Spike Lee made me do it. Sort of.
I walked out of the theater in the summer of 1989, sat on a curb for a very long time (my adorable date went home without me!) and tried to get my head around Do the Right Thing. I’d never been so spun by a narrative, never so moved in so many ways. The film didn’t hip me to the realities of racial injustice. At the age of 19, I’d be down by then for as long I could remember, having been raised by righteous parents and privy to the African-American experience both culturally and personally. No, what happened that day, as I tried to make sense of Mr. Lee’s riveting film, was that I decided to become a storyteller myself, one who uses the narrative art form to explore crucial themes such as race.
A dozen years later I wrote my first novel, and it, like much else I’ve written since, was informed by the theme of race in America. The Domino Effect is the story of Danny Rorro, a charismatic kid from Queens caught in the cultural crossfire of his Italian-American enclave and an encroaching Latino population. The result for Danny is a trip to the hospital followed by exile to boarding school where his new roommate is an African-American scholar/athlete with decidedly mixed feelings about being the only kid of color in the school. While not the primary thrust of the novel, the relationship between Danny and his roommate allows thorough consideration of the complexity of being African-American in America.
My second novel, Outerborough Blues: A Brooklyn Mystery, is about a drifter of Italian-Irish descent who becomes an unlikely detective in an historic African-American neighborhood on the dawn of gentrification. The myriad characters of color, mostly black but not exclusively so, present many facets, with depth and breadth, of the minority experience in America. The sequel to this novel comes out later this year, and it continues with a similar emphasis on characters not represented enough in mainstream American literature, certainly not in titles penned by white writers.
So, why do I do it? Why in my fiction, and often in my column here at The Good Men Project, do I write about race? The story of Africans in America is the story of America. There is nothing that defines this country more than the complicated relationship we have had with race. It has been here from the day this country began, the day that declared all men as equal, but with an asterisk.
As I recently wrote,
How is it that this cornerstone of our democracy continues to be denied to people who have been here since day one? People who have helped build and defend and define this country in ways that far exceed their percentage of the population.
And the great hypocrisy has been evident since day one, inspiring our country’s greatest horrors and accomplishments, our greatest villains and heroes, our greatest shame and hope. Not to mention some of our greatest narratives. But the story of race is, at large, still a failed one in America, though the reckoning of racial injustice may finally be upon us. I certainly hope so, and I hope that the stories about race in America have been of help.
As a writer in America, I can’t imagine not being part of that story.
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Photo by James Eades on Unsplash