h’s Reviews > White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination > Status Update

whiteness seeing its end (preppers); allowing endings to become beginnings for repairing the race problem; guns as ritual objects collecting dust (until threats of minority race war come about); avoidance as absolution; i tried to be nonracist, but the world was not kind enough; there is no reward to making things better, it is only what it is

cynicism (depression, but productivity, the color exits from life); the wes anderson sanitization of melancholy (white male experience); emo as the white blues - a melody for the misery; juxtaposition of the "loud" racial minority to the overly repressed white; racism's damage to white people, for self restraint is a virtue; offense with a use; work is between life and death; minority inspo fetish

passivicity of white mannerisms; filling space as resistance - emptiness as a virtue; the mental space race takes; suffering as culture/americana for black people; white only spaces being devoid of love; microaggressions - "artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside;" blank canvases for projection; society that works - how it was sacrificed to the visibility of black residents; encountering diversity in the city

private spaces; man-made emptiness (via genocide); barriers of the imagination and suburbia; fiction as an art of choosing what Not to see; cushioning one's self from diversity; wilderness fetishization and being sold a prepackaged wilderness lifestyle; proxemics and white comfort; urban planning segregation; two individuals seeing the same space different ways

editing down - lish's distinctly white method of writing and prose; not communication, consumption; the untranslatability of selfhood and Being (and jesus), subsequently antimulticulturalism; white trash (nothingness) proximity / its written dialect as shame; white writers represent themselves but poc must represent their culture; racist confessions as footnotes seeking redemption: segregation from even loving poc

the nothingness left behind from destruction; the invisibility of racial minorities - albeit the hatred of them is obviously visible; racism as the desire to keep the other down, not expel or erase them entirely, and to benefit from that oppression; racism as original sin (everything's biblical isn't it?); whiteness as an identity created as mere opposition to blackness

what are we seeing - what are NOT seeing?; the way epiphanies don't erase the past, but the american public would love it if they did; presence of all words and all things, even the ones that make you uncomfortable; only "realizing" something when you are ready for it anyways

stories with race and without race (by whites where narratives aren't intentionally written with such, but have clear racial presences); the little man; reparation as more than repairing, but building something new, and better together