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Confessions of a Race Writer
A guide to writing while Black
To be a race writer is to be a fraud. It is, as Olúfémi Táíwò put it, “to be given authority regardless of what you do or do not know, or what you have or have not experienced.”
It is to inherit the struggles of millions of people, not because you were elected to do so, not because you struggle in identical ways, but because you share a bond that is literally skin-deep.
And so, to be a race writer is to be tempted to perform “blackness.” To mine your life only for the moments in which you were mistreated or overlooked or wronged. To edit your humanity for fear of tarnishing your victimhood.
It is to risk playing this part so convincingly that you begin to believe it.
And yet, by any reasonable definition, to be a race writer is to be privileged. It is to have escaped the impoverished schools that leave 85% of their Black eighth-graders functionally illiterate. It is to not be among the 31% of Black households that don’t have reliable access to the internet.
It is to have the ability and the opportunity to say something valuable about these people. To be one of the few people, of any colour, with the power to make their voice heard.
