Kofi Post #5

As a student/tutor living at many points of difference, I was struck by much of the content in "Northern Realities, Northern Literacies." One line that struck me is the idea that "it is one thing to recognize difference, another to communicate across the gulf that difference creates" (171). In undergrad, I developed an Independent Study in screenwriting with a professor in my department, a white woman who specializes in crafting and revising short screenplays. During one of our revising sessions, she noted that I only mentioned the races of white characters in the story. To her, this was obviously a mistake: it was jarring and confusing and took her out of the narrative. "You have to tell the race of everyone or no one," she told me.

She missed entirely the cultural context that I am coming from, one where the only characters whose races were mentioned in screenplays, books, and stories are those of color: the Black criminal, the Latinx gang member, the Asian mathematician, etc etc etc. In my work, I was consciously pushing back on this model. I tried to explain this to my instructor without much headway. Because of my professor's inability to communicate across our differences, I shut down completely. I internalized her comments and changed the message I was subtly trying to communicate--I didn't tell anyone's race.

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM

    I know these comments are supposed to be professional, but that professor can get bent. I remember reading something for the first time when I was young years old where only the white characters were identified by race. It was like a Jimmy Neutron brain blast of brown delight. Now I like to identify unspecified, “un-coded” characters as Latinx. This is also something I’m trying to do in my own work. Every time a white person is “jarred” or “confused” by white not being the default, they should use the moment to get some perspective.

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