Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race.

As Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10).

Written primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10). White writers’ “apartheid of consciousness” becomes even more stark in the piece, “Parts of Us Not Made at Home,” a reflective piece on the writing of black writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, whose stories spoke openly about the violence and trauma associated with race in this country (149).

“Beautiful Shame,” explores the reasoning behind white writers’ willful ignorance of race in their narratives. In an attempt to avoid the shame of a white racist past, white writers created a kind of revisionist storytelling: “cut away the parts of the story body you’re most ashamed of,” Row writes, “the parts you want no one to see” (10).

In “Seeing, Waking, and Being Woke,” Row explores the disturbing history of whiteness in America, an artificial, racist construct that emerged from an amalgam of ethnic groups seeking “solidarity in power” over newly freed black men and women (47). Whiteness, Row explains, lives on today in marketing and proxemics (how groups utilize space), as well as other characteristics that for many white Americans are “so deeply behavioral, so hardwired, that it doesn’t rise to the level of conscious choice” (119).

Row then goes on to examine his own tenuous relationship with whiteness, recounting the legacy left by ancestors who illegally settled on land the U.S. government stole from the Lakota. He also tries to reconcile the disconnect between the fact that his liberal-minded parents, while “holding up a pantheon of black heroes,” never socialized with blacks, and in effect, were completely disconnected from the real issues facing the black community (52).

The transitions Row makes in White Flights between lit-crit, personal narrative and historiography are eclectic, sometimes awkward, and he rarely resolves most of the questions he raises. And while Row encourages white writers to embrace reparative writing, an idea introduced by Erica Johnson, of particular concern is that he does not address the potential for white writers to claim stories that are not their own. In a book that spans 290 pages, the first mention of cultural appropriation is on page 196 and, disappointingly, comes across more as a dismissal than a discussion. What does come across loud and clear is Row’s faith in the craft of fiction writing, his persistent belief that writers can reverse a “white flight of the mind” (117) never flags, writing “fiction can find new vocabularies for inclusion” (153). White writers must find the tools with which to expand their narrative reach, because, as Row asserts throughout his writing, at this juncture in American history, anything less will be artifice, not art.

– Serenity Schoonover