We live in an age that's very suspicious of preachy political rhetoric, which means that there's room for art that approaches these issues from the side - as satire, as parody, or as a kind of outlandish speculative proposition.
— Jess Row
My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.
It's difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which you're disguising your origins in which someone doesn't get hurt.
There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color.
Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.
I think novels - or any art form - can have a powerful impact on people's perceptions of race, particularly if they draw attention to the absurd inconsistencies and stereotypes we all carry around with us and don't want to think about.
I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.
There's an enormous amount of obliviousness: a desire among young gentrifiers to see only the city they want to see.
White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.
The truth is that much of the plastic surgery we see today has a racial or ethnic component because it has to do with inherently racial concepts of physical perfection, like the 'Roman nose.'
As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.
Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.
White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.
When I read 'Another Country' when I was in my early 20s, you know, as soon as I put the book down, my first thought was, 'I will never be able to write a book like this.' And my second thought was, 'I really want to try writing a book like this for the 21st century.'
