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Can I Only Write About Race?
Learning to share my pain on my own terms
“The pain inherent to my Blackness offers me all sorts of opportunities,” I told myself this past February, the February before that, and all the months between Februaries.
On February 1, like clockwork, a slew of editors called for writers of color to contribute to their Black History Month content.
“It’s my time,” I whispered to myself, scrolling down a Twitter feed begging me to write. Growing in a Black body means some of my experiences are unique to the color of my skin, and as a writer I can — and should — bleed onto the page with pain-ridden Black ink to create a harrowing narrative in which I bare a soul accustomed to trauma to readers who seek out personally hurtful stories. Look at me, already hitting the standard beats of writing about race, introducing my Blackness with words like “bleed,” “pain-ridden,” and “harrowing” — yup, still got it.
Minority voices have been muzzled for a long time, but over recent years we’ve noticed a shift: the personal essay is no longer only White. The essays available at my fingertips take on colors I’m not used to seeing when I study for my English degree, where the personal comes from Whitman or Thoreau, not Roxane Gay or Athena Dixon. Writers who have known hardship solely because of the way they were born write their way out of their circumstances using a voice permeated with their struggles. I wanted to be part of this.
The same way Hollywood tends to reward movies featuring people of color only when the stories center their pain, I realized quickly that many writers of color were asked to perform suffering on the page. Blackness and pain are intricately linked, so it didn’t strike me as odd that editors and readers alike would gravitate toward writers of color who excel in cathartic writing.
Until I realized that writing — like any other art form — is a craft that should always be compensated monetarily, I felt weird about the whole thing. A post-traumatic moneymaker, I called it. The 21st century asks me not only to monetize my hobby, but also my pain. When my hobby morphed into my vocation, I feared the blurring of the line between my writing and my pain, where all my words would become the typographical embodiment of my pain and…
