on audience
I recently finished Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl. Last year I read Raven Leilani’s Luster. And before that, Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age. All of these novels have a couple things in common: they’re set in New York City (at least the greater NYC area) and center twentysomething Black women navigating the ins and outs of adulthood and white work spaces.
I like these books a lot. They’re relatable to a degree. And funny in their descriptions of the gaffes that well-meaning white employers make. The honesty of navigating that question of how Black is too Black? at work. I was reading a part in The Other Black Girl mentioning nuances of Black Twitter™ and wondered about the book’s intended audience. When we’re among ourselves, certain things are understood. Things we don’t have to explain, like bonnets, or the importance of body butters. The Other Black Girl is a bestseller and on countless reading lists. Which means White people are reading.
White audience members aren’t inherently bad, of course. I believe that the more eyes are on your work, the more it’ll circulate and eventually reach who you want it to reach. But there can be an undercurrent of discomfort (for them or for us) if we’re speaking honestly about our lived experiences and how White supremacy shows up in that. Also, sometimes you want your stuff to reach your people and your people alone. We all perform our identities. The Blackness we perform among ourselves isn’t the same as that we perform in mixed company.
I took an Advanced Creative Nonfiction course during my last semester of college. One day we broke into small groups and briefly workshopped each other’s flash essays. I wrote about the Rottweiler that would run along a chain link fence, barking menacingly at me, on my way home from preschool. My dad would come to pick me up those days. I made reference to his accent, calling it a Nigerian lilt, or something like that. My two White group mates latched on to that detail. They wanted to know more about the subtleties of my dad’s accent. What unsettled me about it, in retrospect, was that it felt like it was coming from a place of otherness. Like “oh, what’s the idiosyncratic, foreign detail? Talk more about that!” At a school so homogeneous, I was already acutely aware of how I stood out. And really, I seldom thought about my dad’s accent. Because he’s my dad. And that’s how I’ve always known him. So who was I talking to when I made reference to his foreignness?
This goes back to the idea of learning to unother myself. Which may make the White reader more uncomfortable with what I have to say, but I am okay with this. I am not writing for them.