Write Like Your Life Depends On It

For the first time with any of my blog articles, I don’t plan on yelling at you, talking to you like I am a disappointed parent, or distracting you with humor/sarcasm so you can make it through my writing. This is some much needed girl talk, guy talk, or they talk with my fellow writers. When is the last time you wrote something radical? Of course, I mean radical as in something that defies convention and challenges the status quo. Radical writing is one of the most powerful tools that marginalized people can use. I recently just finished reading a book titled What Truth Sounds Like written by Michael Eric Dyson. The book highlighted many Black or African American radical writers such as James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry who were and are important to social revolution here in the United States. As writers, I think it is our responsibility to write radically. Don’t get me wrong, reading your thoughts about the significance of Independence Day in the United States is interesting, but it would be nice if you also wrote about how freedom did not benefit everyone the same way in America and then write about what would real freedom would look like. Regardless of what space you exist in as a writer including teaching, screenwriting, policymaking, or any of the various writing spaces, radical writing can make a positive difference in the world.

As a Black, queer person living on stolen land built by humans who look just like me, I think my writing naturally comes off as radical at times as a survival tactic. For example, I don’t have the luxury of writing about the education system without also including the experiences of Black people or even poor people in this country. I have read articles in class that offer suggestions to assist students in writing, but there is rarely evidence of how the research benefits students with disabilities or other students who might have barriers to learning. I would like to think radical writing encompasses all experiences or at least makes an attempt at doing so.

Coming up in high school and sometimes even in college, I really didn’t feel like I was encouraged to write radically. I was never given a chance to write about the Stonewall riots or the race massacre in Tulsa but thank goodness I got to write about Macbeth because every modern teenager can relate to that. How can a teacher even say they care about their students when they don’t even give their students space to write radically about the world they live in? It’s downright preposterous to even think about a teacher asking Black and Indigenous students to give written responses to whitewashed history of slavery in this country. Even as I got older as a student, I think I was still hesitant to write about race, sexuality, gender, and social issues in a radical way because I was afraid of teacher backlash. I know especially in high school, the teachers don’t have much control over what is read in the classroom, but they need to at least prompt students to respond to the conventional texts radically.

People who write in film, television, gaming, and etc. also need to be more radical in the way they tell stories. Writers are still creating stories that center white people or whiteness in general instead of incorporating other experiences that people have. Most recently, I would say the most radically written television series to be released is HBO’s Watchmen with the way it depicts sexuality, law enforcement, race, and gender. For example, the show portrayed the Tulsa race massacre in a raw way instead of some watered-down version that would probably be more palatable to most white viewers. When people see content like Watchmen it will force people to deeply self-reflect about the world we live in and hopefully move towards radical change. More radical writing in media would also include more diverse types of people in the writing rooms to help tell stories authentically.

We need more radical policy writers as well if we are truly going to take care of our fellow humankind because “all lives matter” right? So why don’t our policies reflect that same sentiment? Just recently the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair Act was passed in California stating that Black people could not be discriminated against for the style or texture of their hair. It’s sad that we even need to have policy for Black people to just wake up and wear the hair that grows out of their head like everyone else. That is just the start of radical writing in policy making because there are so many other groups who need support including houseless populations, trans people, individuals existing within the prison system, and the list unfortunately goes on.

Someone’s reading what you have to say (just like you had to unfortunately drag yourself through this article), so show your fellow human some love and use your writing to move us all forward because none of us are in this alone. No, you don’t always have to write radically because that would just be draining and you’re not a sewer, right? That’s right, you’re a writing radical, now go push the envelope like you work for the post office!