Point of View
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Date
2015-04-17
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Citation of Original Publication
Delury, J. (2015). Point of View. American Short Fiction.
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Abstract
Here is the opening of a story: I walked out the front door. A black man was biking down the street. Now here is that opening again: I walked out the front door. A man was biking down the street. Years of reading student fiction has taught me that the narrator in the first opening isn’t black. And, almost certainly, the writer of the story isn’t either. On Monday afternoon, I sit in a waiting room, a white woman among white women in an upper middle-class suburb of a city I love but leave every night after work. “It’s awful,” one woman says to another. “Did you see the photos of the CVS?” I know this careful energy from the classroom of the urban university where I teach. Race is in the room. I wait. Here it comes: “They aren’t getting on the light rail, at least,” the other woman says.