Literary pick for week of Feb. 5: David Mura’s new book
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It’s helpful when an author tells readers right up front what their book is about. David Mura does so on page 14 of “The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives” (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95). Here’s what he writes:
“…the themes of this book are fairly straightforward and readily understandable. In the history of America’s racial ontology, white people have created the categories of Whiteness and Blackness, and those categories continue to structure white identity. That identity is in part based on a belief in the myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictional stories white people tell themselves about themselves – that is, the stories Whiteness tells itself, especially abut our history, are not an accurate portrait of our history and yet they continue to structure white identity (white psychology) in the present. That identity is a psychological distortion based on a denial of what white people have done in our past and what they continue to do in the present.”
Mura is a widely-published third-generation Japanese American who admits he grew up wanting to be thought of as white, until he realized in his mid-20s he would never be white, leading him to investigate his own racial and ethnic identity. His previous books include the memoir “Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei” and “A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing.”
“The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself” is a mix of history, ethics and literature. For instance, Mura compares Steven Spielberg’s film “Amistad” to Alexs Pate’s novelization of the story about a slave ship. The movie focuses on white lawyers as saviors of the enslaved; Pate’s book is told from the viewpoint of one of the escaped men who has a family, a culture, a life.
Mura contrasts depictions of slavery in William Faulkner’s novel “Absalom, Absalom!” with Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and looks at the contemporary white literary imagination through Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom.”
He argues that it all goes back to slavery, the belief that Blacks were sub-human and therefore not even seen. During reconstruction, after the enslaved were freed, the myths just took a different form that still made people of color lesser and unworthy. The White story continued to erase the brutality, cruelty and lasting traumas of slavery.
But what is Whiteness? Mura replies:
“It is far more multifaceted than many recognize. In part, it consists of prescriptions and prohibition for white behavior and thought, a set of dos and don’ts and beliefs about our society. These behaviors and beliefs have served to protect and preserve the racial status quo from the very beginning of America – the ways power is distributed unequally and undemocratically in our society through the categories of race.”
Mura opens and closes his book with the deaths of Philando Castile and Daunte Wright, Black men who died at the hands of white police officers. He is prescient in his warning that it will happen again if Whiteness doesn’t change. (And it has happened again as we watch with horror the beating in Memphis of Tyre Nichols. Although the police officers involved in the killing were Black, they operated under a system created by Whites.)
Mura’s challenge to White people is bold: “…there is a clear psychological and spiritual process whites must undergo if they are to let go of the lies and evasions of Whiteness and create a new white identity that allows for the truth of who we have been as a country and who we actually are now.”
Mura will launch his book at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 8, hosted by Minnesota Humanities Center, 987 E. Ivy Ave, St. Paul, co-sponsored by University of Minnesota Press. Following a reading, Mura will be joined by his longtime friend Alexs Pate for a discussion about race, history, and education. Free: Guests are asked to register at: mnhum.org/event/mn-writers-series-stories-whiteness/.
Also on his reading schedule: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 15, in Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s free Fireside Reading series, Hamline-Midway Library, 1558 W. Minnehaha Ave., St. Paul; 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul; 7 pm. March 7, Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Mpls.; 7 p.m. April 27, East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St., St. Paul.
