Identity Politics and American Dirt

I'm currently enjoying a wonderful novel by Jeanine Cummins titled American Dirt. It's a story of a Mexican mother and her eight year-old son whose family has been murdered by a drug cartel and who are fleeing to the border in a desperate attempt to reach the United States.

It's a suspenseful, well-written narrative that certainly engenders a lot of sympathy for refugees seeking to emigrate to the U.S., and was highly recommended by Oprah's Book Club, but apparently the book has a major flaw that I, in my blissful obliviousness, never recognized.

According to Libby Emmons at The Federalist the unpardonable sin committed by American Dirt is that it's written by a white, American woman who has no business telling a story about brown-skinned Latinxs because, well, she's not one of them. Cummins has even received death threats for her temerity in writing such a book.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Emmons' piece:

After its publication, Cummins and her story about a refugee mother fleeing Mexican drug cartels and crossing the U.S. border with her young son were flayed by critics and on social media. Cummins’s crimes? Not being Mexican while writing about a Mexican experience, using cultural stereotypes in describing her characters, and supposedly knowing nothing about her subject matter, despite her extensive, years-long research process.

This question of who is allowed to tell what stories is huge, and it will be interesting to see how the conversation goes on Oprah’s Book Club. In media, there has been basically one answer presented: Cummins should not have written the book. The consensus among podcasters, reviewers, and social justice critics is that she shouldn’t have been given the money, the go ahead, or the platform to tell this story.

For [several reviewers], “American Dirt” gave them emotional insight into the fear and difficulty of being a refugee from Mexico traveling north to the United States. But that very real feeling of being swept up in the story was then mitigated by their concern that they shouldn’t be feeling what they were feeling because they weren’t feeling it in the right way. Instead of being concerned for refugees and migrants, they realized their concern should be that someone who didn’t have the authority to espouse those feelings or create this artwork was affecting them.

[Some critics] resented Cummins’s platform, feeling more deserving authors should have written the story instead, or that a different story about migrants should have been published by someone who had more experience with that story.

If "more deserving authors" should have written the story one wonders why they didn't. Nothing was stopping them. The controversy over the authorship of American Dirt sounds very much like a fit of author-envy. The critics are perhaps jealous of Cummins' talent and success and wish they themselves had written her book. Instead they're left to snipe at it and call Cummins names.

Here's more from Emmons:

In the current climate of identity culture, the book never had a chance. White writers who write outside of their ethnic or racial background will be skewered on long sticks and roasted over the fires of social media.

Meanwhile, these writers who are steeped in leftist culture know that their highest calling is to write with an eye toward social justice, political advocacy, and amplifying what are labeled as marginalized voices and experiences. The book can be good or the book can be bad, but that’s not really the issue at hand.

No, quality doesn't matter to the social justice types. All that matters to them is whether the author is of the proper race and gender and on the right side of the issue. Emmons concludes her article at The Federalist with these words:

The issue is whether Cummins should have been allowed to publish this story, if her blood gave her the authority to do it. That answer has roundly come down in the negative.

This is an abysmal result for the state of American literary arts. If the social justice mob does not permit an author to write the stories that compel her, she may as well toss out her quill for good. Race and ethnicity should not be qualifications for what stories a person can tell.

She's absolutely correct. Should Harriet Beecher Stowe never have written about slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin? Should critics have slammed the musical Hamilton since historically white characters were portrayed by African Americans? Should the recent PBS production of Les Miserables have been condemned because the French policeman Javert was played by a black actor and all the other French characters were played by Brits?

Where does the silliness of "cultural appropriation" end? Should Hispanics not play baseball and blacks not play basketball or football since their "cultures" didn't invent the games?

Should anyone from a non-white culture forgo the use of cell phones, automobiles, electric lights, air conditioning, airplanes and modern medicine since these and much else that's freely appropriated by non-whites were the inventions of whites and white culture?

If whites shouldn't write books about the experience of other cultures should modern historians refrain from writing about ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt? And if whites shouldn't write books about Mexican culture why should they not also be discouraged from reading books written by Mexicans?

The idea that only members of a particular race, gender or ethnicity can have the authority to speak on a topic that involves others of the same race, gender and ethnicity leads ultimately to the conclusion that no one should be permitted to write anything about anyone other than themselves. The only genre of art that would be acceptable, if the social justice mentality were carried to its logical conclusion, is autobiography.