Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Sometimes I think Id prefer racist trolling to this grade of self-aggrandizement.
A racist troll is easy to dismiss.
He does not think decency is enough.
Sometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency.
A month earlier, a grand jury had failed to indict Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner.
Good white people were angry.
Or at least they wanted to be seen as angry.
A more perfect Negro.
Each generation lighter than the one before.
In the most famous stories about passing, Bennett points out, the protagonists ultimately face societys reckoning.
But Stella is never found out.
Instead, she suffers from something more subtle and enduring the hollowing out of the self.
Bennett was interested in passing because of how it both exposes and strengthens the artifice of race.
On the one hand, if you could perform whiteness, then what does it mean to be white?
Hows your week been?It all feels very surreal.
In some ways, this is the most normal life has felt this spring.
It feels weird to say that, because obviously theres something really unique about the protests.
But at the same time, weve seen this constant loop of black death over and over again.
Theres something familiar about that, in a way that lockdown felt completely like nothing Id ever experienced.
So its all strange.
And then youve got like a book coming out in the middle of it.
[Laughs] Its been a whirlwind in every possible iteration of life.
So it is surreal.
The book opens in 1968 thats a year that everybody wants to talk about right now.
What inspired you to set the book then?
In the Jim Crow society, its all about the binaries.
So what does it mean to be outside of that binary?
And then, what does it mean to leave that town?
Ive heard you talk about how the town was based in part on stories your mom told you.
She mentioned offhandedly this place she remembered from her childhood.
There was something so strange and really striking about the implications of that.
I was interested in this town as a mythological space.
Its a place that has been filtered down to you from somebody elses memory.
I remember seeing the movieImitation of Lifewhen I was a child, which is about a white-passing character.
Its also a thing you just pick up on that nobody has to tell you.
I was aware of who is considered attractive, who is considered desirable, whos considered smart.
Twins are so useful narratively.
Theres the mythological component twins are important in a lot of different myths.
And both of their lives are shaped by witnessing the same act of senseless violence when they were young.
The idea of them witnessing his murder was in fairly early drafts.
Thats different than what she had experienced as a black woman growing up in the Jim Crow South.
And shes always kind of doing it wrong.
Even beyond that, I didnt want current white readers to be able to separate themselves from these characters.
Sometimes thats what you risk when you have white characters who are very obviously, cartoonishly bigoted.
These characters are pleasant.
They would never burn a cross on somebodys lawn.
They have values that are much more similar to most contemporary white American readers.
Thats whats useful about the good white people community Stella joins.
It doesnt allow the reader to look away.
Were those the sort of white people you grew up around?Yeah, that was my experience.
I grew up in Northern San Diego.
I had white friends growing up, I had white teachers who mentored me.
We had lots of white neighbors who were very kind to us.
And I think about how unusual that is in the history of my family.
My parents didnt grow up with white friends.
As adults, as co-workers and colleagues, they gained white friends.
So I learned race differently than they did, and differently than my grandparents did.
Youd have a much easier time learning to be white than Stella does.I think so.
For Stella, its not like she grew up watching TV.
They didnt have access to this white world theyre really sealed away from it.
And its not only that shes become white, but that shes entered this upper-class world.
Shes passing during the civil rights and post civil-rights movement, at a time in which integration is increasing.
So her performance of whiteness is always wrong, its always one step behind.
If we cant even know the categories which we cant.
We dont know peoples gender, or their race, we just make these assumptions.
Theres nothing inevitable about these categories.
And so the passing character is really transgressive and maybe even kind of liberatory.
When Stella becomes a white woman, shes not attacking white supremacy.
She actually ends up embodying white supremacy to get to maintain her role as a white woman.
But at the same time, reading the novel, Stella seems so unhappy.
When I was a kid, and I watchedImitation of Life, I found that movie so baffling.
Why would somebody do this?
Why would you just decide that you want to be white?
I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that movie, which is a very moralizing story.
I didnt want to do that I just dont think that makes interesting fiction.
But at the same time I did want to think about what Stella is losing by passing.
But the idea of what shes losing was the most interesting.
Losing her family, her connection to her sister, her connection to her home.
Shes got this hollow center, because this whole section of her life she cant talk about with anybody.
Ive been really fortunate.
Im an outlier, compared to what I saw on Twitter.
But I hope its a moment of reckoning for the book world.
Weve seen this influx of anti-racist reading lists.
And even for myself, my novel is not Howto Be An Antiracist,its notWhite Fragility.
Its not something I wrote to teach people anything.
And I think thats good.
Two of our greatest living American writers right now are Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward.
How do you not read those people if youre reading contemporary American fiction?
Its the images, its the rhythm of the sentences, in addition to the ideas.
*An earlier version of this piece misidentified the author Nella Larsen.
