This is the question, of course. Its the wish not so much to be able to write a character of another race, but to do so without criticism. And at the heart of that rather ludicrous request is a question of power. There is the power of rendering anothers perspective, which is not your own. There is the adage Dont punch down, which sits like the shiny red lever of a fire alarm, irresistible for some writers who wish to pull it.
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A writer has the right to inhabit any character she pleases shes always had it and will continue to have it. The complaint seems to be less that some people ask writers to think about cultural appropriation, and more that a writer wishes her work not to be critiqued for doing so, that instead she get a gold star for trying.
Whenever I hear this complaint, I am reminded of Toni Morrisons cool assessment of anti-P.C. backlash more than 20 years ago: What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
The quote is two decades old, but this debate, in certain circles, has never moved past the paranoia about nonexistent censorship.
This debate, or rather, this level of the debate, is had over and over again, primarily because of an unwillingness on one side to consider history or even entertain a long line of arguments in response. Instead, what often happens is a writer or artist acts as though she is taking some brave stand by declaring to be against political correctness. As if our entire culture is not already centered on a very particular version of whiteness that many white people dont even inhabit anymore. And so, someone makes a comment or a statement without nuance or sense of history, only with an implicit insistence that writing and publishing magically exist outside the structures of power that dominate every other aspect of our daily lives.
Imagine the better, stronger fiction that could be produced if writers took this challenge to stretch and grow ones imagination, to afford the same depth of humanity and interest and nuance to characters who look like them as characters who dont, to take those stories seriously and actually think about power when writing how much further fiction could go as an art.
Its the difference between a child playing dress-up in a costume for the afternoon and someone putting on a set of clothes and going to work.