"I’m going to be called a black writer until I die. But the point is that when I write at my best I try to look for the human situation, and I think whites have an obligation to do the same when writing about black folk, if they choose to write about black folk. W hat I’m trying to say is that there’s an institutionalized classification. I used the phrase “greedy institution” a while back. That’s really what those classifications come down to - institutions. They tend to define general groups in the population and assign character traits to them."
James Alan McPherson
“It is my hope that this collection of stories can be read as a book about people, all kinds of people. Certain of these people happen to be black, and certain of them happen to be white; but I have tried to keep the color part of most of them far in the background, where these things should rightly be kept.”
James Alan McPherson
"I think that if you look at the society in terms of an ongoing social drama, then you see that certain groups have been assigned certain roles. Black Americans have been assigned the roles of being perpetually needy. The ones who have a moral claim on white man’s compassion. The ones that they always trot out to show you how far you’ve got to go. And so, I can imagine all these ethnic groups saying, “Look at this. I had to break my balls to get this little house here. They don’t give a damn about me.” Reagan built a coalition of ethnics because he said, “I feel sorry for you.” They say, “The system treats me like a nigger, but I don’t get any kind of compassion for it.” And so, here’s some guy that’s going to say he understands the pain. Well, Reagan fooled all of them. But that was the appeal I think."
James Alan McPherson
"It was acceptable to be overtly racist, but it’s more complex than that. I think that if you study the first generation of slaves out of slavery, you find that they were artisans, they were brick masons, they built all the plantation houses in the South. They weren’t just field hands, they were architects. That threatened the power structure, and so from 1896 until the early ’50s, there was an attempt to suppress any evidence of black intelligence. It was aimed at making sure black laborers never competed with white laborers. That accounted for the mass wave of migration out of the South. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, there’s a segment called “Golden Day.” Those guys are old professionals. The whites feel threatened by them and the black people feel threatened by the whites."
James Alan McPherson
"But you don’t achieve mass acceptance in this culture without being diffused. Unless you are diffused, then you’re likely to be limited in your appeal. It’s so easy, you know. But then you end up without your self. That’s the way the whole thing is set up. It’s not just blacks, it’s anybody. They’ve got to be diffused. If you can’t be, then you’ve got a price to pay just because you question w hat’s normal, what’s right and w hat’s wrong, what’s the truth and what’s a lie. But in the case of black Americans, I think, asking those basic questions is almost obligatory. In a sense, your life depends on it. You’re living in a crazy country that’s paranoid, in a large part because of your presence in it, and if you have a view of the whole thing, it’s because you’re outside, and you say “This is where I fit in, and this is where things get warped."
James Alan McPherson
"I don’t see myself as a token. I fought - I had too many fights with certain people. I’ll say this, the people I fought with I wound up respecting, although I might not agree with them. But if I were a token, I’d be much more at ease and comfortable than I am now. But beyond that, Bob, my work is good. W hat I do is good. I teach, I write - nobody gave that to me. As for the responses of black people, no, surprisingly enough, the best review I ever got was in Essence and a black woman said, “Somebody out there’s watching us, somebody out there’s on to us.” I’m in the tradition, I’m still in the core culture. I’m not explaining it to white folk. I don’t think I m using it to titillate whites. I’ve never gotten any negative criticism from black people - I never have.
(...) But I can’t say I’ve gotten that much negative feedback from white people. Usually the response is indifference. People have been gracious to me, all down the line. I’ve been lucky in that respect. I never wrote for money. I never wrote for propaganda purposes. Well, to go back to your question about my feelings about the marketplace and my color, I will just say that there are very few short story writers who end up in paperback, and very few who get a Pulitzer Prize, and very, very few who ever get popular. So I ain’t complaining, I ain’t complaining."
James Alan McPherson
- - - - - - -
photograph via
kewl
ReplyDeleteCheers, Sam!
DeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteThank you for dropping by, Kenneth!
Delete