Race relations proved to be a recurring theme in several events I attended, addressed by writers whose strategies ranged from confrontation to elegy to satire. The juxtaposition of these diverse and occasionally discordant approaches continues to make me ponder how we can speak about race in ways that are both skillful and honest, and the reasons we avoid doing so.

Avoiding speaking about race, of course, is a privilege mainly possessed by white people. I have the option, which I usually exercise, to follow the old adage that “It is better to say nothing and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.” So I am stating up-front that everything I say after this paragraph is unavoidably somewhat tainted by the defensiveness and lack of knowledge that are my heritage as a white American.

Okay, now on to blaming other people…

I am going to venture to say that one factor in white people’s avoidance of race talk is the feeling that we’ll be condemned for speaking out of our experience of whiteness, even if we’re doing so in order to identify and transcend areas of prejudice. We can’t move beyond our racism-influenced misconceptions until we bring them to light and ask for a critique of their deficiencies. However, if the mere act of disclosing those views exposes us to condemnation, the dialogue ends before it began.

Any safe dialogue depends on meeting people where they are. Since racial inequality is a structural problem that shapes every individual’s consciousness whether they want it to or not, I feel that the full force of your justified anger should not be leveled at the white individual who happens to be in front of you, who didn’t choose this situation either.

I wish there was a word other than “racist” that could express the distinction between intentional animus toward nonwhites, and attitudes formed by white privilege that we have the intention to correct but need help achieving the insight. Something like the difference between homophobia and heterosexism. I am pretty sure I’ve never been homophobic, but until I started writing about gay characters and became involved in activism, I was blind to many ways in which my cultural upbringing assumed the normalness of heterosexuality and erased alternative identities. With respect to transpeople, I probably have a little bit of both. I didn’t know any transpeople until a couple of years ago, and so I believed most of the media stereotypes and didn’t take offense at the sensationalized and mocking way they were portrayed. My intentions are in the process of correcting my gut reactions. I think it’s been crucial that folks in the trans community have been really patient with me and welcomed my efforts to educate myself as an ally.

So what does this have to do with AWP?

Each night of the conference, several famous authors were scheduled to give readings. On Friday, we went to the poetry reading by Claudia Rankine and Charles Wright. This was a weird pairing in itself, as Rankine is a passionate, political, experimental African-American writer, and Wright turned out to be a genial old Southern white fellow who read meandering Buddhist poems about nature and death.

Instead of poetry, though, Rankine read an essay, or maybe more of a speech, condemning the racism she found in the Tony Hoagland poem “The Change“. She then read Hoagland’s response to her initial complaint to him, and her reaction to that response.

Regardless of its merits, and it did have some, the format of this absentee dialogue made me uncomfortable. It felt like our audience of several hundred people was being enlisted in an attack on someone who was not there to respond. Rankine’s anger, which drew its force and righteousness from the collective history of racial oppression, was being brought to bear almost entirely on an individual.

To quote another cliche, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” It’s important, when doing justice work, not to get tunnel vision–seeing the person in front of you only as the representative of the one area in which she is more privileged than you. Your audience might include trauma survivors and people who were triangulated into family conflicts. I came for a poetry reading, not to hear Mommy tell me why I should hate Daddy.

That said, I agree with Rankine that Hoagland’s poem has real problems. In it, the white narrator (presumably male, presumably middle-aged because he’s old enough to remember a time before integrated tennis) reports feeling discomfort and resentment while he watches a black American tennis player (obviously based on Venus Williams) soundly defeat a white European. With resigned, self-mocking humor, he concludes that we’ve entered a new era where his “tribe” can no longer expect to be on top. He knows he should feel good about this but a more primal part of him really doesn’t.

Rankine focused her objections on the racial stereotypes in his description of “Vondella Aphrodite”, the aggressive “big black girl” with “complicated hair” and “Zulu bangles”. She was also, I think, generally offended by the idea that someone in Hoagland’s/the narrator’s position of white privilege would dare to feel sorry for himself, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way.  She mocked the naivete of thinking that white privilege was a thing of the past, just because a black athlete won a tournament.

I think Hoagland’s poem stands or falls based on whether there’s a separation between author and narrator. That is, is he reporting these views or also advocating them? Rankine insisted on assuming the latter, despite Hoagland’s denial in his letter to her. Because of her strong feelings, she deprived us of a more valuable discussion about poetic craft and authorial intent.

Option one: This is a persona poem about feelings the typical white Americans might have but not wish to admit. By writing the poem, Hoagland is showing that he knows more than the narrator. He’s exaggerating their distorted thinking, to the point of humorous absurdity, so that we as readers can learn something about American race relations that’s obscured by white liberal platitudes–and even have a painful shock of recognition as we admit to these feelings ourselves. (In his letter to Rankine, Hoagland implied that this was his intent.)

Option two: Hoagland shares the narrator’s feelings, and is appointing himself the mouthpiece of other white people who have the same views. In this 2005 article from the Brandeis University student newspaper, interviewing him after a reading of “The Change”, Hoagland picks option two:

…His most controversial poem, “The Change,” was written around the time when Venus Williams first appeared in tennis matches.

“I knew something important had happened, though no one knew it yet,” Hoagland said. He expressed contempt for what he described as the rugged and base way that an African-American came out on top of a white competitor. Hoagland said very few publishers had been willing to associate themselves with this politically incorrect work, but he feels that it is important to always be honest, and likes his poems to upset people.

“I was giving a voice to America’s dirty secret,” said Hoagland. “I like to shock some people.”

In my opinion, “The Change” is not a very good poem because you can’t tell whether he is critiquing or endorsing racism. Since the subject of the poem is race relations, this is a pretty big flaw.