One problem might be that not all racial slurs are equally charged? Compare nigger and mick.

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The idea that RAC members use racial slurs in meetings.  Transgressing the taboo on those words helps members not lapse back into impression management.

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I could have the main character be a huckster that just hits on the idea and is converted by it. Someone like Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club: someone just trying to figure out race for himself, but discovers a desperate hunger in the white community for something more real.

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I need scenes.

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The show The Office has a diversity day episode. It was so hard to watch until Kelly slapped Michael, and it somehow got real.

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I heard once in a PBS documentary that Bill Clinton is the most comfortable white man around blacks. I don’t remember ever being comfortable. I’m so worried I will offend that it haunts all my interactions. What is Bill’s secret?

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What if RAC starts simple? Just a guy forced to attend diversity training twice at work, which prompts  him and his friend to start trying stuff. They do “field trips”. The intuition is that they need to be able to “feel” race. They go to black Christian fellowship groups (like the one in the Netflix documentary The Family). They go to a black church that was blown up. They visit border detainees, stay in a plantation re-creation, they go to the islands off Africa where ships left from. They accept the “I forgive you for slavery certificate” from a black right-wing politician. They head toward whatever experience is most cringy.   

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I was thinking about Fight Club as a model. In a lot of ways, it is a message story. It also ties in with 12 step programs.

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If I tried to go the narrative route, are there any message stories to draw on? Borges draws on philosophic concepts. Although in Borges, he’s not arguing anything. His stories aren’t created to expound a philosophy. Philosophy is a prop for the story. Borgesian fiction is the exact opposite of what I’m trying to do.

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I have no characters for RAC. What if the club is the character?

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But while the diagnosis is clear, the solution is obviously much harder. I do think it essentially comes down to character. You cannot have Socratic mouthpieces. These need to be characters that you make the reader feel are real, that we have known or can recognize as true to our lived experience. You need to think about who these people in your story are. Sit down and think about their backstories and what has brought them to the present moment of your story. Ask yourself what their greatest fear or hope is. What’s their greatest shame? What’s their biggest wound in life, or their greatest joy? Where did they grow up and why is that significant? What’s the one thing they’ll be thinking about or remembering on their death bed? Not all of this will actually appear in the story, but they will help you get to know your characters. These questions will give context and complexity to the way in which you write/present them in the present narrative of your story. -WF

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I count myself, until the publishing of this essay, as having a very manageable racism problem?

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My brother and I had an uncomfortable encounter doing some fine dining at the Brown hotel in Louisville. Our waiter was white, but his assistant was an older black man. At some point, the assistant came up to clean the table. He complimented us on our suits, complaining that nowadays a lot of people abuse the dress code. He made a bit of small talk and left, but what was uncomfortable was the feeling that he was aping for us. It is interesting that an exaggerated display of deference made us feel as ashamed as being called out

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In the nineties when I was in high school, my stepfather listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh on AM radio. One day I was walking through the kitchen and Rush was discussing the reparations question. He had a guest on the show whose name I wish I could remember. The guest, as a prominent black businessman, thought the idea of reparations was ridiculous and promised to send anyone who contacted him a certificate pardoning them for slavery. The idea seemed so preposterous to me, but there was also poetry in it as it perfectly embodied a white fantasy.

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When did the word racist get coined? When was it first leveled as an accusation?

Merriam Webster says 1902 but does not give the instance. the online etymology dictionary has a fuller account but no original instance.

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Actually, Pynchon of all people has one of the best lines about this. In one of his very few nonfiction writings about his work, he talks about an early short story he wrote titled Entropy. Entropy, of course, is the central Pynchonian metaphor and a concern for all of his mature work, but early on he tried to write a story about it with the word in the very fucking title and he has this great line about it: “The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol, or abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.” -WF

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Title: Recovering from Racism
My proposal is that we start working on racism using a recovery paradigm. The kind used to fight physiologically deep problems like alcoholism. I don’t think racism has the same physiological basis but is culturally very deep. Not only is it deep like alcoholism. There is an incredible amount of guilt, shame, and denial surrounding both the term racist and alcoholic. What I love about programs like AA is first owning the problem. Everyone gets up and says ‘My name is <blank> and I’m an alcoholic’. This seems so simple but is actually quite hard. Many in recovery have been in denial for years with both themselves and those that love them. They have given all kinds of qualifications. You have probably heard a million of these excuses. I drink a lot, but I’m not a drunk. I like to have fun. It isn’t affecting my job. I drink but it is definitely under control. You get the idea. And just like with racism, there is usually someone to point at that has a bigger problem than you, which is why you never start working on your problem. Saying you’re an alcoholic in AA is not meant to make all drinking problems seem like they have the same severity. It is the acknowledgement of a common struggle. A recognition of the struggle and therefore the ability to improve.

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Sometimes when someone is doing something that annoys you, it is difficult to imagine that they aren’t doing it specifically to annoy you.

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Who would think up the Racists of America Club? There he is right now on that park bench, spilling ice cream on his shirt. Progress is wrought by imperfect vessels and there was none more imperfect than Donald. 

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(Another piece of dialogue. I’m not clear on the context.)
-You should come to a meeting.
-I’m not sure I’d know what to say.
-Just come, listen. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to, but you probably will. I hardly ever know what I’m going to say, but once I hear other people share, something always comes up. Most of us live lives rich with shame about race.

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Yes, this is a common issue for a lot of writers, especially people newer to fiction, though we all face it. I see it with my students sometimes: they want to write the “Message Story” that feels like it has a thesis statement. They lead with it, but then remember they’re supposed to tell a story so they try to paste some one-dimensional characters and plot onto their sexy idea after the fact. -WF

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I lost a coat as a kid when we were staying in a hotel in the southwest. I’d been playing with another kid staying there on the hotel’s sportcourt. The boy was Mexican. When the coat went missing my dad asked me where I thought it was. I told him the Mexican boy probably stole it. My dad called me on that assumption immediately and that same day he found my coat in the hotel’s lost and found. My dad bringing it to me mentioned it was probably the boy that turned it in.

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(an attempt at dialogue, I’m viewing this as the founder being interviewed by a reporter)
-How do you try to “escape” racism?
-Mostly by talking. We each share a little something. It could be something going on at the moment. It could be something from the past that a person is working through. The important part is that it’s not judged. Each person says what’s in their heart. They learn to trust the group. One guy has a black guy at work he’s having problems with. One girl has a story from when she was ten years old that she is still ashamed of.  

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I have a question about the Racists of America Club. I’ve been working on it like I said. I seem to have gotten into it by opening it as an interview. Right now it doesn’t have the bite of a real story though. It is more akin to one of the Socratic dialogues in Plato in which the star is the idea less than the characters discussing the idea. I think one of the problems of the story for me is that I actually believe in the idea too much. It is not like a real interrogation. I’m too one-sided about it. Have you ever had this problem writing a story? Maybe I should be writing an essay instead? Help! -BW

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Talking to a reporter:
So this is my point, there are a lot of people out there that are a little racist, but don’t think of themselves as racist. In fact, my guess is most of the racism in America is of this sort. There are very few people that even in private conceive of themselves as racists. I would also guess given that our difficult 400 years of race relations that nobody has been untouched by that history. Struggling with race is in our cultural DNA. Calling somebody a racist is basically calling them American.

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The reason I can’t write the story is that I believe in the idea too much. It would be the same as writing one dimensional characters that are surrogates for pure good or evil. I don’t have the ability to interrogate the idea.

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There was a woman at the meeting. She was older with a huge Elvis caricature on her t-shirt. I wouldn’t have noticed it, but the pompadour fell right across her large breasts. Every time she moved or spoke Elvis’ coif bobbed up and down.

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I’m having trouble starting from the beginning. I could start in the middle at an actual meeting. Or maybe a reporter interviewing one of the founders.

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I thought an early humorous episode by the founders would be to have them create a list of white guilt/shame provoking outings. They would call them field trips.

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I was thinking about plot points for the story.
-origin story
-the club’s first black member
-a visitor misunderstands the club to be a solidarity club not a recovery program
-media attention
-a pc crusader visits the meeting
-a meeting is protested
-founders brainstorm how to adapt the 12 steps
-a nationwide tragedy happens like a Charlottesville, police killing, or a black church shooting

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Like AA, the Racists of America Club needs some corny slogans that the members embrace. A few ideas…. “excavate the unsaid”, “call in racism”. They could also start their meetings with something like
Honkey, honkey, honkey
Nigger, nigger, nigger
Kike, kike, kike
Spic, spic, spic
Goomba, goomba, goomba
Mick, mick, mick
Chink, chink, chink

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The pitch, “What if there was a group that didn’t try to cure you of racism, but presumed you were a racist–that was the assumption? Instead of teaching you to be “sensitive”, it went the other direction and asked you to say the stuff that you weren’t supposed to say, how you actually experience race, when you were conscious of it. You could say anything. It needs to be like a recovery program. There isn’t a person in America that doesn’t need to recover from racism.”

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A white guy gets the idea for the Racists of America club after a required diversity training at work. He attended the same training twice due to an administrative error. The first time, he is mostly silent. The second time, he knows the things he is supposed to say and, not being remembered by the trainer, is praised for his answers to questions. Leaving the meeting though, he feels nothing is really accomplished by either his first training where it was too risky to say anything, or the second meeting that was merely performative. He goes and talks to his buddy, one of those guys who is down for anything, and pitches the idea of a club for racists.

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The Racists of America Club is a story I have been trying to write. I envisage the club in the style of an AA meeting, confessional. The club assumes that racism is in everyone in the US. It is something to be worked on with mutual support, not something that you call out and shame. I love the way people in AA really own being an alcoholic. That admission and the shared struggle help its members recover from the trauma of addiction.

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