Please post your comments to my participation in the workshops here.
How does race (as a concept, an issue, or a part of your identity) affect your writing — how you write and what you write about? If you find that you never think about your race as a factor in your writing, what does that suggest to you, e.g. about your own racial identity, about race as a social category, about how you’ve learned to write… [and so the possibilities go]?
I’m not sure how race really informs my writing. I mean, I imagine it does - how could it not? - but I can’t place as to exactly how it does. I suppose I don’t think much about race, per se, in my day-to-day life. I’ve never lived in especially diverse areas, so it doesn’t come up. More than the question of my own race, though, I am definitely influenced by the more general idea of how races (classes, genders, whatever) relate to each other, usually in a fictional setting, I admit, but it’s there. Some of my favorite pieces of writing - both my own and others’ - have at their core such a situation, the trouble of the judgments we make about people based on what they look like or where they come from, and the trouble of the retaliation for that original injustice. I don’t so much add myself and my own race (specifically, anyway) into this equation when I’m writing about it, which I admit isn’t all that common, and it never really crosses my mind when I don’t set out with the intention to write about it.
What does that say about me? I’m not sure. It sounds bad, but I take race, in some instances, for granted; I don’t think of myself or others of my “race” as particularly racial in any way. I guess that’s just what I consider “normal.” My rational mind says that this is borderline racist, which I don’t like, but that is my impulse. As such, the topic often doesn’t inform my writing if it isn’t a prominent part of that writing…I think.
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