by Kaitlyn Greenidge
In the NY Times author Kaitlyn Greenidge responds to Lionel Shriver’s piteous and tone deaf commentary with the real concerns presented that touch upon privilege and not wanting to be “called out” in our culture today as a writer--thereby also forgoing responsibility.
“This is the question, of course. It’s 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 another’s perspective, which is not your own. There is the adage “Don’t punch down,” which sits like the shiny red lever of a fire alarm, irresistible for some writers who wish to pull it.
We writers, in the United States at least, have a peculiar, tortured relationship with power. We want it both ways. We talk about the power of the written word to shift whole levels of consciousness while constantly lamenting the death of publishing, the death of the novel, the death of the reader. Those first concerns are valid, but the last become questionable, especially in the face of numerous studies to the contrary that say that people are reading at similar rates as a few years ago. Readership has also grown in certain groups — according to analysis of recent data, the demographic group most likely to have read a book in the last year is college-educated black women.”
