Is It Possible to Write Without Bias?
No, and that's OK
*Apologies. This was supposed to come out this morning, not 11/27.
The honest and simple answer: No. Every human being contains bias within them. And when I say ‘every’ I mean all people of all races, genders, persuasions, identities, etc. It’s right to say that I (a white man) have zero idea what it’s like to be a black man. Therefore, were I to try to write from a black perspective (I haven’t and have no plan to), I would be out of my element. However, since I grew up in Southern California (Ojai) and am of the upper-middleclass, I also have no idea what it’s like to be a white working-class person in, say, West Virginia, where the opioid crisis has wreaked absolute havoc on those communities, who are mostly white and mostly in Trump Country. *(To repeat: I am NOT conservative.)
My point is: You can never know what it’s like to be someone else, even (maybe especially) someone who happens to share your skin color, racial makeup, ethnicity, class, etc. Why? Because we’re all essentially individuals, with our own genetic makeup, our own familial history, and including our own unique environmental factors which we experienced growing up. Certainly, an African American man who comes from the middleclass and above, and myself, would share much more in common than either of us would with a blue-collar, working-class white dude from West Virginia who lost his job in a coal mine.
The uncomfortable reality is that we all hold our own weird, specific biases. Like I said I am an upper middleclass white man from a small hippie mountain town 12 miles east of the Pacific Ocean, north of Los Angeles, nestled in the mountains. My father is a computer scientist and my mother taught nursing and wrote books. I was born on New Year’s Eve, 1982. I am an “Xennial,” as they call my age: A strange, mottled mix of the youngest Gen X with the oldest “original” Millennial group. (Think: 90s kid: dialup internet; grunge music; MTV; house phones; etc. My childhood was pre-Facebook, pre-iPhone, pre-Instagram. Late in high school I had my first flip-phone. When the first smart phone came out I was 24.) Ergo: I had all of these environmental and genetic factors pushing me in a certain direction. As Sam Harris opines often: Do we even really possess Free Will? Or are we fully driven by a mix of nature and nurture (especially in early childhood)?
My point here is: The path towards genuine conversation, intellectual honesty and authentic creative writing moves us to this statement: To communicate clearly and profoundly, we have to accept our own and each other’s biases, live with them, and be open about what those biases are. In my opinion, we shouldn’t judge each other for our natural biases when they emerge; we should discuss and critique them but also accept that we all have them. The most honest writers, artists, podcasters (like my favorite podcast, The Fifth Column), explain their biases up front. It seems popular right now for Group A to claim that they themselves don’t have any bias but certainly Group B has a plethora of biases. This is disingenuous, silly, and absurd. Own it!
Over the past couple years it has become more and more obvious that major legacy media publications like, say, The New York Times, have seriously dropped the ball in this area. Once the “paper of record” (and still incredibly worthy and important in many ways) the Times for the most part has seemed, over the last several years, like many others, to have unfortunately slipped into a sort of mega-biased, one-way sounding-board of We Know The Truth and ‘They’ are Bad and ‘We’ Are Good syndrome. (To be fair they did include John McWhorter as a columnist. Kudos for that!) The level of bias—oftentimes by omitting crucial stories if the race of the person didn’t fit the narrative (read: The crazy dude who ran people over with his car in Wisconsin during the Christmas parade)—has become disturbing. I know what you you’re thinking: What about the RIGHT?! I agree! The Right has clearly done a dovetail into not only sinister, creeping bias, but they have basically leapt into the flaming fires of madness altogether. Again: I am a moderate liberal. A centrist. A free-thinker. I choose the Middle Path, as the Buddha extolled us to do.
I know what my own personal biases are, and where my psychological blind spots lay. That doesn’t mean smart people couldn’t and haven’t pointed out new flaws, blind spots, chunks of ignorance on my behalf. It happens all the time, in fact. Because I am human. But so are you. And everyone else. So let’s embrace it and own it and allow everyone to express their views with their unique biases. Because the truth is we can’t change who we are. Not on a fundamental level. If this were possible the world would be a very different place. But we CAN gain self-awareness. Everything starts from that root; the tree that grows from this root we call wisdom.
When I hear people say that you need to write a certain person (usually a minority of some sort) “correctly” I feel sort of baffled. The idea undergirding this concept seems to suggest that everyone belongs not to themselves as individual human beings but to groups. You “are” your group. If you’re Black, you have The Black Experience. If you’re white you have The White Experience. If you’re Hispanic you have The Hispanic Experience. If you’re trans you have The Trans Experience. But this notion is insipid and ridiculously over-simplified. In reality we are all, each and every one of us, unique and particular souls. No one can EVER know exactly what it’s like to live someone else’s experience. If you gathered ten white people or ten trans people or ten Black people you’ll receive ten different perspectives.
This is in fact WHY writing—fiction, especially—is so powerful. Perhaps more than any other art form fiction allows us to get as deeply as possible into the “head” of another human being…in this case on the page. That is the point of writing: To attempt to imagine what it might be like to be someone else in the world. This necessitates great empathy. And yes, when doing this you should interview people in that universe; you should do your research. But. Every one of the people you research, or the people you meet online or in person, is an individual with their own particular life experience.
This is also being written by YOU, and you have your own unique perspective, as I have suggested. That should be praised not rejected. We’re trying to get someone or something “right” but at the same time we’re not simply recording exactness. No: Rather we’re telling a story. And that includes our own psychological imperfections. A large part of the joy of reading is inherent in this concept. This is not bigoted (sometimes of course there ARE cases like this, and yes, those should be rejected; this is usually pretty easy to spot) but merely your soul burning its imprint onto the page. We read to understand different views and perspectives; to empathize; to try to grasp the humanity of another individual in the world who isn’t us. And humans are incredibly weak and flawed and complex. Because all we do is spend time in our own brains, reading a novel is an act of spiritual selflessness and courage in a way. Because we leave ourselves for a while and inhabit the body and mind of another. We wear a prose-skin-suit as it were.
So, my adage is: Write what you know, or write what you don’t know, or write what you don’t know about what you know…but however you slice the turkey, with internal biases and all: WRITE.
MM