Insider vs. Outsider

In my country, anyone who wants to write anything is allowed to do so just the same as anyone is allowed to say anything at anytime.  I am half black and half white and sometimes, I feel like I am not totally in agreement with the socially accepted norms of how to deal with different cultures.  But, I already feel myself going off on a tangent so I will return to the insider/outsider discussion as it is designed to be discussed in the TE 448 classroom.  This discussion is dealing with the authors and readers of multicultural literature.  Should someone who is Native American be critically and socially allowed to write an African American narrative?  Should someone from Alaska write a historical fiction about the holocaust?  Of course they should!  They should be writing as much as any other cultural group on any topic.  

Let's say that the only African American slave narratives that are written are by African Americans themselves.  Any body born after 1863, the year the Emancipation Proclamation was made by Abraham Lincoln, would have no experience with slavery firsthand.  Let's continue to imagine that slavery did extend 20 years after the document was signed.  That would be 125 years since America had slavery, older than any living person on earth today.  So, to make my point, an African American today has as much experience with slavery as any other American.  For that reason, any author who is committed to doing appropriate research and can document their findings and resources should write about slavery.  Whether they are black, white, from Brazil or Hong Kong, they have just as much potential to write a historically accurate slave narrative.

That same idea can be used to argue for peoples' rights to write about any culture, familiar or strange.  There are benefits to go along with this idea of outsider writing.  I think it would be very difficult to find a book by someone of a certain background who showed as much light on their negative and dark cultural history as they did on their positive side.  That is to say that an outsider writing about a dark period in history, the holocaust or slavery for example, will have less of an inclination to bias.  If their was to be a historical fiction written about slavery from the point of the slave owner, a white southerner with a confederate flag on their house may hold some opinions that are very deeply bias.  At the same time, an African American might have opposing biases about the same story.  However, a first generation immigrant from Peru may not care either way and thus be able to give the most bias free story.  

Now, all this is not to say that people should be deterred from writing about their own culture.  That is not what I think at all.  All I am saying is that diverse literature needs to involve diverse topics, authors, and readers in order to as well rounded, honest, and accurate as possible.