In today’s NYT Opinion section is an opinion piece from an Indian-American author defending their right to write about Black Americans (although the title itself is a question the piece is very clearly a flimsy defense). Not necessarily with authenticity, but just to be able to write outside of their cultural knowledge.

In fact, Umrigar sees the issue quite simply:

But I’ve always thought about it this way: If men can write about women and science fiction writers can write about space aliens, surely I can write about someone from a different race. And I have spent my entire adult life in the United States. Why shouldn’t I write about that most American of topics — race and race relations?

By this reasoning I have been a human being and I’ve been sick with viruses before, so I should totally be able to write about immunology.

Yeah, that’s really not how it works.

While I’m of the mind that anyone can write whatever they want, the question of the ability to do it well is a different one. And this statement illustrates that the author is clearly ignorant of the weighty ramifications of race and the nuance of culture when it comes to Black people in America, a culture that is very different than Black people anywhere else. This makes me question just how it is they thought they could write this story in the first place.

Umrigar’s flippant statement is telling, because here’s the thing: if you compare writing Black people to writing space aliens, you’ve already gone and fucked up.

Comparing Black people to space aliens, or any marginalized group to any fictionalized group, is a flawed analogy beloved by the ignorant. It ignores the fact that space aliens aren’t real, but more than that lack humanity at a fundamental level. Aliens are a plot device used to further a story in some way or form. They are an opposing force to that of the main character, usually white, usually the hero. Whatever function they serve is secondary to the main story arc of the hero.

They are, at the most basic level, the Other.

If you are comparing marginalized people to aliens what you are saying is that Black people, like aliens, lack humanity and the basic qualifications to be seen as fully fleshed out characters. Their Blackness then becomes a plot device, a tool to be used to further the story along. They are then a character lacking agency and are instead a game piece to be moved through the narrative in service to an author’s goals.

And as such, even if a writer is writing a Black person as a main character, they are less a fully fleshed out person facing real world issues and more a tool used to impart an author’s larger agenda.

Basically, when writing Black people the same way one would write an alien you are stealing the character’s agency and reducing them to a caricature. And by Umrigar’s own admission, this is what they are doing:

I hadn’t expected this line of inquiry to come up because, although race and racial identity are central preoccupations of the book, I saw Anton not just as a black character, but as a singular, distinctive character born of my imagination and efforts.

This simple statement ignores the shared history of Black Americans, shared experiences that anyone spending five minutes on Black Twitter could see. This is what we mean when we say Black culture. Blackness is a combination of both the oppression and treatment of outsiders and the shared cultural consciousness that is a result of living under such a system. An example is soul food, which is a direct result of Blacks having less access, both now and historically, to resources. Which is why Key and Peele’s skit about two well-to-do Black men eating at a soul food diner is so funny: would Black people eat chitlins if they could have eaten a ham instead? But this is a part of the joke you wouldn’t necessarily understand if you are not part of the larger cultural conversation.

If an author is writing a book about what it means to be a Black man in America raised by white parents shouldn’t they first understand what it means to be Black in America?

And by their own admission, Umrigar does not:

The black woman who is my protagonist’s birth mother in “Everybody’s Son” is very different. She’s addicted to crack and leaves her son locked up in a hot apartment while she goes searching for drugs. If that is all that you know about the book, you’d think that this Indian-American writer was indulging in poisonous stereotypes about black women. But there is also the white father, who epitomizes white privilege and uses his power to get what he wants. In fact, one of the things I wanted to explore is the limits of white liberal piety.

The fact that Umrigar thinks that a negative depiction of a white character balances out a negative stereotypical depiction of the Black character in their book is naïve at best, grossly ignorant and irresponsible at worse. When was the last time a white man had his children taken away by a state agency because of negative stereotypes of white liberals? Since when has white privilege led to anything more than an inconvenience or a few jokes about mayonnaise? But negative stereotypes about Black people have real world consequences, as we can see from the most recent pardon of yet another murderer in St. Louis. How can an author like Umrigar have written authentically and honestly (and not with “empathy”, which is so often just authorspeak for privileged guilt) if they don’t understand the full depth and breadth of what it is they’re trying to explore?

It’s the best sort of irony that in trying to defend their right to write outside of their experience, Umrigar has proven exactly why people shouldn’t.