An examination of the author's privilege

[megwrites]

I realize I'm probably beating on a horse most people would love to stop talking about, but honestly? I don't want to stop talking about it. Not because I enjoy controversy or I'm somehow trying to garner attention.

I've actually gotten very little, which I consider a positive. There are wiser, better sources out there, and people very rightly should be reading those. I'm just some white girl on the internet. My thoughts on yaoi? Not that grate akshully.

But I do think that it's valuable, if only for myself and my own process to categorize what I meant when I said "resources" in the context of my previous post on this topic.



Writing is actually a resource intensive activity. It requires a lot of things that can be easily taken for granted.

To even get to the point where you can even begin to consider what writing requires, you need to be in a place where you're relatively safe from danger and not starving or sick to the point of being incapacitated.

If you're lucky enough not to be either of those, well, you're still not there.

Writing requires literacy. To be good at it, it requires a very high dose of literacy. Obtaining not just the ability to string character or letters together to puzzle out the general meaning of something, but to string them together yourself and make them cohesive and understandable, even appealing to others, usually means you had to be taught. Meaning: education. Most education comes either from committed parents or from schools.

For this to have happened, short of you being one of the few people who can teach themselves to read - it means someone who knew how to read had to come along and dedicate the time and effort to teaching you. Which means they themselves had to have all of the above (re: safety, security, not starving, and someone who taught them to read).

Even if you did teach yourself to read, you needed to have time, security, safety, and space to teach yourself and access to written materials.

I had a history teacher who said something very important. He said, "We are always just one generation away from the Dark Ages. Just don't teach one single generation how to read."

And he was right. If you find yourself, as a large portion of the world does, in a community that, by necessity, is more concerned with surviving than educating, where precious few people can read and write, and where you have little or no access to these people, then no matter how creative and hardworking you, you're not going to be come a writer without some serious intervention in your situation.

Which brings me to the second and equally as important requirement of writing: time. You need time, and you need rather a lot of it. The more writing you want to do and the better the quality of that writing - say enough to to get published - the more time you will need. Now, if you happen to have a secure job, or are lucky enough to have a spouse/partner/parent who is providing for you economically so that you're left with plenty of free time, consider yourself blessed. I know that despite me being out of a job, I'm lucky, because at least I have time and a fiancee who's job is relatively secure in this uncertain climate. But if you should need to work two or three jobs to keep food on the table, in addition to taking care of dependents (children or elderly relatives), or if you should live in a place where the majority of your day must be spent doing labor intensive things just to stay alive, your ability to write is going to be really hampered.

Third, you need materials. At the least, you need a surface and a thing to make marks on that surface. Paper is a luxury good, something that is all too easy to forget. Here in America, we toss around paper like it's nothing, and to us, it really is. Even someone who's completely homeless and on the street in America can get their hands on some kind of paper and pencil/pen. If nothing else, theft is a possibility.

That's another thing that deserves consideration. In America, when I talk about us having these amazing resources, I know a lot of my fellow Americans will get angry. Why? Because for a lot of Americans, they don't matter because their access to them is cut off.

But being cut off from a resource doesn't mean that resource doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that just because you can't afford the designer clothing and the expensive organic foods on the shelves that you're not privileged just by being in a country where they're there. It doesn't mean you don't have an advantage in knowing that those resources are there if you squirm and fight and try a little harder to get there.

There are places in the world where you can't get your hands on these things - paper, pencils, pens, books - because they're just not there. There's not even a store to steal them from, because the economy and the resources there don't allow for their production and importation.

Those are just the physical, material, and practical resources you need to write.

The mental, cultural, and emotional ones are just as important, and just as elusive for many people who might want to write.

Mentally, a writer needs inspiration and encouragement. They need to be told that writing is not only okay, but valued. In America, there's plenty of this. We tend to celebrate our writers, especially the successful ones. We have entire stores and chains of stores and even libraries dedicated to displaying their works, to telling people that we value writing and literature. In school, we study authors - thus sending the message that writing is something that is worthy of the time and monetary resources to pay for a school and a teacher to teach all about these writers.

In the Western world, at the very least in the European/American world, the message is clear. Being a writer is good. Admirable.

On a personal level, it helps greatly if a would-be writer (or any creative person - artist, singer, dancer) has people around them in their community and inner circle that compliment them, that approve.

Me personally? I had teachers since the first grade who told me I was creative, that I was good at writing, that I should do it more often. My parents have always been supportive of my desire to be a writer, and are always asking about when I'm going to write that big bestseller and become the next JK Rowling.

And I may roll my eyes and say, "Oh, mom, it doesn't work like that!" - but my circumstances might be different if my mom said things like, "Why are you wasting time writing? Women shouldn't write, women should take care of their husbands and children! You should be working on getting married and getting pregnant! Writing is for men!" or "Writing? That's stupid. You should do something that matters."

Writers also need to see other writers, not just for confirmation that writing is acceptable - but for inspiration. They need to have other ideas bouncing around, they need to have materials to reference, other stories to evoke ideas in their own head. Writers, in short, need to read.

And the less material they have available to them, the harder their task becomes.

Which is where the privilege comes in.

I, sitting here at this computer, have all of these things readily and easily available to me. I have a computer (a giant advantage), I have time, space, encouragement. I have a culture filled with writers going back as far as I care to think about who have covered just about every conceivable topic, fictional or nonfictional. I am surrounded by minds better than mind which freely pour forth their works, and which I can devour at whatever rate I so choose.

And I deserve not one bit of it. I didn't do anything special that merited that I should be born on top of the pile, that where others are discouraged, or downright prevented from creative expression, I should be so readily encouraged.

This is what I believe many of those who were involved in the discussions that were supposed to be about cultural appropriation were driving at. deepad's post "I Didn't Dream of Dragons" says so, and articulates even better than I ever could what those privileges mean for those who don't get them.

Getting this out and really enumerating it for my own purposes helps me to understand what it is that I need to be doing.

First, whenever I can, I need to support authors who come from less privileged positions. I need to buy their books, read their blogs, make my support of them vocal and well known. I also need to, when I can, encourage people who are in positions of authority to do the same - such as encouraging an editor or a fellow writer or a friend to do the same.

Second, I need to make sure to refer back to these things when considering works that I've mentioned above.

Third, when writing, I need to weight my views with this knowledge. I need to understand that when I write about my cultures less privileged than my own, that I will probably be drowning out the voice of someone who is actually from that culture, and in doing so, I will be adding a bit to the difficulties that culture is facing in overcoming their disadvantages. Therefore, should I choose to write about cultures not my own, I must do my best to cancel out this negative influence by making sure that I am contributing more than I am taking away. Also: see numbers one and two.

Fourth, I need to avoid like the plague the old "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" dichotomy when it comes to being a white writer that writes non-white characters, because it is a patently false dichotomy. It is the death knell of any growth or learning. You are not "damned if you do, damned if you don't". First off, because if you do write a non-white character badly, the worst you face is criticism which you can choose to ignore easily. It's the people who wrote about who will be getting the slap in the face. Second, backing out because of cowardice is, well, cowardly. The answer is to do your best, and learn to deal with criticism.

When writing, if you show your work to an audience, you will definitely face criticism. You will face criticism about your plot, your dialogue, your prose, your writing style, your genre. You will face criticism about your characters being flat or unbelievable or annoying. You will face criticism that your work is hackneyed and a copy of a copy of a copy of someone better than you.

So it is rather two faced to say that you are willing to accept criticism for writing the plot the way you want, knowing some people are going to hate it, but you suddenly find yourself at an impasse when it comes to writing characters different from you, characters of color.

It is valid to be concerned that your writing will hurt people of color if you do it wrong. It is valid to worry and fret and check and double check your work in that area. In fact, it is also a good idea.

But if your real fear is based in not wanting to get hurt yourself, not wanting to have people be mean to you, that is not valid.

Be honest with yourself. What is it you're really afraid of, White Writer Person? Are you afraid that a bunch of very mean People of Color will come up to you, either in person or on the internet (perhaps in your blog) and start saying mean things and call you "racist"?

Why are you afraid of this? Are you afraid that they will come to you and the things they will say will be true?

Are you afraid that it will mean that you won't be praised for being enlightened and so cool and such a gift to POC? Are you afraid that you won't get your cookie?

Do you realize how selfish and racist that is, when you realize that your motives for even writing characters of color was to have a bunch of people of color come and lift you, the White Person, up on their shoulders and throw a party for you and say "you're the best person ever, we're so grateful that you spoke for us!"

It's a natural human instinct to want praise and validation, to want people to come and say that our works touched them, amused them, entertained them, enthralled them. And it's not necessarily wrong to write a book and want for others to enjoy it and say nice things about it.

But if you want those nice things to be based on race? That's racist.

The answer to the "do you, don't you" question, is not so much about your actions, as your motives. When deciding whether or not to write characters of colors, to write about cultures not your own, you need to first examine your motives and examine them so very, very closely. Because the answer to that question will lie in "why do you want to?"

I'm still struggling with when you know your motives are pure. I'm currently working on projects where there are lots people of color (in at least one project all the major characters are non-white), cultures not my own that I'm writing about. I believe that my motives, at least consciously, are because these are the characters and ideas as they came to me.

But I'm far from perfect, and I don't even know that I can say I'm past Racism 101 yet. So I'm constantly checking myself against things that I read, things that I hear, things that I'm learning.

So these are my thoughts, and I've written them down. I hope that's something good.