You can find interesting facets of US white culture by keeping an eye on which stereotypes Black Twitter makes fun of.
For example…
Major recent themes:
White people eat bland, unspiced food.
White people are dirty; they don’t wash properly.
White people often have unhygienic and/or overly anthropomorphised relationships with their pets.
These things are not disconnected from the dark side of US history. Think about the attitudes of white people regarding the supposed uncleanliness of Black people; think about the role of dogs in the suppression of Black protest.
American Dirt is not a good novel, and at the same time, isn’t a major reason to write to try, try and understand other places, people, times through art?
I like autobiographies, but I don’t want them to be the only kind of book that gets written and published when imagination is only seen as appropriation in the court of public Twitter.
That’s not why she wrote it. And it’s not why the publisher paid her 7 figures for it.
White culture: Defending white artists who depict other people and cultures in obnoxiously stereotypical ways, and who thereby push artists actually from said cultures off center stage, as merely exercising their creativity.
Exactly. It would be a non-issue if white folks wrote about “the immigrant experience” if actual, honest-to-dog immigrants writing about the same subject were not so marginalized. This smacks of “Y’all are not literate enough to speak for yourselves, so allow me…”
