“Even in 2015, you can become a very famous and accomplished white writer without feeling like you have to be familiar with writers of color. I know a writer of color who told a white writer friend, “If you don’t read Baldwin, we can’t be friends any more.” This white writer was in his forties and soon won a MacArthur Fellowship; he’s someone who could quote poems from any number of East European poets who had studied Greek, Israeli or Latin American writers. But this same white writer considered himself well-educated without having read Baldwin.
But it’s not just that white writers should be reading more writers of color. In order to confront the writings of people of color, the white writer must also be familiar with the cultural, intellectual, historical and political contexts of these writings. Du Bois’ double consciousness, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, the essays of Baldwin or bell hooks or Audre Lorde are literary works, but they’re also part of an intellectual tradition of writing about and theorizing race. To understand these writers like Baldwin or Lorde, one needs to be familiar with the history of black culture, from Fredrick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts and Black Power movements, not to mention the history of black music, obviously including hip-hop; then all that needs to be seen in the context of specific criticism about black literature such as Henry Louis Gates The Signifying Monkey or the more recent example of Kevin Young’s The Grey Album. Similarly, a familiarity with immigration history is critical to an understanding of Asian American literature. Such literature should also be contextualized through the history and theoretical understanding of colonialism, such as the work done by Edward Said in his seminal Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. This theoretical context is necessary to understanding say David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly or Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.
One can do reading lists, and they are useful. But what is more difficult to change is the basic mindset of so many white writers, a mindset with both conscious and unconscious components. That mindset assumes that the reality of people of color, their lives and their consciousness, are secondary and minor, are not Universal, are not required understanding, are optional. Obviously, when my writer of color friend demanded that his white writer friend read Baldwin, that white writer was making an obvious choice not to read Baldwin, a choice based upon the belief that Baldwin was not a canonical writer, was inessential. “