HE’S ASKED BY KARILYN PRISCO IN THE OCTOBER 2022 WEST VIEW NEWS:
“How does it feel to speak as a different age, gender, or member of a different demographic group when writing?”
“It feels scary but exciting. It feels like I’m stretching the limit of my craft. When I first started writing these stories the voices I knew well were the voices of the young thug and the sassy urban black female, but as I thought more and more about residents in a given building, I realized people can fit all kinds of different definitions. In order to portray them accurately, I had no choice but to go across age and gender. I took it as a challenge. This day and age it’s tough because everybody has their own idea of identity politics, but I think the beauty of fiction is inhabiting other people and swimming around in their skin.”
In other words, Fofana is functioning as a creative artist, as all writers should be allowed to.
Are the Own Voices agitators and the publishers they’ve bamboozled actually asking us to accept that writers of color should not be censored, but everyone else should be?
Do they not understand how this plays into the agenda of Republican party fascists?