough.
It’s easy to write off Trump-supporting regions when you’re a liberal who sees little or no reason to ever pass through the benighted red-state interior. But despite what both the Vances of the world and their critics would have you believe, “Trump supporter” is not synonymous with “rural American,” and “rural American” is not synonymous with “white person.” According to Census data cited by the Wall Street Journal, “Small towns in the Midwest have diversified more quickly than almost any part of the U.S. since the start of an immigration wave at the beginning of this century.” Cutting ties with rural areas means relinquishing the fastest-diversifying parts of America. Another Wall Street Journal analysis of Trump voters prior to the election found that the GOP candidate did particularly well in counties that have more than doubled in diversity since the year 2000. It’s easy to argue that white people should suffer the consequences of their willful political ignorance. It’s harder to argue that people of color should go down with them.
I never had any for a long time. Decades. And then I had a ton. There is still wishful thinking and a sense of time wasted. I did a lot with my time, but there was so much I never even attempted because I thought for sure I would be bad at it. Or good at it. This is why I never learned to ollie very well and why I didn't pursue writing as a legit career until I was about 28. At 28, I had been freelancing steadily for 12 years and publishing a zine, and I still was under the mistaken belief that I did not have what it took to be a writer. Matt convinced me I should try, and I did, and I realized about three weeks into "trying" that could have been writing full time for years, and my cowardice--fear of my own ambition got in the way. And that is my regret. That I lived without a sense of permission for so long.
I read this post on her personal blog back in 2010, and it hit me so hard I was compelled me to write her an email. I was 28 at the time, and was going through a breakup while trying to summon the courage to be a writer full-time. It blew me away that a writer I loved so much and considered so accomplished had ever felt like she couldn’t do it. And she wrote back -- the kindest, gentlest, most thoughtful, multi-paragraph email. I try to channel the tone of that email when I answer the letters that I get now. But until recently I hadn’t gone back and read it, or the post that inspired me to write her in the first place. It really holds up.
Do it your way. Part of being a person who DOES things rather than just sharing articles on social media is figuring out how to do it in a style that matches who you are. If you get anxious in crowds, maybe one-on-one volunteering is for you. Are you a great logistics person — the one who coordinated rides and meeting places to the women’s march? Be the person who finds a time and location for your friends to meet to make calls and write letters. There is no “right” way to get involved: Figure out what works for you. Then do it.
My crew en route to the women’s march
As I gear up to march on the capitol with hundreds of thousands of protesters again, on the surface it feels like we’re back where we started: Futilely screaming against another president with a disregard for the powerless, who was elected without a majority. I have no illusions that this year’s Women’s March on Washington will change Donald Trump’s beliefs about who is worthy of living in the United States, whose body parts have the right to remain un-grabbed, and who is deserving of access to safety-net programs. But I am certain that it will change the people who show up. We don’t just march to change policies. We march to change ourselves. The act of transforming our political beliefs into something concrete — a sign we carry, a message we shout — transforms us.
Here’s a secret: Hillary was always a beginning and never an endpoint. She is not our last chance at a woman president, and she was never our only path to meaningful change or feminist progress. President Hillary — even with a Democratic Senate — wouldn’t have been able to put a hard stop on the entrenched racism that leads to state violence against black people, or the male entitlement that leads to the abuse and assault of women. Things are going to be, uh, different without her in the White House (sorry, understatement of the decade), but our fundamental task is unchanged. The call to action is the same, but so much louder. So listen to it.