THE ARTIST FOCUSES ON THE CONSEQUENCE
An excerpted CORO / OFFICE HOURS question from JW Mansour (you may read the whole query here) and my attempt at an answer: “I'm working on a story that involves two main characters, one from central Appalachia, part of an immigrant family from the Holy Land, much like my own, and the other, an African American former policeman from Detroit… My question for you is how can I reflect the racial hatred of some, especially segregationist whites against blacks or anyone who would stand with them without it sounding offensive or gratuitous to modern readers? How can I use racial slurs without crossing a line? Should I worry about a line?”
1
When it comes to issues of whether one should write other races or how best to write these transracial arrogations without offending…as I wrote earlier in response to a similar question, I have no firm answers, no secret routes that will lead anyone safely out of the desert.
I have only questions, reflections, and maybe a suggestion or two that might give succor on the journey.
2
Representing “the racial hatred of some, especially segregationist whites against blacks or anyone who would stand with them without it sounding offensive or gratuitous to modern readers” is clearly something that is important to you as a writer. The question that you will need to answer – by writing of the book – is how much of this racial hatred does your book actually need?
After all, what is important to a writer – and what a book needs – are rarely ever the same thing.
Part of what will help answer the question of “how much racial hatred will my book need” is how you structure the novel’s strategic audience. Strategic audience not only helps a writer set the story’s definitional economy, but it also helps the writer stabilize the story’s representational economy – what gets represented and how.
For example: some strategic audiences might find it mind-boggling that the United States maintains colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam – for others, that colonial hypocrisy is the basic reality of their lives.