MFA vs POC vs Peter Sagal

 

~by Matt Kessler

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Junot Díaz’s recent New Yorker article, MFA vs POC, caused a stir upon its publication last month. The article attacks the Cornell MFA program that he attended and the MFA system at-large for being too white. “Too white,” he explains, “as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism.”

Many readers disparaged Díaz as a complainer who took for granted his prestigious education, his numerous accolades, and the role that his graduate degree played in facilitating his success.

They argued that Díaz, himself, was the racist.

Consider the comments posted on the New Yorker website:

If Díaz had any talent at all, any originality, he would be writing something profound. He is rather a mouthpiece for the boring and boorish. I am offended by his comments. Díaz is a racist.

Poor Junot.  With only a Pulitzer, a MacArthur, and an MIT professorship to his name, he has been very oppressed.

Sounds like Díaz is sorry for his color.

Like Junot Díaz, I applied to six MFA programs… and like him, I wound up at Cornell… I’m not sure whether to feel bad for Díaz that he can’t count his blessings (goodness knows, he’s had enough of them) or to be disgusted with him for being so whiny.

I apologize for being white and attending Cornell. Shame on me.

Actually, let me go further: I apologize for my existence.

I had to respond to this article for a college course and I’d like to say that this article is a joke…Learn to recognize that race isn’t a real problem until we choose to acknowledge it as one. If we could all just shut up about it, then it wouldn’t still exist.

These comments are written by New Yorker readers who, according to stereotype, are well-educated, well-read and left-wing. Why are they reacting so virulently to his criticism of the MFA system?

Díaz’s article is a response to MFA vs NYC, a book of essays that caused a similar stir upon its publication in February. MFA vs NYC depicts the rising prominence of the MFA system and the subsequent split of the American literary establishment into two competing poles: MFA-world (academia) and the world of big publishing (New York City). In the titular essay, Chad Harbach argues that “this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures… Each culture has its own canonical works and heroic figures; each has its own logic of social and professional advancement.”

Harbach’s point is important: The rising importance of the MFA system is affecting American fiction, and its collective values impact the career paths of young writers. Absent from his otherwise excellent essay, however, is any mention of race.

“In my workshop,” Díaz writes, “there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force… In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all.” Similarly, MFA vs NYC, a book of nineteen essays, ignores the impact that the burgeoning MFA system has upon writers of color. Díaz’s article is an angry public response to this omission.

But this still doesn’t answer the question: Why does Díaz’s article make readers so mad?

The article’s critics believe that Díaz exaggerates his encounters with racial prejudices. How could Díaz, an MIT professor, a MacArthur grant recipient, and one of the most highly esteemed voices in American fiction, possibly be affected by racism?

I’d like to point these critics to Díaz’s Chicago Humanities Festival presentation in 2013. As the honored guest, he was interviewed by Peter Sagal of Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me.  (find the entire interview here.) Here are Sagal’s opening comments:

Sagal: Welcome to this evening’s presentation of two bald guys from New Jersey. This is actually true. You’re from Perth Amboy, right?… And I’m from a town called Berkeley Heights…

Díaz: Yeah, I delivered three pool tables there.

Sagal: What I like to imagine, well—  We weren’t there quite the same time, and we never had a pool table, but I love the idea like a truck pulls up and in walks these Dominican guys —

Díaz: Nah, it was me and an African-American dude.

Sagal: OK. And deliver to this you know suburban house where there’s this Jewish kid that’s going to Harvard and it’s like freeze it— Which of these is going to win a MacArthur Genius grant? [Points at Junot Díaz.]

Racist subtext drives Sagal’s introduction. The scenario is meant to be humorous: the irony of a poor Dominican achieving more than an entitled white student. But as an introduction at a prestigious event, the scenario insidiously reminds the audience of the social prejudices connected to Díaz’s ethnicity, and reasserts racist misconceptions about Dominican career expectations and achievements.

Later in the interview, Sagal says:

Basically, this is what I knew about Dominicans before I read your book: Some of them are really good at baseball. And that when I was, many, many years ago in the mid-90s, looking at an apartment in Washington Heights, somebody I knew who lived up there said— and this was the nicest guy in the world, you know, who as they say, not a racist bone in his body— and he said to me, “One thing you’ve got to be careful of, a lot of Dominicans live up here. They’re pretty loud. Their food, I don’t know, it smells not good.” Right? That’s it. That was the extent of my knowledge of the Dominican experience. And then I read Short Wondrous Life. And I’m like, “Holy shit.” It’s not like, “Oh wow. They’re people too.” But I didn’t know anything about the Dominican Republic [and its history, culture, etc] and reading your book it’s like, “Oh there’s everything. There’s this rich life. There’s this astonishing thing going on behind the facade that I was too self-involved to look behind. … So, whether or not you want to have done that… You did, I think, say, this is your community. These are the people who live in your cities.

Your cities?

Sagal makes two gross assumptions: that Díaz’s fictive output is an attempt to explain, or legitimize, Dominicans; and that, as American cities are white cities, it is the onus of the immigrant writer to humanize himself to his white reader/ruler. As Hilton Als writes in White Girls, “The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought: first, because blackness has almost always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard, and second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell— a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt.” Sagal subjects Díaz to this very interpretation, a reductive interpretation grounded in White Supremacy, an interpretation that an author such as Donna Tartt (another guest that year) would never be forced to counter.

At the end of his Chicago Humanities Festival presentation, Díaz said:

Who doesn’t have to struggle with trying to make the operations of racism clear?… You bring up race and suddenly it’s like you’re at the convention of Holocaust Deniers… Like people will literally be like, “Oh slavery? That was class. Not race.”… I think that the malign effects of White Supremacy, I think the toxic structures which were created to preserve the privileges of the constituents who most benefit from White Supremacy, still have to [be] confront[ed] in all of our societies, in all of our families, the way that White Supremacy lives inside of all of us… Look, we’re not talking about White folks. White Supremacy is a system that connects to everyone… So I just think that systems have to be confronted and we’re still far from this, but to pretend that one group or another is somehow excused, is absurd.

Included in that rubric is the MFA system. And the MFA vs POC article is Díaz’s attempt to confront and make clear the systematic racial prejudices that need to be improved to better foster young writers of color. If Díaz is telling the world that he and his classmates of color had a negative experience, why would readers doubt him? What motive would he have for lying?

Díaz writes: “I can’t tell you how often students of color seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they’re facing in their programs, from both their peers and their professors.” Rather than consider his comments, his critics have attempted to devalue them with ad hominem attacks that belittle Díaz as an “ungrateful whiner.” The attacks must be seen for what they are: hollow denials of the systematic impact of racial prejudice, obstacles that Díaz has overcome by being twice as good. The need to adjust and improve the MFA system is urgent, especially as it exerts an increasingly dominant impact on the future of American fiction.

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Matt Kessler lives in Chicago. He’s an incoming MFA student (Fiction) at the University of Mississippi. His articles have appeared in Candy, Vice, ReadyMade and Hit It Or Quit It. His blog can be found at: www.matt-kessler.com.