My ancestors left Mexico and came to America to make a better life for themselves. One day, I hope to leave Twitter and to do the same.

—Vicente Lozano

I have been tweeting a good deal. (Because of my schedule I tend to tweet and walk, which so far has not gotten me into any accidents.) I’ve found that Twitter feeds my ego and starves it at the same time. I love how Vince can articulate the moral ambiguities of this Matrix-like world in a hundred and forty.

Recently I was lucky. I went to Boomerangs in Jamaica Plain, which almost always has a really excellent selection of paperback fiction in its back room. I got six or seven books (I think I spent $9.00), and the first one was fantastic. Then I read another, and it was good too! Then I read another, and it was good! What a week!

What’s more, all the three books are about (or partly about) children, and they formed a trio on a common theme, which I would describe as the ambiguous abuse of innocence. The first was Castle by J. Robert Lennon. (I feel obliged to apologize to Mr. Lennon, with whom I exchanged tweets, for buying his book used; my excuse is that I’ve always cherished a goal of being myself found on the same back shelf on Centre Street.) It was chilling and beautifully crafted. The second was Make Believe by Joanna Scott, and the third My Abandonment by Peter Rock.

I didn’t think I would like My Abandonment, since it’s written in a minimalist style which too often characterizes books that don’t have much to say. But Rock’s novel is the rare one that keeps nearly everything between the lines, so that by the end of the book you trust the author completely and read very closely to make sure you don’t miss anything. The last sentence tidies away nothing and leaves you more unsettled than when you began.

• The Rivers family is grindingly poor. LaJoe Rivers can barely feed her children, but she spends $80 a month on another necessity—their burial insurance.
• The buildings are so cheaply constructed that the bathroom medicine cabinets in adjoining apartments are connected: “Over the years, residents had been robbed, assaulted, and even murdered by people crawling through their medicine cabinet.”
• Lafeyette is so traumatized by violence that he begins to lose his memory. “He recalled nothing of Bird Leg’s funeral. He couldn’t remember the names of any of the performers at the talent show. He sometimes had trouble recounting what he had done just the day before in school.” Pharoah, for his part, develops a stutter and faints at the sound of gunshots.
• When the housing manager goes into the basements of Horner for the first time, she throws up. Rusting away amid piles of excrement and animal corpses are an estimated two thousand once-new refrigerators, oven ranges and kitchen cabinets, now useless. They have been there at least fifteen years.
• With all that, my middle-class self was perhaps most deeply shocked by the fact that LaJoe’s bathtub faucet doesn’t turn off. It just never turns off. And the water pouring out of it is scaldingly hot.

The Henry Horner Homes have since been demolished, but yes, things still are this bad. These towers may be gone but the racist and dehumanizing systems that built them are still firmly in place. Kotlowitz, who produced “The Interrupters,” can testify to that, as can the brothers themselves. (And here’s another eyewitness report from Devynity.)

I really struggled with my racism while reading this book. I’ve read a lot (not enough) in my efforts to become an anti-racist, but nothing has challenged me like “There Are No Children Here.” It triggered off a stream of judgmental thoughts and feelings, all of them roughly equivalent to “Here’s an instance where they could have made it better for themselves; it’s really their own fault.” Maybe this is because Kotlowitz’s book is also about class, which is more thorny for me personally than, say, a posting on Racialicious about why Miley Cyrus shouldn’t twerk. But while thinking about this I was reminded of another book, similar in some ways, which neatly turned my critical thoughts back on me. It’s The Corner, by David Simon and Ed Burns, which asks:

If it was us, if it was our lonesome ass shuffling past the corner of Monroe and Fayette every day, we’d get out, wouldn’t we? We’d endure. Succeed. Thrive. No matter what, no matter how, we’d find the fucking exit.

If it was our fathers firing dope and our mothers smoking coke, we’d pull ourselves past it. We’d raise ourselves, discipline ourselves, teach ourselves the essentials of self-denial and delayed gratification that no one in our universe ever demonstrated. And if home was the rear room of some rancid, three-story shooting gallery, we’d rise above that, too. We’d shuffle up the stairs past nodding fiends and sullen dealers, shut the bedroom door, turn off the television, and do our schoolwork. Algebra amid the stench of burning rock; American history between police raids. And if there was no food on the table, we’re certain we could deal with that. We’d lie about our age to cut taters and spill grease and sling fries at the sub shop for five-and-change-an-hour, walking every day past the corner where friends are making our daily wage in ten minutes. . . .

That’s the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. . . . Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthink[ing]ly assume that we would be consigned to Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now possess. . . . We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.

There’s actually a devastating conclusion to this passage that I won’t quote because of its language, but I think The Corner is the superior book for engaging directly with the white reader’s resistance to the truth.

Increasingly, I’m noticing this phenomenon in my own field of literary fiction. What does “white supremacy” mean in that context? To me, it means an author interspersing characters of color in her book without having examined her own whiteness. (Note: I don’t think I’ve fully examined my whiteness by any means.) Often such an author uses people of color as minor characters to make a point about her white protagonists—how cosmopolitan they are, or how tolerant, or how benevolent. Or the author sets his book in Africa or Japan but is only and overwhelmingly concerned with the white experience of these places. Or she fails to include people of color (or non-middle class people) at all and doesn’t even notice that she hasn’t.

There are subtler manifestations of white supremacy in fiction, too. Here are three I’ve come across lately.

1. The high-literary novel about white people in Africa

This book presented with a classy watercolor landscape on the front and blurbs from major newspapers on the back. It may, in fact, be a sensitive and complex treatment of race relations; I don’t know, because I couldn’t get past the fifty pages. I just didn’t feel hopeful that some fifteen thousand words spent exclusively on the experience of privileged white people in Africa would lead into a conscious and respectful treatment of Africans themselves. And when the first allusion to the white heroine’s African lover involved his “beautiful black skin,” I decided I didn’t want to invest the time to find out.

2. The novel about young middle-class white people in New York

This one, on the other hand, I did finish. It had many good elements, and I dog-eared a couple of pages where smart prose and smart perceptions came together. But the author seemed oblivious to the fact that she was writing about privileged people moving through a non-privileged world (as all we white people do). I felt that I was expected to empathize with the protagonists when they move into a “rough” section of Manhattan to save money, or when (this being an extreme example) one of them finds he no longer has a bedroom in his father’s new condo. Which I might have done, if I had not been annoyed previously by what struck me as the author’s indifference to people of color. When a minor character with a stereotypically African-American name is described as “sassy,” and a housemaid is given another stereotypical name and coded as black and poor seemingly as a matter of course, am I wrong to suspect that these are gestures towards a “diversity” that the author doesn’t wish to examine too closely?

3. The perfectly nice novel of intertwined suspenseful stories

Here I had less to be cranky about. True, all the main characters are white, but the first five novels I wrote were all-white, too. (Fortunately for me, I was unable to get published for twenty years and that gave me time to evolve.) On the other hand, one unambiguously villanous character had a Spanish name and spoke AAVE (although not correctly in my opinion). And I had other objections at the level of syntax, too specific to reproduce here, by which minor characters of color were shown to be set-dressing only.

So, what’s the problem with white supremacy in paperback? Aside from the problems of white supremacy in general, this kind of obliviousness damages our work as writers. Fiction, of course, is about truth. And when we reach for the universal truths that, I believe, all writers want to make contact with in some way, our grasp is the weaker for having blocked out most of humanity.

Dear C.C.,

Do you remember when you suggested we swap recommended readings, after our second year at Yale? You lent me My Dog Tulip, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I may have lent you Mumbo Jumbo. I was writing a novel about you. At one point in Tulip, where it must have seemed to you that the author was exhibiting some kind of gay sensibility, you had written in the margin: “Homo?” Of the Mailer I recall nothing but the size and shape of the book. I am just finishing Malcolm X tonight, twenty-three years later.
 
Do you remember one night in your room over the courtyard, when we must have been talking about how I loved you and I was crying? I said, “I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this,” and you smiled and said, “Better sitting than lying.” That was such a sexy thing to say, by the way, and also a pun. 

Do you remember when you turned to me, one evening inside the New Haven Mall, and with the touch of self-mockery that was characteristic to you asked me, “Do you fight racism within your own mind?”? I can finally say yes.

Have a good day, C.C., my affection is with you always. 

Cathy

the wave of Southern racism came in as a swell upon a mounting tide of national sentiment and was very much a part of that sentiment. Had the tide been running the other way, the Southern wave would have broken feebly instead of becoming a wave of the future.

Here’s something I found quite shocking, due to my love of elite liberal media:

It was quite common in the ’eighties and ’nineties to find in the Nation, Harper’s Weekly, the North American Review, or the Atlantic Monthly Northern liberals and former abolitionists mouthing the shibboleths of white supremacy regarding the Negro’s innate inferiority, shiftlessness, and hopeless unfitness for full participation in the white man’s civilization. . . . Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men.

For me that last sentence points up one of the major themes of the book: the usefulness of racism comes first, before racist structures are actually cemented into place. (This is also a theme of the great “Undoing Racism” training.) Black people in America were (and are) oppressed by laws and customs not because white people spontaneously came to believe that they were inferior, but because that belief was useful to the white power structure. In fact, a populist politician named Tom Watson put it this way in 1892:

You [blacks and whites] are made to hate each other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both.

Woodward shows that this “race antagonism” was adopted for very specific purposes, and that the South had permission to do so from the country as a whole.

No real relief was in sight from the long cyclical depression of the ’nineties, an acute period of suffering that had only intensified the distress of the much longer agricultural depression. . . . There had to be a scapegoat. And all along the line signals were going up to indicate that the Negro was an approved object of aggression. These “permissions-to-hate” came from . . . the federal courts in numerous opinions, from Northern liberals eager to conciliate the South . . . and from a national temper suddenly expressed by imperialistic adventures and aggressions against colored peoples in distant lands.

It’s interesting to me too that Woodward explicitly names Jim Crow as a system of racist laws put in place by the forces of white supremacy. The phrase “white supremacy,” used to mean the structural forces that keep black people at the bottom of American society, has gone out of the mainstream since Strange Career was published; last fall I noted my surprise when Ta-Nehisi Coates used it in his assessment of Obama. When I use it myself I always explain nervously, “I don’t mean like the KKK, I mean . . .”

Finally, here’s a bracing quote from Abraham Lincoln (1858):

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races . . . and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the black and white races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

It’s important to remember that Spielberg’s is not the only history.

What people don’t understand is this: art’s only half intoxication; the rest is paperwork. Only a fine line separates the artist from the accountant—but as in drawing, the placement of that line is everything.

—Paul Russell, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov