Wait, that’s not right. Ocean Vuong interviewing Ben Lerner about whiteness and toxic masculinity? What a time to be alive.
BL: Whatever my “approach” is—my conscious thinking through of these issues—I’m not in a position to know everything about how whiteness inflects or determines or delimits my writing. Part of what makes writing worthwhile—for the writer and for the reader—is not just what artistry achieves but how it fails, how it is necessarily disfigured by history, which includes, which is dominated by, what Baldwin called the “lie” of whiteness. Certainly this is a book about whiteness, is more intensely focused than my others on how racist (and other forms of) violence fills the vacuum at the heart of privilege for white boys on the cusp of becoming white men, how whiteness is a radical imaginative poverty. But I don’t pretend I got it right or that getting it right is the point of making art.
