Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Junot Diaz

In these writers’ fictional worlds there are only brown people and white people (The Namesake); or only black folks and white folks in the world (The Colour Purple); or only Chinese people and white people in the world (The Woman Warrior)…In these books, the communities of colour have white folks as their sole interlocutors. What about conversations between different communities of colour? It’s pretty rare that you come across a book like, for eg, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which featured a white family, a brown family and a black family.

This lack of real diversity, Díaz argued, creates The Wheel of Tyranny (and if he was here to draw this for us he would), where communities of colour circle constantly around a hub that is white folks, while never communicating with each other. Díaz suggested that in reflecting the experience of other people of colour in our work, we create a home for each other in our art; we show each other that we exist.

And he says this about race, racism, masculinity, and ‘decolonial love’ as pertaining to his work in Previous page | Next page