Write like Me: Black Fictions of White Life

White writers have long expounded on the life and times of black people in the US, to greater or lesser degrees of insight or knowledge. What comes to mind is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven in 1926, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and David Simon’s portraits of contemporary urban life in the The Corner, The Wire, and Treme at the turn of the twenty-first century, to name a few high-water marks of blackness in the white imagination. Not to mention the Africanist presence undergirding the American literary canon from Poe to Faulkner diagnosed so forcefully by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). When white writers move into nonfictional terrain, the results are as prone to awkwardness as insight. Exhibit A is John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, the 1961 do-gooder experiment to experience life on the other side of the color line aided by some melanin pills, a suitcase with a stash of money, and some shoe polish when he found himself in a pinch. Tim Wise resuscitated that framework in White Like Me (2007), a personal meditation on white privilege. And the best send-up remains Eddie Murphy’s 1984 skit “White Like Me” on Saturday Night Live! in which a white-faced Murphy crosses over into white society to experience its mysteries of unearned privileges: free newspapers, no-application bank loans, and even catered dance parties on the public bus!

The Murphy satire points to an inverse tradition: black writers on white life. This is rich terrain that scholarship is only beginning to fully explore. A critical mass is forming in a cluster of new books by John C. Charles, Stephanie Li, and Veronica Watson, who, along with other scholars, are staking out a literary tradition signaled by James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Ann Petry’s urban fiction, later work by W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, among others. As this trio of new studies demonstrates, the tradition of African American writers taking up the subject of white life is insightful not only for what individual works tell us about whiteness and American racial experience but also for the artistic and ideological innovation engendered by such literary crossings of the color line. In many ways, these studies are direct and necessary responses to the well-established intellectual inquiry into portrayals of black life by white writers. We see this most explicitly in the invocation of Morrison’s landmark study in the title of Li’s Playing in the White. And these studies also extend the minor chord of black inquiry into the white psyche, as we see in the signaling of another intellectual giant, Du Bois, in the title of Watson’s The Souls of White Folk. And in other ways, this emerging critical interest goes against the currents of literary and intellectual assumptions about African American literature. We see this in the title of Charles’s Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel, which taps into long-cemented ideas about what is expected of African American writers in terms of racial affinity and subject matter. Yet there is something new in this critical interest, both in its volume and, more important, the kinds of questions it asks about what it means when a writer from a marginalized identity sets up camp within the dominant culture. What kind of narrative techniques and reading practices does such a move require? What vision(s) of whiteness comes into focus? And may it tell us anew about how identity and power operate in a US culture invested in keeping whiteness invisible, an unmarked racial...