Argh. this makes me so angry.

It’s like that “Candy Girl” book about stripping- some upper middle class white girl decides to strip for a year and gets a book deal. Forget the thousands of hard working strippers who dance to survive, this girl is white and that’s what’s interesting! The audacity to say a story that isn’t yours is criminal. There is no good intention behind it. Never. It shouldn’t be treated lightly. It isn’t a little mistake- it’s a criminal act of appropriation born of the same sick twisted desire in the brain that caused the rape of the new world by white Europeans. Don’t think for one second it isn’t that serious.

fuck that. her book deal reinforces the invisibility of thousands of people who need *NEED* to be heard!

Because I grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, across the street from the first housing projects in NYC (First Houses, a success story). Now I’ve just mapped Baruch projects, and it’s about half a mile from where I grew up, but even prior to the massive gentrification waves that the LES has suffered…well…let’s just say that I would never in a million years portray my childhood as some kind of tooth-and-nail fight for survival.

The thing is, there’s a whole slew of false memoirs–The Education of Little Tree, like Candelaria says, Famous all Over Town, which in my opinion is utterly dreadful but won awards until it was revealed that the author was not a Chicano teen but an older white man, this holocaust memoir where the author has turned out not, in fact, to be a Jewish woman who, as a four-year-old girl, escaped from Nazis and was brought up by a pack of wolves in the woods (!) who helped her track her parents, taken away by Nazis, 1900 miles across Europe (and nobody thought that might not be true? really?), but in fact a Belgian gentile who, because her parents were arrested by the Nazis as part of the resistance and she was condemned by the extended family who brought her up as the daughter of “traitors,” claims that she “felt Jewish” (really, one suspects that her real story would have been quite compelling enough, thank you).

It feels to me like too many writers are missing the point of fiction. The wolf-memoir-writer says that “This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.” But that’s what fiction is for. It’s for conveying emotional truths that better represent reality than facts. If she had written a novel about a little girl caught up in the Holocaust who did all that, this wouldn’t be an issue. If Seltzer had written a novel, she would still be co-opting people of color’s sufferings, but she wouldn’t be doing it in such a damn stupid way. So in some ways Candelaria’s elegant formation of why white people write about non-whites in this particular kind of “woo, look at my hard-knock life” way–that too many white people somehow think that non-white people are somehow “realer”–doesn’t for me address the issue of why those white people would co-opt the experiences in the form of fake memoirs. And why do they continue to do it when they routinely get caught? And how stupid are they?

I asked her why didn’t she write about her feelings about her mother’s neglect instead of writing about how the Black housekeeper loved her.

Long story short – it was too painful to write what was real she could rather write was unreal.

Several years ago, people found out that the writer of The Education of Little Tree was not Native American but was a white man, and, if I remember correctly, known to be racist.

Some white people don’t want to confront the truth about their lives and don’t see their lives as having flavor and so they will make up experiences or consider themselves the experts on whatever experience they’re co-opting.

My husband recently attended a hip-hop conference and damn near all the expert authors were white so…it’s nothing new.

What we have to do is spread the word whenever we read something authentically written rather than giving press to these wannabees. Speaking of Bees, I hear that The Secret Lives of Bees, a novel written by a white woman is being made into the movie and I think Queen Latifah is one of the stars. The thing about the book is that this little white girl shows up in these Black women beekeepers lives “back in the day” and basically ruins everything. Yet it gets recommended as a wonderful story.

Fiction writers have license to write whatever they can imagine, I just think the best books come out of authenticity some where. There are writers of color who write books that are inauthentic and miss the mark, too.

Angry on…