Race in the Land of MFA

Race in the Land of MFA by Alex Gallo-Brown

When I decided to take the plunge last year, at the age of 27, from relative literary isolation—reading and writing on my own while working a string of menial jobs to support myself—into the comparative security and companionship of the MFA, I certainly had mixed feelings. I had always struggled with academic institutions, skating through high school on the back of a natural aptitude for writing and attending three colleges before completing my bachelor’s degree. I was familiar with the myriad criticisms of MFAs, too, from their promotion of a “house style” to their failure to provide graduates with tangible benefits or skills.

And yet I wasn’t sure what else to do. In the five years after leaving college I had worked in coffee shops, labored as a caregiver for people with disabilities, interned on an organic farm, and scored one well-paid but temporary gig organizing workers for a union.

(I also went through a substantial period of unemployment.) That sort of take-whatever- you-can-find-while-making-art-on-the-side mentality is common enough for creative people, and one I embraced throughout my mid-twenties. As 30 inched closer, however, I found myself thinking in previously unimaginable career terms. What if I wanted to have a family? What work was I qualified to do that would provide even a lower-middle-class income, not to mention health insurance?

Hence the MFA. Despite the claims made by detractors, the programs do instill their students with real-world competencies, namely how to teach creative writing. They also confer a credential in the terminal academic degree. Perhaps most appealingly, they ground their students in literature. As a borderline autodidact who had learned more about books squatting in coffee shops and one-bedroom apartments than in any institution, I yearned for such grounding. There were holes in my literary education an

MFA could actually help me to fill.

While working my succession of menial jobs, I had published critical and creative essays in a range of publications. I also wrote poetry—mostly self-published, but poetry nonetheless. For my degree, however, I chose to study fiction. As a long-time reader of literary fiction, I had become intrigued by a form that allowed one to transcend their own personal experience—to inhabit varied and disparate individual points of view. And as the graduate of a multicultural inner city high school that was largely stratified along lines of race and class, an individual of Italian and Jewish descent who is often misapprehended as Mexican, and the romantic partner of a mixed race Korean American woman, I had long been interested in questions of social difference. Fiction, I felt, offered profound opportunities for such imagining. I wanted to explore those questions of identity that had confronted me since I was a small child.

What I did not entirely understand, however, was that race, in particular, can be a touchy subject within the literary community. Perhaps this is because the community is so overwhelmingly white. Last year, for The Rumpus, the author Roxane Gay analyzed the literary sections of The New York Times. She found that of the 742 books reviewed by the Times in 2011, about 90 percent of their authors were white—compared to 72 percent of the population at large. I haven’t been able to find a parallel study of MFA programs, but anecdotal evidence tells a similar story. In my own program, every student but one is white. Recently, a black friend of mine who went through a MFA program told me how uncomfortable he was with the racial homogeneity he encountered there. And a white friend who completed a different program told me she was once advised by a professor not to address race, lest her stories strike some readers as too controversial.

So I probably should not have been surprised when a story I brought into class about a young half-black, half-white man struggling with his racial identity was met with harsh resistance. I should not have been. But I was.

“Maybe you should write about something you know,” one student snarled at me a few minutes into the discussion. Others seemed baffled by my protagonist’s preoccupation with race. The phrase “post-racial” (yearningly, I thought) was used.

A few weeks later, I brought another story into class about a white kid playing basketball in a predominantly black environment. On the surface, it was more autobiographical—I play a lot of basketball in predominantly black environments—and so, presumably, less problematic. Not so. This time my accusers castigated me for trafficking in negative stereotypes and exoticizing black culture.

This time I was not surprised. I was stunned. I had expected my classmates to be sympathetic to the issues I was trying to raise, and perhaps even to be reflective about their own experiences navigating a multiracial society. Instead, they were by turns non- participatory and hostile. It was as though I had set something foul down in the center of the floor.

Admittedly, in each story I had been trying to execute a delicate maneuver. In the first, I tread the line between empathic literary performance and cultural appropriation. In the second, I skirted the boundary between chronicling an authentic social reality and presenting a set of meaningless racial clichés. Even if I had managed to stay on the right side of those lines (which I believe I did), such stories were bound to make some people uncomfortable.

Discomfort, however, is not always a bad thing. Race is an incontrovertible aspect of the American reality; it needs to be talked about, argued over, debated, and discussed, even, especially, within the literary community. If writers expect people to take their work seriously, they should be prepared to engage with any number of live wires, social, political, historical, and psychological among them. By choosing not to talk about race— by unconsciously rendering the subject off-limits because of the discomfort it may provoke—the literary community runs the risk of isolating itself, on the one hand. More critically, though, it threatens to exclude those for whom the discussion is vital, integral, not just optional or academic.

I don’t regret writing those stories. I plan to write more. As a straight white male,

I feel an ethical imperative to imagine the realities of people who inhabit different bodies than me. As a fiction writer, I feel compelled to write about them. Imagining other people’s lives. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to be all about?

“Let’s face it: literary fiction is fucking boring,” J. Robert Lennon wrote recently in an editorial for Salon. I don’t agree with that sentiment—there is much being published now that excites me; the bulk of contemporary fiction I have not read at all.

But I would be lying if I did not admit to feeling a twinge of recognition. Most of what I read in contemporary literary magazines does feel curiously insular and esoteric, secluded from the lives of people without MFAs. (I am reminded of the African American clothing brand FUBU—For Us, By Us.) It also feels hypereducated, suburban or rural in origin, and culturally white.

I don’t pretend to have my own finger on the cultural pulse. But I do know the country is getting more urban and more racially mixed. If literary culture wants to reconnect to a broader proportion of the reading public, it would do well to encourage stories from, about, and for not just white people with educated backgrounds who live outside city centers (or conversely inside New York City). That means diversifying our literary culture, most of all. But it also means challenging those of us who do come from racial privilege to think and imagine and investigate—and eventually, should the spirit move us, write—across borders that may have often felt impermeable.

Bio: Alex Gallo-Brown’s essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown,

Salon.com, Bookslut, The Collagist, and more. He is the author of The Language of

Grief, a collection of poems. Find him at www.alexgallobrown.com.