The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself

Starred review from October 31, 2022
Poet and critic Mura (The Last Incantations: Poems) delivers a searing collection of essays on race in America and how it’s treated in literature. Mura, a Japanese American, recalls growing up striving for assimilation and “wanting to be thought of as white”; in turn, he makes an urgent plea that white readers listen “to the narratives that the white versions of our history and our present leave out.” In “Whiteness in Storytelling: Amistad, the Film and the Novel,” Mura juxtaposes the Steven Spielberg–helmed film with its novelization by Alexs Pate to demonstrate how the same story can be told in strikingly dissimilar ways. In “Portraits of Slavery: Faulkner and Morrison,” meanwhile, looks at William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison’s Beloved for an examination of the “significant differences in the way the white imagination has dealt with the institution of slavery in contrast to the imaginative re-creations by Black American novelists.” The author bookends his collection with reflections on the killings of Philando Castile and George Floyd. Full of insightful analysis and powerful personal anecdotes, Mura’s top-notch cultural criticism delivers. Challenging and provocative, this one’s sure to stick with readers.

January 15, 2023
Fiery critique of how the semantics and signifiers of Whiteness maintain comforting historical illusions while upholding structural racism. In this wide-ranging and deeply felt narrative, Mura moves confidently among American history, literary critique, and social analysis, laying bare the secret terrors and coded defenses of being Black in America. Now in his 60s, the author brings a blended perspective to his subject. "I come to race as a Sansei, a third-generation Japanese American...mine was a family that fervently believed in an assimilation into Whiteness. The internment camps criminalized my parents' race and ethnicity." This background informs his central argument about the artificiality of traditional (White) narratives, dependent on smothering Black perspectives and experience under the crushing oppression of White supremacy. "The problem isn't what white people have done to Black people," writes the author, "but that Black people keep remembering what white people have done--and somehow that harms white people and victimizes them." Mura brackets the text with the police killings of Philando Castile and Daunte Wright, both of which occurred in Minnesota, the author's home state. Such violence, he writes, is "a direct result of the ways that whites have enforced and interpreted the dictates of race, the ways whites have tried to script not only their own lives but the lives of people of color." Mura examines the foundational racism of Jefferson and even Lincoln as well as the post-Civil War establishment of the Lost Cause myth as the legal underpinnings for Jim Crow. Other topics include the prescience of James Baldwin and how novelists including Jonathan Franzen and Toni Morrison choose to address race. Mura combines academic discourse, historical and literary analysis, and polemical outrage; the chapters build to a crescendo, using rhythm and repetition to return to uneasy, fundamental truths about American racial mythologies. While his discussion can be overly repetitive or didactic, it captures the guardedness that necessarily informs Black life in contemporary America. A highly useful, educative tool to navigate our weaponized racial discourse.

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