National Book Award-winner Is Reduced to a Racist Stereotype
I’m not black. I state this because occasionally people who have not seen photos of me think I am. If you write about race, people assume you are a person of color–like no one else would be invested in racial equality enough to write about it except other people of color.
I write about racism because I grew up in the midst of my parents’ civil rights activism and ours was the only white house with black people in it. I write about racism because white people can ignore it and black people can’t. I write about racism because it guts me.
I write about racism because I see the impact it has on my friends and neighbors every day and I wish I had a magic wand to fix it.
In lieu of a magic wand, I write.
I live in a black neighborhood in a predominately black city. A few years ago I started a mentoring group for kids in my poor neighborhood where the schools are all below standard because I know writing about your life is life-changing.
I also started a small press to publish young adult books by black authors for black kids because I know how much books with characters like you matter, how they validate your existence.
Our books have won awards. Our authors have changed the landscape for younger readers. Our books tell stories that our authors wanted to read as kids, but didn’t have.
Last weekend I was at a Locavore event promoting our press. Our books were fanned out on a table and not for the first time I was so proud of what we’ve accomplished in a few short years. A black woman came in near closing time.
She’d recently moved to Philadelphia. The bookstore manager introduced us and told the woman that we published books for kids of color. We started talking–about books, about race, about the confluence of the two.
And we talked about Jacqueline Woodson.
I’ve known Woodson peripherally for a number of years. We are both writers, we are both lesbians, we are close in age. I’ve interviewed her in the past, we have friends in common.
Her work was and is a model for the kind of books I wanted to publish for black kids. She is someone whose work I admire tremendously and who has almost single-handedly changed the face of children’s literature. Changed it to be less white, less straight, less male.
On Nov. 19, Woodson won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her luminous memoir, Black Girl Dreaming.
There is no bigger award for literature in the U.S. There is no writer who doesn’t covet that award. So when you know someone who has won, you know just how fabulous they must feel, because it’s so huge.
So imagine winning the award and then having the emcee slap you hard across the face. So hard, in fact, that the slap would resonate through the entirety of the literary arena and strike many of your friends and colleagues as well..
That’s what happened to Jackie Woodson. The night that should have been perfection was marred when her good friend, Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler, made a racist joke. Handler said, “I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer–which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind.”
Let it sink into your mind that for Woodson, the image of the watermelon-eating Negro was one that shadowed her childhood in the Jim Crow South about which she writes so eloquently in Brown Girl Dreaming.
Let it sink in that by making that comment, Handler took something from Woodson that she can never get back and took something from other black writers as well. The specialness was marred, irreparably.
Handler took to Twitter to apologize once it was explained to him that he’d made a racist comment. Handler said, “My remarks on Wednesday night at #NBAwards were monstrously inappropriate and yes, racist.” He also tweeted, “Brown Girl Dreaming is an amazing novel and we need more voices like Jacqueline Woodson.”
But the words could not be unsaid.
I had been reading the live tweets from the National Book Awards during the ceremony. Then a writer friend sent me an essay by Edgar Award-winning crime writer Laura Lippman, in which she spoke about a similar incident that she was culpable of and how it has haunted her for 30 years. She wrote, “I said something racist once. Probably more than once. Once that I know of. Once that I think of all the time.”
Let that sink in. For 30 years the incident has made her cheeks flame.
Because the words could not be unsaid.
Black lesbian poet Nikky Finney, herself a National Book Award winner, wrote about Handler from the perspective of a victim of what she called “casual” racism that (white) people term “unfortunate,” and then forget. Writing that she was “choking on a waterfall of watermelon seeds,” Finney wrote,
“The words Handler spoke were spit and spoken into my face just as they have been spit and spoken into my black face for most of my life. The truth is: his words were spit and spoken into all of our faces. His racist ‘unfortunate’ words are part of what keeps us where and what we are as a country that refuses to deal with ‘race.’”
Let that sink in.
Then, on Nov. 28, Woodson finally broke her silence in an op-ed in the New York Times. The column, “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke,” is as seamless as it is gutting. Woodson writes of seeing photographs of black men lynched with watermelons hanging nearby.
She writes, “Slowly, the hideousness of the stereotype began to sink in. In the eyes of those who told and repeated the jokes, we were shuffling, googly-eyed and lesser than.”
The joke that Handler thought showed their closeness, was anything but. “In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I’ve ever written, a step back from the power and meaning of the National Book Award, lest we forget, lest I forget, where I came from.
By making light of that deep and troubled history, he showed that he believed we were at a point where we could laugh about it all. His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance.”
Last week Elizabeth Lauten, a GOP operative, went on a Facebook rant about Sasha and Malia Obama being dressed too casually during the turkey pardoning before Thanksgiving. It was wincingly encoded racist language and although she apologized, she was fired. Overt racism just isn’t good PR.
I’m not sure what we do about all of this. About Ferguson, about the way the Obamas are written about, about a white man making a racist joke at his black friend’s expense. About the fact that white people can lead totally white lives in America but blacks never have the luxury of leading lives sans white people.
Over the years when I have been told to “stop playing the race card” I have learned to say the only race card is racism. But as recently as yesterday, a white feminist I know told me she was tired of white people being chastized for not engaging in anti-racist actions like the #BlackLivesMatter campaign.
As I spoke with the woman at the bookstore about Woodson, my voice caught and tears welled. I was embarrassed by my emotion. Yet the reality of racism in America is enough to choke anyone, bring anyone to tears.
So what are we doing about it? What are we doing to get to that post-racial society everyone keeps talking about?
What Finney said resonates. We have to stop calling such incidents “unfortunate” and start talking about why they happen.
Racism.
We have to start talking. We have to talk about what it means to live in a society still riven by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and all the casual racism that goes hand in hand with institutionalized racism.
Most of all, we have to start listening.
Finney contacted the National Book Awards and suggested they issue an apology. They said no.
Let that sink in.
I’m not sure what to do. Racism is an endless series of “unfortunate” incidents and casual comments and people saying they are weary of being taken to task for their ancestors’ support of slavery. Racism is white people saying they don’t see color when it’s not about them, it’s about being on the receiving end of casually racist and deliberately racist and encoded racist slurs and comments.
Racism is black Americans being made to feel Other every day of their lives. Racism is never being able to escape racism, no matter how accomplished you are–recipient of the National Book Award or even the President of the U.S.
Lesbians know what it is to be Othered. We know what it is for people to make casually homophobic comments about us and expect us to laugh. We know what it is to smile and pretend everything is fine when it is anything but. We know what it is to be less than, to have an entire society stand against you.
With that knowledge comes responsibility: The responsibility to speak out against racism everywhere and in any way we can. As Finney wrote, “Even if our mouth was not the mouth that said it—we still must have and find the courage to speak out against such moments as these.”
Such moments as these–and so much more.