By Claudia Rankine (adapted from her keynote at AWP 16)
“I asked Beth Loffreda, my coeditor on the Racial Imaginary, what questions she might bring up to her white collegues. Her response was to forward me the following list of questions and observations: “Do you invite mostly white writers for your visiting writers series, and assign mostly white-authored readings in your workshops, and nominate mostly white students for prizes and awards, all the while thinking you’re engaged in a benevolent form of meritocracy? I was once told by a white colleague who in a discussion about keeping the reading series diverse wondered if ‘we couldn’t take a break from that now.’” Loffreda also pointed out that reading assignments and visiting writer choices, “are public value judgments, are decisions about what writers and kinds of writing you value…. You’ve praised yourself and each other for recruiting students of color, and then your decisions upon their arrival say, ‘we don’t actually value writers who look like you; we value writers who look like us.’’’”
