At the front desk

[mrissa]

At the front desk of the chiropractor's today, another patient stopped me to ask if she'd heard me correctly when I told the receptionist I was a writer. I agreed that I was. She started questioning me about how I go about it, quickly narrowing her specifications to how to get published (without, apparently, writing anything at all -- at first I thought she couldn't describe what she wanted to write, but it turns out she didn't know what she wanted to write). Okay, so that's bad enough, but plenty of people are in love with the idea of Being An Author without actually wanting to auth.

But then the [white] receptionist said to my [black] fellow patient, cheerfully, "Oh, and you'd be a shoe-in, because they're really into that black stuff these days. Y'know, multiculturalism and stuff." And my jaw dropped, and I thought, "Oh, Lord, this is the bit where this woman rips the receptionist's head off and feeds it to the squirrels." Because that's what I'd have done, for heaven's sake, and what just about every other writerbeing I know would have done.

Instead, my fellow patient nodded and said, "Oh, yeah, that's good." It is? Oh. Well. My mistake. I couldn't imagine a situation in which it would be appropriate to say, "they're really into that black stuff these days," but apparently I would have been wrong. Especially with "you'd be a shoe-in."

I'm still appalled, frankly.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've heard that from more than one person about the "black experience." Nobody I've ever heard to seems to have to worry about not being "authentic" as a "white voice" (and when did "inauthentic" become a bludgeon-word for dealing with those we dislike or disagree with?). I also haven't heard much of the "authentic voice" shtick aimed at Asian or Hispanic or Native American authors, but it may be there and I just may not hear it from the people who feel like they're being labeled inauthentic in that regard.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I'm not prominent enough to catch hell for it yet, is what. ;-) (That, and having an anglo name.)

In school, what actually put me in the minority was being far more interested in dead white men's poetry/drama than women's studies and colonial lit. One person (another Asian) challenged me on why I was studying Middle English romances instead of Chinese literature, and others clearly thought that anyone interested in medieval lit without focusing on gender oppression was weird. *shrug* The funny thing was getting this kind of disapproval from white men as well as other women, and running into some professors with very fixed ideas on the racist/patriarchical subtexts of various classics (hilarious in retrospect -- I mean, what's more ludicrous than an elderly white male prof telling a twentysomething Asian chick what the proper minority-conscious reading should be of a text -- but back then it drove me completely nuts being exhorted to focus on authors' shortcomings instead of what they were trying to do).