Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
Rudyard Kipling, 1899
The discourse this summer has decided that we need to debate why white men don’t read novels and/or why we don’t read novels by white men, and why white men think the way they think about being white men.
White men are having a moment. But it’s a moment shaped by grievance over a perceived loss of power and influence, rather than a sincere investigation of masculinity or whiteness. The most recent manifestation of this grievance is in the world of literature, where white men have dominated what we read for a few centuries. In her book The History of White People, the historian Nell Irwin Painter refers to whiteness as “a default category, the absence of race.” Whiteness, she adds, is “not a kinship or a culture but a power relationship.” And who grieves the loss of power more than the person who’s always taken it for granted?
Academia has been discussing the idea of decolonization for decades. But like most discussions in academia, its application in real life is hard to conceptualize. We talk a lot about decolonizing our syllabi, but restorative justice and reframing how we understand the world isn’t a game of chess where you simply move one piece off of the board and replace it with another.
Amy Sherald, A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt), 2022
I can take every white male author of my course reading lists, but that means erasing books like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, one of the most important books for understanding the systemic forces behind American poverty, or not showing Robert Reich’s documentaries, which are often filmed on campus at Berkeley, reminding my students that sometimes the work we do in class has real world applications. Also they just think it’s fun to see the campus where they’re studying in a movie. But even if I do these things, that still doesn’t erase my own very visible whiteness or the education I myself received, which was loaded with people like Kipling, even if we were reading him back to back with Audre Lorde.
All of that is just school, and what educators do, think and feel is largely irrelevant to any kind of substantial policy change. The fact that it is supposedly harder for a white man to get a publishing deal for literary fiction is really just a kind of course correction, not an extinction level event. White men will still write and publish novels, often about World War II or whatever kind of major depressive episode the work of Ian McEwan is designed to produce, or autofiction, or whatever people are doing these days in fiction MFA programs. If people are reading fewer novels by white men, it’s also because people are just reading less literary nonfiction, period. If Jonathan Franzen has fewer readers, so does Rachel Kushner. And again, outside of academia and the New York Review of Books and debates on Substack, the larger question remains: so what?
Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Sometimes – rarely – you can see decolonization working in real time. In West Berkeley, a shellmound was recently returned to the Ohlone tribe, but the shellmound is under a parking lot in a high end shopping district. We can return the land, but what kind of shape have we hammered it into?
In my attempts to learn guitar, I’ve been frustrated to find that most of the singer-songwriter stuff I can play with the half dozen chords I know is by white guys. I attempted Steve Lacy’s Bad Habit and scrolled through a million Prince songs only to be reminded that Prince was a genius-level songwriter who didn’t stick to A, D, E, G and C chords, and that Bad Habit is mostly a good song because of the swagger Lacy brings to it. It does not sound great coming out of my guitar.
Can I decolonize the history of American song? Not on my own. I need people like Rhannon Giddens, Don Flemons and my friend Mark Montgomery French to help me do that. But even people like Giddens and Flemons are slotted into a category of old timey music that doesn’t matter much to the mainstream. Their audience is small and specialized. That’s why you see them on PBS. Bluegrass is a kind of literary fiction of its own, a genre created that’s the result of the collision of white immigration and Black slavery, but one that has mostly become the territory white musicians and white audiences. Country music has made a little bit of room for Beyonce and Shaboozey. But the self-mythologizing of country music remains the same: boots, trucks, and white people getting drunk.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
I don’t think the solution is to just stop listening to, reading, or watching films made by white men. The solution is maybe instead to think about what it means when we only listen to, read or watch things made by white men. The same is true with literature: you can learn a lot from fiction, but you can learn even more from nonfiction, and quite a lot of nonfiction is frankly better written than fiction these days. You can spend your whole life listening to only one genre of music, but that leaves you missing out on the dazzling map of influences that can lead to things you’ve never heard before. The rapper Big Boi’s favorite artist is the eccentric white singer/songwriter Kate Bush. Bob Dylan doesn’t exist without Chuck Berry. Willie Nelson likes collaborating with Snoop Dogg, who says Willie’s weed is too strong for him.
One of my favorite musical discoveries of the past few years is the piano-playing Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who died in 2023. It’s not the kind of music I’d normally like, but something about it brings me a sense of tranquility that’s sorely missing lately. The same can be said for the British/Sierra Leonian musician Duval Timothy. Pushing the boundaries of my often static taste in music genres means I am self-decolonizing, but I’m following my instincts rather than a syllabus. We have to feel our way out of cultural dead ends.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley, Maxine Hong Kingston and the experimental novelists Ishmael Reed were teaching in the English department at the same time. They couldn’t be more different stylistically. But there was room for both of them alongside scholars of Shakespeare, John Donne, Montaigne, and whatever else bubbled up from the western canon. White men conquered literature, and we can’t erase that. But we can see what it happens when we put their work side by side with people who have historically been silenced. Who knows, maybe it might even sound good.