Can White Write Black?
My new novel Lake Barcroft has been criticized as being racist for my use of Ebonics. The critic said I made the characters sound less intelligent.
The maid in Lake Barcroft is modeled after Annie Metcalf, the woman who was awake when our parents slept, whose bed we fled to when we had a nightmare–the “law of the house.” I still occasionally say ax instead of ask and have other verbal ticks that I know came from Annie. Nothing I could ever imagine would make Annie less intelligent in my mind.
A white raised in segregated Virginia in the 1950’s, I remember wandering next door where Black construction workers were eating their lunch and listening to their conversation. What sticks in my memory is their language. If the workers had been speaking Spanish–likely the case today–their words could not have been less comprehensible to me. I believe Black English or Ebonics is not an accent, but a rich language.
I revised the introduction to Lake Barcroft to confess the maid’s dialogue was racist, and plead that segregation was the law and practice in 1950’s Virginia. In the novel there is no doubt of Beck’s love for Janey. A trip with Janey to a Black church on other side of Columbia Pike from Lake Barcroft is described by Beck with the awe of a visit to a foreign land.
We rightfully celebrate authors from marginalized groups. At the same time, critics speak out against fiction that deploys harmful stereotypes.
Some have made the comparison between my use of dialect and Mark Twain’s character of the runaway slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn. While I demur to any comparison to Mark Twain other than I use words–we both tried to replicate voices we knew.
The issues of cultural and–in the case of Lake Barcroft gender appropriation (written from the point of view of a girl)–are manifestations of a wider struggle to eliminate white privilege in an increasingly diverse society. Writing is a minor battle when compared to police shootings and high rates of minority incarceration but is symbolic of the floundering to discover what is appropriate (do I capitalize Black and not white?)
The danger is segregation and prejudice against artistic expression. If there is to be a limit–a literary voice should be neither a stereotype nor a racial prerogative.