Junot Díaz: ‘We Live in a Society Where Default Whiteness Goes Unremarked’

In a recent interview published in the academic journal Paradoxa, Pulitzer prize-winning writer Junot Díaz puts his finger on the reason why racism is still so rampant in American society. In addition, Díaz, who is known for his best-selling novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” discusses his experience emigrating to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in his youth, an event that has left an indelible impact on his work which often features Dominican immigrants living in the U.S.

Gawker:

In a new interview with Paradoxa, Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz speaks at length with Taryne Jade Taylor about the allure of genre fiction, colonialism disguised as sci-fi, writing, and immigrating to the U.S. at an early age (he refers to it as “a profound fracture of my reality, a temporal and spatial anomaly”)…Below, selections from the interview.

Diaz on the “surreal extremity” of immigrating to the U.S.: When as a young person you lose all your bearings, all your reference points, when the gap between where you were and where you are is as vast as the one that yawned between the DR and the US, you’re going to struggle mightily to explain not only what happened but also to explain oneself. I came to the US at six and with a single flight I jumped literally from one world to another, from one Age to another…

On racism and race in America: Racism and race are still being viewed as our problem and not the problem of the white mainstream that so benefits from white supremacy’s malign racial hierarchies. We live in a society where default whiteness goes unremarked—no one ever asks it for its passport—but God forbid a person of color should raise her voice against this smug occult system of oppression, points out whiteness, its operations and consequences—well, in two seconds flat that person is the one accused of being obsessed with race.

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata