If You Come Softly

1. If You Come Softly

2. Discussion Questions • How is blackness constructed in the text? • How is Jewishness constructed in the text? • How are issues of interracial and interfaith relationships handled here? • What about masculinity? • What role does nostalgia play? • This story is about upperclass, cultured, educated city dwellers. How does that effect the story? • Pg 134: “Thing about white people…they don’t know they’re white. They know that everybody else is, but they don’t know they’re white.” • Pg 174-175: Forgetting race • Alternating narrators and narration styles.

3. Contemporary YA Literature means… • There is going to be author access!

4. Woodson says: • “I feel compelled to write against stereotypes, hoping people will see that some issues know no color, class, (or) sexuality.” • “I wanted to write about communities of color, I wanted to write about girls. I wanted to write about friendship and all of these things that I felt were missing in a lot of the books that I read as a child.”

5. “How do you feel about people writing outside of their own experiences ? How do you feel about white people writing about people of color?”

6. “More than the question, it is the political context in which it is asked that is annoying. As our country moves further to the right, as affirmative action gets called into question, as race related biases against people of color soar, as the power structure in our society remains, in many ways, unchanged, why, then, would a person feel comfortable asking me this question?” • “When I asked my white writer friends how they answer this question, I was less than surprised to find that none of them had been asked. Why was it then that white people (because I have never been asked this by someone who was recognizably a person of color) felt a need to ask this of me? What was it, is it, people are seeking in the asking? What is it about the power structure our society was built and remains upon that leads a white person to believe that this is a question that I, as a black woman, should, can, and must be willing to address?”

7. “As I grow older, as the negative misrepresentations of people of color showed up again and again, understanding replaced the anger. I realized that no one but me can tell my story. Still, I wondered why others would want to try. When I say this, that a person needs to tell their own story, people argue that this view is myopic, that if this was the case, there would only be autobiography in the world.”

8. “I have just finished the final draft of a novel, If You Come Softly, about the love affair between two fifteen year olds. In the novel, the boy is black and the girl is white and Jewish. As I sat down to write this novel, I asked myself over and over why I needed to write it. Why did I need to go inside the life of a Jewish girl? More than the need, what gave me the right? Whose story was this? And the answers, of course, were right in front of me. This, like every story I've written, from Last Summer with Maizon to I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This to From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, is my story.”

9. “While I have never been Jewish, I have always been a girl. While I have never lived on the Upper West Side, I have lived for a long time in New York. While I have never been a black male, I've always been black. But most of all, like the characters in my story, I have felt a sense of powerlessness in my lifetime. And this is the room into which I can walk and join them. This sense of being on the outside of things, of feeling misunderstood and invisible, is the experience I bring to the story. I do not attempt to know what it is like to come from another country. Nor do I pretend to understand the enormity of the impact of the Holocaust.”

10. “I know what it is like to be hated because of the skin you were born in, because of gender or sexual preference. I know what it is like to be made to feel unworthy, disregarded, to have one's experiences devalued because they are not the experiences of a dominant culture. I cannot step directly into my character's experience as a Jewish girl, but I can weave my experiences of being black in this society, a woman in this society, and in an interracial relationship in this society, around the development of my character and thus bring to the creation of Ellie a hybrid experience that will, I hope, ring true. I don't want to tell the story of Ellie and Jeremiah because it is the "in" thing to do. I don't want to shortchange anyone that way. Nor do I want to exploit people through my writing. When I write of people who are of different races or religions than myself, I must bring myself to that experience, ask what is it that I, as a black woman, have to offer and/or say about it? Why did I, as a black woman, need to tell this story? I say this, because there is always, of course, one's position of power. I have read books where this position isn't named, where white authors write books "about" families of color with no white characters figuring into the story, and I wonder how this is different from the demeaning stories I read as a child, the television I watched, the movies I was taken to. I wonder why is that author standing in that room watching without adding or participating in the experience, without changing because of the experience? Why is that author simply telling someone else's story?”

11. Reactionary or Progressive?

12. Switching gears…

13. Jessica Alba Born in 1981 5’6 127lbs Mexican, Danish French-Canadian, English, and Italian

14. “Exotic Beauty”

15. Radiolab: Race

16. Discussion Questions • How is blackness constructed in the text? • How is Jewishness constructed in the text? • How are issues of interracial and interfaith relationships handled here? • What about masculinity? • What role does nostalgia play? • This story is about upperclass, cultured, educated city dwellers. How does that effect the story? • Pg 134: “Thing about white people…they don’t know they’re white. They know that everybody else is, but they don’t know they’re white.” • Pg 174-175: Forgetting race • Alternating narrators and narration styles.