Writing the other requires knowledge and empathy. It’s possible to learn both. One of the pleasures of being a human is the ability to learn from another person’s experience in addition to your own.

Sure, I sometimes get tweaked when my own cultural stuff is appropriated, but I have no right to do so. It’s not like it was an entitlement gifted to me at birth. Somebody made it up in the first place!

If I were to only write the non-Other, with the settings of my stories reflecting only the make-up of the people in my life, my work would be filled with middle-class white people, with a smattering of non-whites and other classes, mostly as background characters. However, considering most of my stories center around three or fewer characters, non-whites could easily disappear entirely.

Getting some of the details wrong is, in my opinion, a lesser crime than erasing the existence of the Other entirely. Besides, the Other is more interesting than I am; after all, I’ve already been there, done that, when it comes to my own native culture.

A tangent: is the insistence of some people that writers only write the culture they know like the insistence of some people that we should fix all problems (at home, in the city, on Earth, …) rather than (go to work, build a ring road, go to Mars, …)? It seems to me to be rooted in the same sorts of fears: don’t make new mistakes/waste valuable effort when there are old mistakes to correct/situations needing attention already under your nose.

Here in Brazil we have the same problem. When Ben Bova wrote “Mars”, he implied that we have Indians walking on the streets of our major cities. Unfortunately, that is very far from truth. Native Brazilians are mostly dispossessed people, living in reservations or in slums on the outskirts of the North Region cities, near the Amazon. (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, for instance, are approximately 4000 km from Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas)

As historian Homi Bhabha says, it is much easier to talk from our cultural location. But that is for historical reports. For us writers, as much as it is for actors (I´m a writer now but I was an actor for the theatre a decade ago), the question is “how can we put ourselves in The Other´s shoes?” For we must. Otherwise, how can we tell stories?

Even though Brazil is a country full of very good writers from all walks of life, we are still afraid of doing that, however. Only from the 1980s on we are beginning to have books published by Afro-Brazilian writers, and a small handful of books (mostly YA books) by Native Brazilian writers. Unfortunately, most of these books are still restricted to the retelling of mythos (the Native Brazilian examples) and the life in favelvas (the Afro-Brazilian writers). We still don´t have black and Indian SF/Fantasy/Horror writers in Brazil yet.

Flip things around for a moment: Does Thomas Sowell have any right to have his comments on race relations in America — and, in particular, relations among social strata disproportionately composed of racial elements (e.g., the urban poor) — taken seriously by anyone just because he is melaninically enhanced? Or, as a closer question, how about multimillionaire Al Sharpton, who at least maintains some personal contact with the urban poor who share his ethnicity? I personally think the answer to both questions is “no,” but I base that on the cognitive dissonance between what these two individuals say and do, on the one hand, and reputable scholarship on those issues on the other.

In short, visible authenticity is just a means of cavalierly dismissing competitors in the current buyer’s market of publishing and public discourse. There are more authors and would-be pundits than our current communications infrastructure can distribute to their satisfaction (and I don’t just mean the editorial process, either…). Whether proponents of visible authenticity admit it to themselves or not, the meme fulfills the same function as any other mindless means of excluding potential competitors from the market, and doesn’t require awareness of its “rational actor” foundations to work that way.

<sarcasm> Besides — these days, is there a difference between “John Updike” (IMNSHO, one of the most overrated of the current generation of American auteurs blanc-gris) and “unpublished”? </sarcasm>