That was the question recently posed by Slate.
From the piece...
“White person tackles race” shouldn’t have to be such a big deal.
From Herman Melville to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Mark Twain to William
Faulkner to Harper Lee, the grand American narrative of race was always
tackled by white writers, writers who created and inhabited black
characters as they would any other. Together with black authors who
would finally be given a platform in the 20th Century, like
Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, white novelists
addressed the issue head on, thoughtfully and meaningfully, thereby
leading to a deeper and richer understanding of the country we live in.
But all of that changed, as critic Stanley Crouch noted in his 2004
essay “Segregated Fiction Blues,” in 1967, with the backlash to the
publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Written by the lily-white Styron but told from the point of view of Turner, the insurrectionist leader of a slave revolt, Confessions
was a well-intentioned gambit to join the canon of Great Books About
Race. But it had the severe misfortune to be published right at the
ascendancy of the Black Power movement. Alongside a philosophy of
militant political and socioeconomic solidarity, Black Power asserted
itself on the cultural front as well. The movement demanded ownership of
its turf: black studies, black history, black theater, black art, and
black fiction. It was a natural and understandable response to centuries
in which black voices had been wholly excluded from the cultural
dialogue, in which the story of race was reduced to minstrel shows and
white-supremacist propaganda like D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
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