The Optics of Opportunity
The story of a literary fellowship that maybe wasn’t so strange at all
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“Hey, nigger, nigger, nigger,” Jackson Taylor, the writing instructor, called out, pointing his finger at me from across the Chelsea loft that had been renovated into our classroom. I and 13 writers had been invited to participate in a mysterious writing fellowship funded by the Barnes & Noble founder, Len Riggio. For our writing assignment, we had been tasked to complete the thought, “I remember…” A young black poet in his 20s had written and shared a syncopated poem whose rhythms bounced around the room. Buried in his poem, he’d quoted a title from a 1935 poem by Wallace Stevens, “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Taylor demanded to know why he, a white person, couldn’t use the n-word if this black writer could.
The Springing Center, as the fellowship would be called, had invited a group of emerging writers to use our work to engage and interrogate structures of power. We were Black, African, Indian-American, Asian-American, along with seven white writers from America, Russia and Portugal, and we had all been drawn together by the prestige of the Barnes & Noble name. Though the fellowship would run twice a week for a full six-weeks before disappearing in a puff of smoke, it was clear from the first class that, though we’d been tasked to examine power, questioning white power was forbidden.
With the n-word hanging in the air, the room froze. “I could hear that word on the street,” Taylor said, trying to cover his tracks as though pointing the n-word in my direction was merely in service of pedagogy and a class exercise. Daniel Gross, an Asian-American participant in the fellowship who recently reported on the workshop for the New Yorker in his piece, The Strange Story of a Secret Literary Fellowship, volunteered that, in the English language, the n-word has no equivalent. I pointed Taylor to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ video on the subject, reminding him that whiteness cannot be separated from the historical context of the n-word. Unoriginally, Taylor would not be swayed. He wanted to vote on whether he could use the word. “Absolutely not,” I said. A white woman on my left named Stephanie was visibly angry. Though, from the first day — like a scene out of a poorly scripted spy novel — we’d been forbidden…
