Truth is… I have ZERO tolerance for using slurs in nonfiction in order to demonstrate something occurred in the past.
As someone who has written a memoir, I’m aware that some words and actions that may have been acceptable back when aren’t now, and as a writer, how I approach that is a CHOICE.
In Voices Carry, I do write about a white friend I had as a child whose mother married a man of color. She was not biracial, but her siblings were. Being the early 80’s in Northern Florida, this was a big deal. To this day, areas of Northern Florida are very racist. The hatred her family suffered was eye-opening. When writing about this, I didn’t have to use the words slung at her mother and step-father in order to paint the scene and portray that hatred.
I bring this up because recently, I picked up a memoir where the author was setting the scene for her childhood. It was during the 60’s, aka the Civil Rights Movement. This author is a white woman and in her portrayal of the setting, she drops several horrific slurs. These were not racist characters in a fictional tale saying these words. These weren’t villains. Nor was this someone quoting the words of a real life person. These were words she as an author CHOSE to use in order to demonstrate that she grew up around racist people. She used the terms to describe people of color from ostensibly her point of view since it is her memoir and her memory.
She could have 100% written the scene without those slurs and portrayed the hate around her with both accuracy and impact. Instead, she chose to use those words to describe people around her.
When I was still teaching English classes, there were fiction books that used these slurs, but they were written in a time where that was more acceptable and they were used by fictional characters in order to demonstrate why hatred is wrong. There is a huge difference between that and someone casually using the words in a nonfiction piece to describe people of color.
Perpetuating hate is a choice, and in this case, it was an unnecessary one.
I’ve never DNF’d a book so fast in my life.
(DNF means Did Not Finish for those who didn’t know.)
