The Argument: Who Can Write About What?

Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at The Argument, about cultural appropriation in creative work. In recent years, book written by white authors like “American Dirt” and “The Help" have been criticized for their portrayals of characters of color. Artists’ job is to imagine and create, but what do we do when they get it wrong? To discuss, Jane Coaston is joined by the Opinion writers Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang. In their work, both have thought deeply about the thorny issues of writing across identities — including what makes work authentic, the pressure of representation for writers of color and the roles social media and the publishing industry play in literary criticism. “I don’t think it’s that complicated,” Roxane says. “It’s not that we divorce identity from the conversation. It’s that we treat it as inherent because we can’t separate out parts of ourselves.” Mentioned: “White Fever Dreams” by Roxane Gay in Gay Magazine “The Pity of the Elites” by Jay Caspian Kang Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker; mixing by Pat McCusker; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  It's See Argument. I'm Jane Coaston.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  This week, I'm joined by Times opinion writers Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang to talk about very important things, like musical theater. As someone who hates the musical rent.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Oh, get out. I'm sorry, but we...

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Jay, I don't hate rent at all.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  The older I get, the more I'm like, why didn't they just pay rent? Anyway, that is not the point.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my god, Republican. Oh, no.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  What? Come on. I mean, we don't all have good opinions.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  I have great opinions, by the way. But I actually brought them together to talk about an issue that seems to crop up every year. Let's call it the help problem. Remember that book about black maids in the deep south? People loved it, but I hate it. Want to hear why?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  It's a bad movie.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  But separate from being a bad movie, the book it's based on is a bad attempt by a white woman to write what she thought black people in the South at a different time from the time she lived in would have been like. It's a projection experiment all the way down. But then it got me thinking, what if it had been good? Would that change how I feel about it? This is a debate it seems like we can't stop having as a culture. Who gets to write outside their identities? What we do when they get it really, really wrong? And what does it say if they get it right? And that's what Roxane and Jay are here to talk about.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Hello, Roxane. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. And Jay, it's very good to see you again.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Hey, it's great to be here. Hey.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Roxane, I'm curious to you, what jumps out at you about this cultural conversation that we keep having off and on?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing that strikes me is that we seem to avoid the real issue, which is that people who tend to write across identity lines just do it very badly. I mean, it's just bad writing. And that's why we talk about it. That's why we even notice. Because for good writing, I frankly don't know who the author is. I'm not even thinking about that. But when you're reading something and inaccuracies and just like wild things jump out at you, you're like, oh, damn, let me see who this person is. And then you realize, oh, of course, that's why it's so bad. And I wish we would talk more about the fact that, of course, you can write whatever you want. Who cares? But when you do it badly, yes, we're going to talk bad about you.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  That's just, that's the rules, and I don't make them.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that if the conversations are just about bad things, right? If that's what it's limited to. And part of the reason why the thing is bad is because the person doesn't have familiarity with subject matter, or even like the ways in which people live. All that's fair game for criticism. And I think that, you know, I don't think that many people would disagree with that, right? Like, bad things should be called bad. But, you know, when I talk to young journalists now, which is somewhat often, and it's not that often, but it's somewhat often, like, somebody will email me or something like that. I just see a lot of questions about sort of a prescriptive identity, where one is

• 3:29Speaker 03

  expected to write about the concerns of their group, right? And for me, I don't know, I'm Asian, so I get a lot of Asian kids writing, right? And they ask questions that I don't think I would have asked at their age, right? Like, when I was 25, 26 years old, I wouldn't have asked, I don't know, what's it like being like an Asian person in the newsroom or something like that? I would just, again, I don't know. But there's also a kind of like, how do you navigate your identity in like a white publishing world or something like that, right? Just like, asking questions that betray such a level of angst and internal conflict and turmoil that it like, makes me feel crazy, you know? Like, I feel so bad for them. And it's like, well, why don't you just write whatever you want to write and see if it's good or not and try and make it better?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Why do you feel the need to navigate through all these questions to even like, put some words on the page, just write something? But, I mean, I understand why they don't feel like they can.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Right. Jay, people have been talking a lot about the experience of writing college essays, in which it feels like you kind of have to do this kind of... Confessional essay type to explain why you should be admitted to this university. It's a funny thing because on the one hand, it is both this overcorrection, but it's also to me, I actually find it kind of offensive. I went to like a majority white Catholic high school and we read the book Native Son and my English teacher, white older woman, asked me if I identified with the main character in Native Son. Now, if you've never read Native Son, the main character in Native Son murders a woman and then puts her on a furnace. And

• 5:05Speaker 00

  I remember being like, well, no, no, I don't. I'm curious to hear from you, Jay, about that experience of like, you're talking about yourself, you're talking about yourself as part of a group, but you also need to reflect that group in a very specific way or else you're doing it wrong.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Right. And I mean, I think that this is pretty limited in some ways, right? It is in literature. I think in literary fiction, I think it's in journalism in some ways. And I think it's probably very much so in like elite college admissions, right? And then I think that in those spaces, yeah, I do think that there is an incentive for people to play up the sort of traumatic parts of whatever the people in power are going to associate with their group. And so I remember reading this book and it was by like an Asian American author and, you know, like describing a childhood that was much like mine, right? Like growing up with parents who had gone to graduate school and but not wealthy in any sort of way, living in through the early parts of an immigrant life of struggle. And

• 6:06Speaker 03

  the way that was depicted was just so radically different, you know, than how I think I would have chosen to depict it. Like because it's just so filled with like endless amounts of, I don't know, I guess like I would just say like self pity, which is almost too pejorative of a way to put it, right? But I do think that that's what I read. And I was like, to me, it was eye opening because it was just like, well, we've lived basically the same life. But I don't know. I think that there is an incentive, right? Because I think that to sort of make yourself as sympathetic as possible by mining all of like every single detail that you can to make your life seem as squalid as possible. Those types of stories do seem to do better than stories that present like a different spin on that reality.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  So far, we've been talking about one version of this debate, how writers of color are incentivized to talk about their trauma a lot. But the other part is when people try to write about identities they don't claim, generally white people. Roxanne, you wrote a piece about the book American Dirt. It's a book that came out in 2020 by a white woman, and it's about a Mexican woman and her son, who leave for America to escape cartel violence. And Roxanne, you had big issues with this book. You said something I thought was really interesting, that essentially, when you're writing outside your own identity, perfection isn't the goal. Accuracy and authenticity are the goals. But how do we arbitrate what's accurate and what's authentic?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  I don't think it's that complicated. Again, it's not that we divorce identity from the conversation. It's that we treat it as inherent, because we can't separate out parts of ourselves. And in treating identity as inherent to the work that we do, but that there's more to the story, we just create space for better conversations. And when you look at a book like American Dirt, it's a bad book. And that's not subjective. That's an objective truth. Like, there were things about the book and about Mexico that were just silly in how bad they were and how inaccurate they were. They were clearly written from someone

• 8:12Speaker 01

  who certainly knows nothing of what it means to cross borders undocumented. And the beauty of fiction is that the author had every right to at least attempt it, but it wasn't a good attempt. You know, when a reader is reading and thinking, huh, that's weird. Why would she say that? You know, that means the author has failed. Like, when you are reminded of the author while reading a novel that's supposed to be engrossing and immersive, then you know something has gone wrong. So there is no tribunal, you know?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And like, I'm not even Mexican, so like, I am no authority. But like, the fact that I'm not Mexican and I knew that some of that stuff was just bullshit was bad. That's like, that's extra bad. Of course, for every person that thought that novel was terrible, there were clearly hundreds of thousands of people who thought it was just wonderful.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Oprah thought it was wonderful, which, you know, God bless her.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  It is what it is, but I think it would have been great for the book to be better so that we could have more interesting conversations about what it means to cross borders than, oh, boy, this is just inaccurate. This is wrong. This is racist, et cetera.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  This is going to sound extraordinarily stupid, but I have a weakness for the Jack Reacher series of novels.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  I love them.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  One of the random things about Jack Reacher novels is that they are written by someone who had like never really been to the United States before he wrote them. So there are so many parts of books in which he's just walking down the side of highways to go from town to town, a thing which people don't do. Now, granted, I'm willing to let that go because he also is a military police officer, but appears to have the power of a thousand sons behind him. So I'm okay with that. But Jay, my concern here is twofold. One, I think, and I'd be curious to hear from both of you as people who have been writing for a long time, because I think the thing about so much of criticism that takes place on social media and other venues, you know, I've been on Twitter since like

• 10:32Speaker 00

  2008, so I am completely insane. I've been on there for 14 years. I am baked in the internet and it's not been good. Social media is inherently performative and I would much rather get an email that's like, hey, you suck than have someone tweet with like me, hey, this person sucks. It's the way in which we're performing for other people, like a bad review of a book or a call out online about identity.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  I think that social media definitely has like a way of accelerating the type of toxicity around this stuff that probably does sit in people's heads. But I don't think that it's the only or even the main reason why some of these conversations have gone this way. I think I agree with Roxanne. We've had this conversation for years and years and years and years and it doesn't change. What I think is new is that anxiety, right? And I'm 42 and like Roxanne, when I was growing up, or even when I was in graduate school, these questions about identity never crossed my mind. I didn't think about it at all. You know, it was strange because I, when I was like 30 or so, I started dating somebody who was in an MFA program.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And she told me that they had these types of conversations about like, who gets the politics of the piece and who gets to write what all the time. And that was most of the conversations that people had. And I was just like, what? You know, I was like stunned. And doesn't it seem somewhat restrictive? And so I do think that while the conversation is not new, that I do think it has sort of somehow created some sort of anxiety. And I don't really know why it is, but I don't think it's because of social media. Cause even when I had that conversation with this person, you know, Twitter was like one year old, right? And Facebook like

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Oh, the good days.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Like you were like tweeting about what you ate for lunch, Jane, at that point. Oh, my God. We gotta go back. Right, right. And so it can't just be social media, right? It like, that anxiety did come out of somewhere. Now, I don't have an answer for where it came out of, but I do think that that's the big difference is that like, this sort of crippling anxiety that people feel.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  So I'm younger than both of you. I'm 34 and I feel as if that anxiety has been with my writing experience, my entire time of writing publicly. My only thought is that it comes from perhaps the idea of like, the more tenuous writing becomes, the more it feels as if, if you don't do it right, you will never do it. You know, I didn't start out as a journalist. I was a press secretary and I wrote about sports at night. And so like anytime you wrote anything for a public audience, it was like, if this goes wrong, you will never come back from this. I wonder if that's part of that anxiety. I think that that's what it would be for me.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I mean, in part, the anxiety is simply because the amount of opportunity in the writing sphere gets smaller and smaller with each year because we live in a culture that honestly doesn't really value writing. It's unfortunate. You know, friends and I talk about this all the time. Like when we post links to our writing, especially writing that isn't necessarily news cycle based and isn't memoir, crickets. Like, nobody engages with the content on social media. It doesn't really seem like anyone reads it.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  But then you post some link to some nonsense thing, tens of thousands of likes. And it's really frustrating, especially when you know, like, okay, I don't have to feed the beast anymore, but like, nobody gives a damn about my little sort of niche interests. You know, it's hard to resist that sort of clarion call of what to do.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  A lot of times this stuff is people ask for a personal opinion because there are a personal slant to it, because the way in which you are valued is that you're like, oh, well, here, I am the voice in this place of this, and I'm going to make it personal. I'm going to explain myself to you, the white reader, right? Like, that's sort of the game. And I do think that young people, at this point, because they do feel such intense precarity, especially if they want to be writers, right? Like, how can you fault somebody really for going with what seems very obviously like the quickest path towards some sort of economic stability?

• 15:30Speaker 00

  I was thinking a lot about the idea of representation. People talk about representation, and first and foremost, it needs to be a very specific type of representation. But also, What is the point? Like, what are we trying to do with representation? I remember like when Glee was on television and people would be like, well, there's a gay couple on Glee. And I'm like, great. But like, the idea seemed to be that like, well, first people will watch Glee. Then they'll like the gay person on Glee. Then they're gonna go home. And then when they go vote, they're gonna be like, oh, I saw Glee. And well, obviously, I'm going to be supportive of candidates who value marriage equality.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Like, I feel as if on the idea of representation, we have kind of lost the plot a little bit as to like, is the point here to be representative of what America or the world look like more widely? Or is it to be representative of an ideal?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  I think that we put a lot of pressure on representation. We really do. I think what we need representation to do is to offer people different possibilities, different potential versions of themselves. When I look at the entertainment that was the most formative for me, it wasn't that I looked and I saw a Catholic Haitian-American Nebraskan girl on the screen and like felt affirmed. It was more like The Cosby Show.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Why do men ruin everything? But it was like-

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Well, that was the thing also, like, the idea of The Cosby Show was like, these are these elite black people. Isn't that great?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's more than that. I, to be fair, like, for a lot of young black people and for middle-class black people, that offered a sense of possibility and also a reflection of lives that, because normally you don't really see a lot of middle-class black life on television. And so it was great. It was like, oh, a family that's kind of like mine. And it was incredibly helpful. And, you know, did it save my life? Absolutely not. But did it make my life a little bit better? Yes, it did. And I think that matters. And, you know, I also don't think that every example of representation in film and television, I don't think it has to be like vitamins. I don't think it has to make your life better.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  I think it has to be entertaining.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  It's interesting to me, Roxanne, about your point about seeing yourself and seeing yourself on television, because I think that that was something that I really craved as a kid, like even just little things like I can, I will never get over seeing lots of people with my hair, even in ads. I think that sometimes it feels as if when there is like prestige television that's made about LGBT people or LGBT history, there are some times where I'm just like, I feel in some ways like those stories are being exploited for an audience that is not a part of that story. I'm interested in how you, Jay, how you think about that line, the if there is a line, how to toe the line, is

• 18:44Speaker 00

  it a wide line? I'm not sure, between telling stories with empathy and telling stories that become exploitative.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know, you know, like some things are just corny, you know, and it's like, you can just kind of tell. And maybe I'm more resistant to this than other people, right? But I do feel if the only thing that you are celebrating is the fact that like there is a something that is popular that is, has people who look like you in it and that you feel more of an acceptance in America because something that has people that look like you in it is very popular. Like, I understand that impulse, but I think it's ultimately somewhat shallow. Like you said, like Cosby Show's number one show in America for however long. It's not like racism was solved because of that, right? It's not like the people who watch the, every single person who watches Cosby Show suddenly wanted to like integrate

• 19:32Speaker 03

  the schools in their, in their town, right? So I think that that's where a lot of that pressure that Roxanne was talking about does get placed on representation. I'll never forget this, right? Like, I actually think I'm gonna go to my grave remembering this line that was written in a piece in the Washington Post after the Atlanta spa shooting. And the line was saying that like, it was a particularly cruel timing, just right after Asian Americans had gotten Crazy Rich Asians and felt like they were much more of a, had a place in this country. And I was like, this is the craziest thing I've ever read in my life, you know, like, what are you talking about?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I mean, there couldn't be two more extremes. Like, if every Asian could connect to Crazy Rich Asians, the shooting wouldn't have happened. Oh, my goodness.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Just like what you're talking about the I I have not seen that movie, but it's just like, you know, you're talking about people in Singapore, right?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I mean, it's fun. I liked it.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Okay, but they're like, they're in Singapore and I can tell from the title that they're crazy rich.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's pretty much what you need to know.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  So, yes, there is a way in which one can think about these things in a way in which I just think is frankly crazy. But I would not discount the idea that there are meaningful moments where you do feel like something has connected to your life in a way that you've never seen before, and that's a powerful experience. The one thing I keep, I think about it, I read about this in my book a bit, and I was like, the person who best portrayed the life of a Korean working class immigrant trying to navigate life in New York City. And all the sort of confusion over race and everything like that was Spike Lee, I mean, like at the end of Do the Right Thing. The Korean store owner, when, you know, everything is burning and the group comes to perhaps burn down their store,

• 21:20Speaker 03

  is chasing them away with the broom and he's screaming, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black. And then there's an argument that happens and then store is not burned. That scene is like so powerful, right? Like it just shows like the confusion that everybody has about this. It shows sort of the newness of the of the immigrant and the way in which the immigrant will sort of change his affiliations based on circumstance. It also shows some genuine identification with black people because like this person understands fundamentally that he's not white. Right? In some ways, it doesn't really have to do with whether something is accurate or not. It just has to do with whether or not the thing that is being said about this person or is resonant or if whether or not it's true. And that's something that's very hard to codify.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  We've talked a lot about examples of people writing across identities poorly. And Roxanne, you were talking about how the problem with so much of this conversation is we give so much attention to books that are bad. Like, we are not mad at good books. I mean, sometimes I'm mad at good books because I'm like, dang it, how did you do that? Like, that's unfair. But are we just getting more examples to pick from? Where do you think we'll reach a tipping point where we don't feel like we need to assign so much importance to each example that comes out, where we get to a point where it's like, yeah, that's a shitty book about a lesbian couple, but eh, we're good.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that's actually the goal. That is the goal. It's not that we should aspire to mediocrity. It's that we aspire to there being less pressure. It's the burden of representation, that everything that marginalized people do has to be excellent in order for any other projects in that vein to ever exist. It's unreasonable, it's unfair, and it's racist and homophobic, transphobic, et cetera. And we do need to get to that place, and I don't know how we get to that place, but we're certainly inching there very slowly. And in some ways, we are kind of there, I would say, maybe with regard to queer

• 23:21Speaker 01

  representation, where you can make a queer TV show, a queer movie that's like, eh, not my favorite, and another queer project is actually going to get made.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  They made a Stonewall movie and we all made it through.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  I, listen, why does it have to be so bad? God, it's not necessary. Give us a good Stonewall movie. I would like us to get to a place where there's less pressure placed on marginalized creators and there's less pressure placed upon representation, where we are not discussing how effectively someone represents an entire identity and we are reflecting more on what is the quality of the story, what are the production values? You know, like, we deserve a better level of criticism than, thank you for representing us well. We just do. And as creators, we deserve that, you know, for better and worse.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Like, I think most writers of color, like, we crave genuine intellectual engagement with our work, you know, now, sometimes that engagement hurts when someone is criticizing you, but like, to have people robustly engage with the work would be so lovely. I feel so bad for like, this sort of diminished critical culture that has risen. Where creators have to defend like their subject position instead of what they've put on the page or on the screen. You don't work your entire fucking life for someone to be like, I don't like what you said about black men in that book. And it's just like, wow, that's what you took away from it?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Did you read my sentences? Like, come on.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Right. I assume that both of you can do this too. But you know, when there's a work that is produced by like a person of color and I read the review and if the review is positive, I can tell if like the reviewer didn't actually like it, but just feels like they have to pretend that they like it and just kind of want to give a pat on the head for being like, oh, this is like wonderful that this exists and that you're so cute.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, well done. You string some sentences together. You can absolutely tell.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  I can always tell. I could always tell when the, because like, it's very rare where like the review is like, you know, negative.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  And you know, that's actually racist, too.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  The condescension, the condescension. It's like, they think they can't, and also they're afraid. They're afraid of what's going to happen to them should they admit this book was bad. There have been some books in the past couple of years where it's like, guys, come on, let's just all admit it was a bad book.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  This has been a really helpful and good conversation. Roxanne, Jay, thank you so much for joining me.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Okay, good. Thanks. Bye.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Roxanne Gay is a contributing opinion writer and the author of multiple books, including Hunger and Bad Feminist. Jay Caspian Kang is a contributor for New York Times Magazine. He also writes a Times Opinion newsletter. Roxanne and Jay have even more thoughts. You can read them in their pieces, White Fever Dreams by Roxanne Gay, published in Gay Magazine, and The Pity of the Elites by Jay Caspian Kang and his newsletter for New York Times Opinion. You can find links to all of these in our episode notes. The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It's produced by Phoebe Lett, Elise Gutierrez, and Vaschak Adurva. Edited by Alison Brujek and Annabelle Bacon. With original music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, with editorial support from Christina Samiuluski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.