{"id":42686,"date":"2015-09-13T21:08:04","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T21:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42686"},"modified":"2015-09-13T21:08:04","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T21:08:04","slug":"they-pretend-to-be-us-while-pretending-we-dont-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42686","title":{"rendered":"They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don\u2019t Exist"},"content":{"rendered":"

They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don\u2019t Exist<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

BuzzFeed<\/a>
\n2015-09-11<\/p>\n

Jenny Zhang<\/a><\/strong>, BuzzFeed Contributor<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nWill Varner<\/a> \/ BuzzFeed<\/small><\/p>\n

White poet Michael Derrick Hudson\u2019s<\/a> use of the Chinese pen name Yi-Fen Chou was an act of yellowface<\/a> that is part of a long tradition of white voices drowning out those of color in the literary world.<\/em><\/p>\n

To be Other in America is to be coveted and hated at the same time. It\u2019s never been enough to know that I feel it, but I know I am often asked to prove it before I am allowed to speak on it. When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop<\/a> for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature. \u201cNo one is going to pay attention to a name like mine,\u201d a white dude who exclusively wrote stories about white dudes said to me one time when I was feeling particularly low about my writing. I couldn\u2019t enjoy a scrap of validation or wallow in a sliver of self-doubt without someone interjecting some version of \u201cYou\u2019re so lucky. You\u2019re going to have an easier time than any of us getting published.\u201d They were shameless about their envy, not shy or coy at all about their certainty that my race and gender were an undeniable asset, which, in turn, implied that I could be as mediocre and shitty as I wanted and still succeed. This was how some of my white classmates imagined the wild spoils of my literary trajectory. This was how they managed to turn themselves into the victims.<\/p>\n

…I won\u2019t be scandalized because what Hudson<\/a> is doing isn\u2019t anything that white male writers haven\u2019t already been doing since the first recorded instance of our culture embracing any kind of excellence that did not include them: scramble to come up with ways to keep the playing field uneven, to keep the odds stacked in their favor. The scandal of Hudson performing the laziest act of yellowface<\/a> (co-opting a Chinese name) to get his poem published and accepted into the Best American Poetry<\/em> anthology is lurid fodder for our cultural conversation because of its explicitness, but it should not be strange or unbelievable. White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it. After all, 50 years ago, when black voices were fighting to be heard, when their stories of trauma and abuse were struggling for legitimacy, it took John Howard Griffin<\/a>, a white man who dyed his skin black and wrote about his experiences as a \u201cblack\u201d man in his book, Black Like Me<\/em><\/a>, for white Americans to believe that yes, black people were telling the truth<\/a> about their lived experiences in the Jim Crow<\/a> South. He was hailed a singular hero. Studs Terkel<\/a> once said, \u201cGriffin was one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered. He was just one of those guys that comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us.\u201d It may seem totally nuts now, but as far as who gets credit for simply being affected by black pain, it doesn\u2019t seem very removed from our current world where we heap lavish praise on someone like Jon Stewart<\/a> for announcing on the Daily Show<\/a><\/em> that he was too heartbroken to make jokes after the Charleston church shooting<\/a>, as if all throughout this country\u2019s present and past, black people and people of color have not been so heartbroken and so violated that we were left humorless, or worse, dead. To praise Stewart as excessively as he was praised is to say to black people: Your pain is unexceptional<\/a> and does not matter<\/a> until a white man feels it too<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don\u2019t Exist BuzzFeed 2015-09-11 Jenny Zhang, BuzzFeed Contributor Will Varner \/ BuzzFeed White poet Michael Derrick Hudson\u2019s use of the Chinese pen name Yi-Fen Chou was an act of yellowface that is part of a long tradition of white voices drowning out those of color in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[13345,21047,21046],"class_list":["post-42686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-buzzfeed","tag-jenny-zhang","tag-michael-derrick-hudson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42688,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42686\/revisions\/42688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}