Critics
So I had a workshop meeting with a colleague of mine at a coffee shop. We critiqued each other's writing. She is a very intelligent Indian millennial. I told her about the last guy who edited the first chapter of my novel. He hated it.
She asked me, oh so coyly, "Was he a white dude?" I said yes, because he was. Her response was, "OK, you cannot listen to white dudes." She loved my work and said, "This was not written for him, it was written for me."
I thought that was a beautiful compliment. But back to the white dude comment. I'm not going to lie, I laughed when she said it and was complicit to the whole thing. However, it made me wonder if there is such a thing as reverse-racism. I don't know if that is actually a legitimate thing, however, when we categorize anyone on the basis of their race, we are doing a disservice to them and to ourselves.
My friend went on and on about white people, I don't even remember the details, I just remember asking her to lower her voice, since we were in a white neighborhood and there were white people surrounding us on all sides. Eventually, I told her to use the Hindi word for white.
I mean this is America, governed and ruled by white people, for white people. Yes, there is a lot of diversity in this country and whites may not be the majority very soon. I have to admit that I'm pleased about that. However, the vast majority of people in power are white males.
Does that mean I don't like white males or white people in general? Quite the contrary actually, I envision that it is very likely that I may marry a white person, one day. My best friend is Caucasian. She dislikes white people more than I do.
The point is that I don't dislike any group of people. I have friends that will be the most open-minded people you have ever met, but if you bring up a certain ethnicity or religion, they have a strong bias. I have a good friend who just thinks that Muslims are people we should be suspicious of, but she is an extremely diverse person. I have another friend who can't stand Chinese people for no good reason.
I often like to use the analogy of how you cannot use the master's tools to get out of the master's house. Disliking anyone based on their race or gender makes you guilty of the very crime you say that you despise. I bring this up because I know some people who are very offended when they are judged by white people but judge white people very harshly.
Don't get me wrong. I do not believe in this bullshit that it is hard to be a white male these days. It's hard to be a human being of any kind, however, if you are a white male you do not have to fight a lot of battles that women and minorities must fight.
I also do not subscribe to the notion that All Lives Matter. Sure, in theory, all lives matter, but black people have to undergo a very specific discrimination white people do not. Black Lives Matter is a thing because of many reasons, one of them being that young black men are disappearing into jails or early deaths.
Some of my favorite people on this earth are white, so I can't say that I don't respect "white" culture. Hating white people is not going to make white people stop hating minorities. It just makes the situation worse.
My novel is about an Indian American woman living in America. This story and the way I tell it may not be interesting to some people. They are not my audience. The first professor I had in grad school was a white woman, she didn't not like my work. In the end, my last professor and mentor was a white male who absolutely loved it.
I don't think race or gender was a factor in this situation. What I am trying to is that if we brown people, or black people start to hate white people, this is not helping the situation. I know we all know this, but it bares repeating: people are people.
Some of them suck and some of them are phenomenal. In every race.
nina