Can White Authors Write about Black Characters?

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 20^th 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.