I went to a majority white Catholic high school. 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. 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. But I mean, I understand why they don’t feel like they can. I feel so bad for them.Īnd 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? Why do you feel the need to navigate through all these questions to even put some words on a page? Just write something. 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? When I was 25, 26 years old, I wouldn’t have asked - I don’t know - what’s it like being an Asian person in the newsroom or something like that? I don’t know.īut there’s also kind of like a, how do you navigate your identity in a white publishing world or something like that, right? Just asking questions that portray such a level of angst and internal conflict and turmoil that it makes me feel crazy. But I just see a lot of questions about a prescriptive identity where one is expected to write about the concerns of their group, right? And for me, I don’t know. And I think, you know, that I don’t think that many people would disagree with that, right? Bad things should be called bad.īut when I talk to young journalists now, which is somewhat often, right? It’s not that often, but it’s somewhat often somebody will email me or something like that. 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 a familiarity with subject matter or even the ways in which people live. Who cares? But when you do it badly, yes, we’re going to talk bad about you. And I wish we would talk more about the fact that, of course, you can - write whatever you want.
I’m not even thinking about that.īut when you’re reading something and inaccuracies and just, like, wild things jump out at you, you’re like, oh, damn. That’s why we even notice because for good writing, I frankly, don’t know who the author is. 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. Roxane, I’m curious, to you, what jumps out at you about this cultural conversation that we keep having off and on? roxane gay And Jay, it’s very good to see you again.
It’s a projection experiment all the way down.īut 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. jane coastonīut 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. Remember that book about Black maids in the deep South? People loved it, but I hate it. But I actually brought them together to talk about an issue that seems to crop up every year. The older I get, the more I’m like, why didn’t they just pay rent? Anyway, that is not the point. As someone who hates the musical, “Rent”- roxane gay This week, I’m joined by Times Opinion writers Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang to talk about very important things, like musical theater.
Two writers debate writing across identity lines - and how to respond when an author gets it really wrong. Transcript Who Can Write About What? A Conversation With Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang.