David Mura | Issue 23
Excerpt from The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives
From The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself:
The Absence of Racial Identity for White Characters
In The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, I analyze a basic contradiction in the American story: From its very beginnings America had two irreconcilable goals. One was to seek equality, freedom, and democracy. The other was to maintain white supremacy and the domination by white people over any people of color. White America is fine with telling our tale through the lens of the first goal. But it is still decidedly not fine with telling the second story of America’s treatment of people of color and America’s desire to maintain white supremacy. All the recent ridiculous distorting, disparaging, and damning of Critical Race Theory are just the latest manifestation of this repression.
Instead, this second tale, the tale of BIPOC America, is regarded as un-American, unpatriotic, a smear on the past, an abomination to the present—or at best, a minor element. According to some, this story can never be integrated with the story of America’s noble pursuit of its ideal goals. And this is an essential way white America has lied to itself: it has denied the voices of people of color as an essential and defining part of America’s tale; it has denied their validity as Americans; it has denied that their history is also the history of white America—however white America wants to deny that fact. For the story of white America cannot be understood without comprehending how inextricably and intrinsically that story is intertwined and united with the story of Black America, of Indigenous America, of Americans of color.
In the history of America’s racial ontology, white people have created the categories of Whiteness and Blackness, and those categories continue to structure white identity. That identity is in part based on a belief in the myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictional stories white people tell themselves about themselves—that is, the stories Whiteness tells itself, especially about our history, are not an accurate portrait of our history and yet they continue to structure white identity (white psychology) in the present. That identity is a psychological distortion based on a denial of what white people have done in our past and what they continue to do in the present.
Part of that distortion involves the creation of unblemished white heroes and a version of our history that ameliorates, downplays, or excludes the depths of white racism and white supremacy in our history. But that distortion also involves the ways in which white history diminishes or excises Blackness from our history. In other words, that identity distorts and occludes the actual lives and consciousness of Black people in our history, what Black people have done and accomplished, what they have suffered and continue to suffer, how they tell their stories. This occurs not just through the content of the stories Whiteness tells itself, but through the structures of these stories, structures that often function more at an unconscious rather than conscious level. In both conscious and unconscious ways, white identity and the stories it tells segregate and separate, wall off white people from the reality of Black people, their history and experiences, the truths Black people have to tell about who we have been as a country and who we are now….
In The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself and my book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing, I examine a distinct difference between the way white fiction writers and fiction writers of color introduce their characters: In general, white fiction writers do not identify their white characters as white. Thus, if the characters are named, say, Bill and Bridget we are to assume tacitly that those characters are white. In contrast, more often than not, fiction writers of color identify their characters by race and/or ethnicity.
By implication then, white fiction writers assume whiteness is the universal—and unremarked or un-denotated—default. It is writers of color and their characters of color who are an exception to this rule and this universality. Moreover, by implication, this practice of white fiction writers also assumes that they and their white characters do not see their race as essential to their identity. Their characters being white is not a significant factor in their experience or the ways they think about themselves.Â
These are assumptions that few writers of color make about race and their characters—and also, about white writers and their white characters. At the same time, white writers often accuse, or assert that, many writers of color substitute politics for art, or that we write in ways that are overly or overtly concerned with politics.
But this practice of white writers not remarking upon or indicating their characters’ racial identity—that is, their avoidance of any question of what whiteness has meant to their characters identities and lives—is in itself a political position. Indeed, it is a position much closer to a conservative take on race—race is not essential or important for whites and is no longer a live issue for our society—than a progressive political position on race. Moreover, making whiteness both invisible and the universal default, leads to instructive differences in the ways white authors envision their work to be evaluated and the ways the work of writers of color are evaluated.Â
For white writers, some of these implications are:
White authors start with the premise that their characters are primarily individuals and not members of a racial group. Underlying this is a belief that a character’s membership in a group negates or obstructs seeing that character as an individual.
In upholding these premises, the white writer does not have to indicate openly the race of their white characters. If no other racial designation is assigned to these characters, the reader is to assume they are white.
The lack of racial designation for white characters makes certain tacit assumptions: Race will generally be considered not to play an important factor in the identity of these white characters or the ways they think of themselves. Nor does their whiteness and race play a significant factor in their experiences or the course of their lives.
For most white authors and their white characters, the questions of race and white identity can only come up when those white characters encounter characters of color. Otherwise, unlike Blackness, to reverse DuBois’s phrase, Whiteness is never a problem—or even a question.
In this literary practice, the white writer is not considering how people of color might view their white characters or the fact that people of color would consider their characters to be white and that racial designation is part of the way people of color would contextualize those characters….
For writers of color, a different set of assumptions are at work:
The writer of color does not see a contradiction between viewing their characters as individuals and as members of a group….
Given the fact that whiteness is considered the universal default, the writer of color must identify her characters in terms of ethnicity and/or race if the characters are not white.
Many characters of color possess an awareness of how whites view that character and not just how people of the character’s own race view that character—i.e., The character of color possesses an awareness of the gaze and judgment of the racial/white Other, and the racial hierarchy which structures the society to the benefit of that racial/white Other.
For many writers of color, the lens of race is essential to understanding their characters as well as the way the writer herself views her characters and the society in which we live.
The writer’s ability to read her characters and the society through the lens of race and her ability to convey the complexities of that reading, often constitute significant criteria through which readers of color evaluate writers of color.
But most white readers do not possess this knowledge. It goes against the white aesthetic—and political—assumption that race is not a significant and necessary lens through which to understand characters in literature, whether they are white or people of color. In a similar fashion, most white fiction writers do not think very often about or want to be conscious of their own racial identity—which naming white characters as white would force them to do….
Given all these contrasting assumptions by white writers and writers of color, it is therefore impossible to argue that race is not a factor in the aesthetic judgment of works by either white writers or writers of color…[Here] it is useful to note the political implications of this aesthetic rule for white authors: One current practice of Whiteness is to erase Whiteness as a group identity or render it invisible or non-essential when Whiteness benefits from such a view.
In other words, the practice of white authors not identifying their characters racially is very much in keeping with the beliefs and practices of Whiteness as an ideology … And yet most white authors are not aware of the political implications of this practice or their larger general avoidance of the issues of race in regards to their white characters….
Two different literary practices—separate and unequal. Â
Excerpted from The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives by David Mura. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2023 by David Mura. Used by permission.
David Mura is a poet, writer of creative nonfiction and fiction, critic, and playwright. He is author of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing and the memoirs Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. He is coeditor, with Carolyn Holbrook, of We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (Minnesota, 2021). He lives in Minneapolis.
The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives
by David Mura
University of Minnesota Press, 2023Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression
From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present. Mura shows how deeply we need to change our racial narratives to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the experiences of Black Americans.
More than anything, David Mura reminds us that history is still just a story, and life and death lie in who gets to tell it and what’s been told. This is a reexamination of the American imagination itself and the myths we need to dismantle for a proper foundation to finally grow. It’s fearless, illuminating, and revolutionary.
—Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Booker Prize
Upcoming Events with David Mura
Launch: February 8, 2023, 7:00 PM CT, Minnesota Humanities Center, 987 Ivy Avenue East, St. Paul, MN 55106 (in-person event) Register for the launch
February 15, 2023, 7:00 PM CT, Hamline Midway Library, 1558 West Minnehaha Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55104. Virtual registration.
February 27, 2023, 6:00 PM CT, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 Snelling Ave S, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55105. (in-person event)
April 27, 2023, 7:00 PM CT, East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St, St Paul, MN 55106 (in-person event)
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