By Runjini Raman
On the first day of class, we talked about Rachel Dolezal and the conflict that her act of “pretending to be black” created for our feelings of insult and our parallel and unsuccessful attempt to define race. As I read for class this week, it occurred to me that perhaps a crucial missing piece was the issue of class and how it intersects with one’s ability and inclination to “act” as a different race.
The writer Michael Derrick Hudson has recently been scandalized in the media for changing his name to a female Chinese name (Yi-Fen Chou) in order to get published by the well-known poetry publication, The Prairie Schooner. Once his poem was later chosen to appear in Best American Poetry 2015, he came clean to Sherman Alexie, editor of the anthology, on his act of masquerade, proudly, as if to tout that the life of a white middle-class male writer is one scant of literary recognition, and that writers of color have a long-denied advantage in drawing the eye of literary magazines with their exotic names and stories of ethnic hardship. The ridiculousness of that is alarming, but what’s more worrisome is that some people are surprised that writers of color might choose to give other writers of color an advantage—that years and years of whites handing up, down, and over their privilege to other whites in very blatant acts of nepotism that has created the swirling incoherent mix of race and class issues could not one day be rectified in any miniscule way by brown people, who happen to hold a little bit of power, attempting to facilitate some nepotism among their discriminated group.
The writer Jenny Chang, in her publication “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” recently commented on Hudson’s bizarre behavior of being rejected forty (40) times by literary publications under his real name and then re-submitting his poem nine (9) times under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou before it was picked up. She writes,“I won’t be scandalized by a white man who hasn’t considered that perhaps what helped his poem finally get published was less the fake Chinese woman he pretended to be, and more the robust, unflappable confidence bordering on delusion that he and many privileged white men possess: the capacity to be rejected forty (40) times and not give up, to be told, ‘no we don’t want you’ again and again and think, I got this. I know what will get me in. What may be persistence to him is unfathomable to me.”
Chang implies the exact opposite of what Hudson tried to imply by adopting the name Yi-Fen Chou: Actually, we don’t live in a world singularly operating on a basis of brown people extending their privilege to other brown people to create an unfair imbalance in the literary world in which whites are the particularly disadvantaged; actually, we live in a world where upper middle class white males have so much privilege that their inner dialogue has been conditioned to churn a delusional ambition, one which has no wit or fancy to the marginalized lives they overtake, and which can only see their adoption of other cultures as a way to prove their imagined white disadvantage.
Important to note is that, without a doubt, we can’t discuss the literary world and genre without talking about class. Those who choose to pursue the life of a poet (as opposed to say, business or science) undertake the reality that there will be hardship, little money, and a lot of rejection. Who is socially, educationally, and financially set up to endure this particularly stressful life? The upper and middle class. Of course this spans across race, but by and large, whites occupy the upper and middle class (not to mention that the salaries of those we define as “middle class” in black populations are actually much lower than the salary of those in the white middle class). The fact that many more white, upper/middle class males are able to pursue literary careers and may therefore be seen as a commodity never enters Hudson’s mind. Instead, he seems to focus only on the disadvantage that his lack of “otherness” could create for him, completely excluding the fact that “otherness” comes with a pretty hefty price, such as discrimination, racial slurs, less pay, and fetishization, just to name a few.
The thick chain between race and class naturally eliminates people like me from the playing field of the literary world unless I try unusually hard to enter. Despite the fact that I fall into the “model minority” this is still true because of the color of my skin, the fact that I live under the strict reality that no one will support me after my graduation from my high school, and the fact that, as an Indian person, I am expected to write about the tribulations and history of the Indian people, and if I don’t, people are confused. Don’t even get me started on how this class imbalance affects other “Asian” populations, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
In Behind the Mule, Dawson cites William Wilson’s thesis that “discrimination is now less important in determining a person’s life chances than social status or economic class.” This is obviously a troubling statement because race and class are so linked when it comes to what one is able to do educationally, career-wise, financially, etc., that it’s impossible to separate them. In the case of Hudson, what he perceives he is able to do and the racialized, racist, and dishonest means to which he feels he is capable of accomplishing that goal is inextricably linked to his whiteness and his class. He has been conditioned with the elite notion that he is capable of anything, and his ambition extends into the wild and abusive. Nevermind the fact that most black people literally cannot masquerade as physically white, it may not even occur to them to do so. And while many Asian authors use white, English names both in their writing and every day life, this is often because they face greater discrimination, violence, and subjugation if they don’t. In fact, choosing to use their ethnic name is often a way for them to be further marginalized in their American communities. It is Hudson’s self-inflated egotism brought to him by his undeniable and life-long privilege that created the idea that he could adopt another culture’s identity– and that he needed to do so in order to push his way through to the top of cultural standing, as if being white and middle-class had put him at the bottom.