The other day I had a conversation
with someone. This conversation still bothers me. Probably because it’s a discussion
whose main points I’ve had to deal with many times before with other people. This particular
person was a very privileged white man who has an excellent record of trying to
value and implement diversity. Let me state that up front. This guy is not some
ignorant, insensitive racist. He’s a guy who has the wherewithal to live a
happy life of privilege without ever having to concern himself with poor people
or people of color. Yet he truly tries to understand when he wouldn’t have to
and when it’s made his own life more difficult. I can appreciate that.
Still, he doesn’t understand because
ultimately he is not yet able to stand outside his privilege of white skin,
male gender, and inherited wealth. I say, “not yet,” because I refuse to give
up hope for him and others I’ve encountered like him, who have genuinely good
intentions but can’t get past the blinders of privilege. Earlier conversations
with such people have focused around the difficult lives of women living in
poverty, the automatic racism encountered over and over by people of color that
can leave them justifiably hypersensitive, and similar topics. This
conversation centered on books.
This person condemned a wide variety
of fiction and poetry by writers of color, in particular Latinas and Latinos,
as “just political.” Good writing, according to him, is not “political posturing.”
I looked at the list of books we were discussing, which ranged from Rudolfo
Anaya and Manuel Muñoz to Luis Alberto Urrea and Helena Maria Viramontes, and
tried to explain that most of these writers weren’t trying to write political
novels or poetry as much as they were simply trying to be true to the lived
experience of their lives and the lives of their families and ancestors. He
didn’t buy it.
You see, in his experience, everyone
is deferential and respectful to him (as he is routinely respectful to everyone
he meets, no matter their socioeconomic status). He has no experience of being deliberately
humiliated or seeing his parents deliberately humiliated because of the color
of their skin, their accent, their Hispanic last names, and/or their poverty.
He has no experience of deliberate, offhanded cruelty directed at him or his
family or neighbors for no reason other than because the inflictor can get away
with it. He has no experience with living in grinding poverty, seeing his
parents (and possibly himself) forced into dangerous, unsafe, and unfair working
conditions for the tiniest possible wages.
In his world, such things are
unreal. Therefore, they must be made up or vastly exaggerated for political
purposes. To him, therefore, any writer who simply writes of her childhood
misery working in the fields as a migrant laborer as Helena Maria Viramontes
does or of the poverty and casual, racist cruelty encountered as the child of
an immigrant as Luis J. Rodriguez does must be dishonestly fabricating in
order to inflame the reader’s emotions for political purposes. Writers speak
the truth about their lives and the lives of many in their communities, and
because the reality they describe is so unacceptable, they must be making it
all up for radical political purposes.
I know, unfortunately, that this is
a common stance, even among some well-meaning people. I live east of Troost in
Kansas City, Missouri, which is automatically considered the bad part of town
because it is still populated by poor to working-class people of color, mostly
African American. Once when talking with a woman from the suburbs who had done
great work on diversity in Kansas City, she mentioned that people in the
suburbs were tired of paying for the city to send out plumbers to fix the
plumbing of people in my neighborhood for free. Stunned, I told her that never
happened, that people where I live have to pay for plumbers, just as suburban
residents do. Equally shocked, she asked, “But what do they do if they can’t
afford a plumber?” “Like anyone else, they shut off the water to that sink or
toilet or whatever until they can afford one,” I replied.
Through the years, I’ve come to
realize that many well-to-do white people, even well-educated ones, believe
myths like this about poor people, especially poor people of color. The Black unmarried
welfare-queen myth—when statistics have shown for many years that the vast
majority of women on welfare are white and married with white husbands who’ve
deserted their families. The myth of the wealthy, lazy Indian, who lives in
squalor because he likes it—when Indians living on the reservations tend to
fall further below the poverty level than any other group in America and have
less access to jobs, education, health care, even electricity and running water
than any other group in America at the same time we’ve learned through the
American courts that the BIA has “lost” (read: defrauded the tribes) of multiple
billions of dollars that were rightfully theirs.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that
the person whose conversation with me began this post believes that poor people
of color writing about their lives and history must be inventing out of whole
cloth for inflammatory political purposes. I’m not angry with him. I’m sad for
him—and others like him. The only way to get past the blinders of privilege is
to take a journey way out of their comfort zones, to walk into the world of the
disenfranchised (of whom they are afraid). Or they could read the works of the
many gifted Latina/o writers, African American writers, Indigenous writers,
Asian American writers, and poor white writers and discover the world they and
their people live in deep underneath that bright surface of the world of
American privilege.
