Sometimes there is a defining moment and we know that every tomorrow will be different from yesterday, different from today. When those moments affect our belief systems, we owe it to ourselves to sit up and take notice.
Several years ago, I experienced one such defining moment that caused me to see race as an extraneous detail.
Please do not misunderstand. I am not saying race is unimportant. I am not saying it should be ignored. However, there are instances when race becomes an unnecessary detail.
The moment I refer to occurred after I enrolled in my first creative writing course. My professor repeatedly stressed the importance of eliminating extraneous detail from my fiction, but as a beginning writer, I found it difficult to discern what to cut and what to keep.
So for every detail I included, the professor began asking, “Is it important to the story?” Was it important to know, for instance, whether my main character had red hair or brown? Did it matter that she had freckles? Did the story change if she became a blonde? If she was short? If she became a man? Any of those details might or might not be important, depending on the character, but why would those trivialities matter to my audience? What changed when the details changed? And how was I to decide when they were important and when they were not?
I began to consider such details in my day-to-day life, and I began eliminating those details from my conversations. After a few weeks, I discovered that if I told a story about the rude clerk at the checkout counter and eliminated the detail of race, my listeners would be forced to create her image in their own minds. By denying them that detail, I was denying them the opportunity to prejudge the people in my stories the same way that Nathaniel Hawthorne denies his audience a physical description of Faith in Young Goodman Brown. Or, the same way Ernest Hemingway withholds description of his characters in Hills Like White Elephants, referring to them only as the American and the girl.
I found an unexpected power in this extraction of race from my speech. By never mentioning the clerk’s skin color, I removed my listeners’ ability to instantly label her—to set her apart from them. If I was talking about a rude clerk, what did it matter whether her skin was light, dark, or somewhere in between? The story was about the clerk and her rudeness, not the clerk and her skin color. In this instance race becomes a detail that interferes with the point of the story, and therefore becomes extraneous. If race is left to the imagination and the character’s surroundings offer no clues about their background, the listener will most likely assume the clerk is of their same race. Left unmentioned, race becomes irrelevant, and the point of the story, the importance of the story comes through. But if race is named, then it becomes an integral part of the plot and the listener will assume that they should read meaning into it. By bringing race into the mix, we run the risk of misleading our audience into thinking they should attach some sort of significance to that detail, when that is not what we had in mind at all.
When we categorize artists by their race, sex, or culture, we are essentially doing the same thing — attaching significance to an extraneous detail that has no bearing on the work. Not that those attributes should not be celebrated; they should. But before we categorize them (or anyone), perhaps we should consider our purpose. After refusing repeatedly to include her poetry in women’s anthologies, Elizabeth Bishop let it be known that she would “rather be called ‘the 16th best poet’ with no reference to my sex, than one of 4 women—even if the other three are pretty good.”
The extraneous detail that Bishop was a woman had nothing to do with the fact that she was a fine poet. Labeling her as a “woman poet” could only distract from her talent as an artist. In this case, the point of the story is not that Bishop was a woman, of course, we all know she was a woman; the point is that she was a poet. Had she been an African-American, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American poet, I suspect she would have been opposed to publishing in those anthologies as well. But since her race was of the majority population, it became an unmentioned extraneous detail.
If we can make ourselves aware of what we are saying, aware of what we mean by the mention of race (or gender) in our conversations, then perhaps we can provide ourselves the opportunity to see people for who they are, not what they are. Perhaps we should consider whether those extraneous details are important for the stories of our lives, and whether their inclusion changes the plot in a negative or positive way. If we do, we might open ourselves up to more defining moments, and tomorrow, in addition to being different, might be better.