An Interview With Roxane Gay

Avery Lavine/The Exonian

By: Safira Schiowitz

Roxane Gay ’92 was the keynote speaker for the 31st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day. During her speech, Gay spoke on her own Exeter experience, the tokenization of Black voices and how an institution can be truly dedicated to anti-racism. In an interview with staff writer Safira Schiowitz, Gay expands on these ideas and talks about other work that she has done, such as her TED Talk, “Confessions of a Bad Feminist.” 

1. You mentioned in your MLK Day presentation that your Exeter experience was “tolerable” and that you didn’t “know if it was worth it.” Can you elaborate on that?
   
   High school is not great for anyone. Well, that’s not true. There’s some people who love high school. Never trust them. Some of the reasons were not related to Exeter and some of them very much were. And I think that you pay a high price for some of the challenges that you tend to face in high school. And so is it worth it? I don’t know, but I do know that I got an exceptional education and that part was certainly worth it.
   

2. Students of color are often obligated to spearhead diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and conversations. How do you think institutions can support these students without tokenizing them?
   
   I think for one, don’t put the onus of changing the culture of inclusion on students and expect them to do the work, expect them to raise all of the issues that a campus might be facing. It’s really an undue burden and it’s unfair. Institutions should be able to do that sort of assessment themselves while also being open to hearing student feedback in addition to that self assessment, and all too often, that’s simply not the case. And students are left with the responsibility of raising awareness, of doing the work of teaching and addressing what’s needed, and then having to follow up time and time again because the institutional memory is all too short. So I just think it’s an unreasonable thing to expect of students who are also supposed to be studying and doing well in school. 

3. How do you think people who, as you put it, “cannot be diversity trained,” should be addressed?
   
   It just depends on the context. That’s a broad thing to address, but I do think that there are people who are unreachable . Rather than exhaust ourselves in trying to reach people who are unreachable, I think that our efforts are better spent reaching people who are open to change and who are willing to acknowledge that problems exist.
   

4. You talked about how creating anti-racist institutions requires financial commitment and creativity. What do you think the Academy and/or its donors can invest in to make Exeter more anti-racist?
   
   Certainly more faculty of color and recognizing that diversity is not just black and white, that there are all kinds of diversity. Really, how open is the campus? And I think a lot more effort and energy could be spent on retention, which is I think in many ways a bigger issue than recruitment. How do you get people to stay at an institution and want to stay at the institution? I think resources should be spent to answer that question and to realize that some of the things that institutions can do to retain faculty and students for that matter are actually not that complicated. They’re certainly not that expensive.
   

5. How would you define success in the context of anti-racism and gender equality? In other words, what does a community, country, or world that is successful in being anti-racist look like to you?
   
   I think success would be that we get to talk about other things, [that] people of color no longer have to raise these issues because they are not issues. Students of color can focus on what their actual interests are because students and faculty of color in these institutions often have to become the experts on diversity and inclusion, which is a field in and of itself. It’s certainly not my area of expertise. And yet I am asked to talk about it time and again. I think when students of color can attend an institution or join a company or whatever, and not feel like they are being singled out, not feel like they are the only one or one of the few; where they feel genuinely welcomed into that community and respected not despite their differences, but because of their differences, we will achieve something.
   

6. In your MLK Day presentation Q&A session, you said that having “a fancy education does not mean you know anything.” What do you think is the best way or setting for people to learn how to confront their biases and how to be anti-racist?
   
   I think the best way is to admit what your biases are. So many people spend so much time saying that they’re not racist when you probably do harbor some racism and they’re so defensive that they don’t even want to consider the ways in which they might be racist. And so I think everyone needs to stop acting like being called racist is as bad as actually being racist and really engage in self-reflection.
   

7. How can we create urgency for the threatening of our shared humanity?
   
   I think that we have to demonstrate the ways in which inclusion and equity really help everyone because racism is actually very expensive and it costs people quite a lot in every sense. Unfortunately, we live in a capitalist society. And so I think if we highlight that more, maybe more people would give a damn about creating actual change. But I do think we need to highlight the benefits, but again, also, sometimes it just feels like, why— if you don’t already know in 2021 that everyone should be treated equally and that how to get to equality does not mean that everyone gets exactly the same thing, because sometimes you have to account for differences that are inherent to a certain experience? So it can be overwhelming at times to think, “How do we get people to believe that we’re all equal when they just don’t even want to believe that Black people are human or that women are people?” These are challenging questions and I certainly don’t have the answers any more than anyone else does.
   

8. Could you elaborate on what you mean by “racism is expensive”?
   
   Racism tends to cause people quite a lot of money in organizations, quite a lot of money because they tend to miss out on really great people and really great talent because of racism. There’s actually a few studies that have been done about the costs of racism and in general inclusion and diversity and benefit and institution. You get far more substantive intellectual discussions when you draw from people from a range of experiences. And when you only have one type of experience, one type of person in a group, there are so many things that you’re going to overlook. An example for racism being expensive— Pepsi did this ridiculous commercial with one of the Kardashians, the Jenner-Kardashians. She’s standing in front of a protest and there’s a wall of police officers and she hands one of them a Pepsi. That commercial probably cost $10 million or more. And they never got to run it because it was so ridiculous. And [it was] universally panned before it was even released that they had to scrap it. Now, that’s millions of dollars that Pepsi could have saved if they had the right kinds of people working for them to say, “maybe that’s not a good idea.” And perhaps they did have a Black person or two in whatever decision-making committee that ad agency had. But the reality is that sometimes when there is a Black person or an Asian person, or that next person, they all don’t have the institutional credibility or power to say something in the face of these kinds of things. And so you also have to empower people in these organizations or institutions to be able to speak up, to be able to say, “that’s a problem.” And to also expect that they shouldn’t have to call out racism every single time. Again, that puts the onus on them, instead of doing amazing creative work, to have to sort of be a racism police officer. And nobody actually wants to do that. It’s not fun work. It’s not intellectually interesting. So that’s an example. There are tons of examples of people who put millions of dollars into projects that never seen the light of day, because they’re extraordinarily racist or abelist or homophobic or whatever. And when you only have heterosexual middle class or wealthy white men making decisions, there are a lot of blind spots. There are a lot of things [that] are going to [be] overlooked because they simply don’t have the range to accommodate it. And we could do better.
   

9. The murder of George Floyd and other Black people by police has sparked global outrage. How can we ensure that movements and demands for change do not lose momentum?
   
   I think that we have to resist fatigue over these kinds of issues. We have to remember that the fight is just beginning. There’s a lot of work to do. Also I think it’s important to acknowledge progress. So often people overlook actual progress because there’s so much work to be done, but I think it’s really hard and overwhelming to want to continue to fight when you think, “Okay, now it doesn’t matter what I do.” And of course it matters what you do and you can contribute to change. I think it’s important to acknowledge what we accomplished as much as it is to acknowledge what we have ahead of us.
   

10. What aspects of our current world hinder feminist and anti-racist movements? How do we move forward?
    
    I think that education goes a long way. I think that it’s upon us to educate ourselves about issues that we don’t know everything about and that’s okay. But I do think that it is up to us to address our ignorances and to do so without relying on marginalized people to do that education for us, or to point us in the right direction. And Google is right there and it’s a generally useful resource. There’s just so much information available. And I think that more people need to allow themselves to access that information and to do the work and to dig deeper. And of course, ask questions. Sometimes you do need to ask questions and that’s okay, but make sure that you have answered the obvious questions before you ask questions that are meaningful and substantive and that someone that you would benefit from someone else’s expertise instead of sort of hunting it down yourself. I just think education, education, education, and taking upon yourself responsibility for that education.
    

11. In your TED Talk, “Confessions of a Bad Feminist,” you discussed how people should take the step of refusing offers to work for businesses and corporations that have not supported or have often discriminated against marginalized people. How should society support the people who are brave enough to stand up against institutional prejudice?
    
    There shouldn’t be detrimental consequences for standing up. Whistleblowers shouldn’t have their lives blown up for stepping forward and saying this is a problem. And I think people should be supported when they call institutions out. And unfortunately that’s not the case for more often. And so then people become very wary of stepping forward and doing something and that never helps anyone.
    

12. Is there a question you wish interviewers would ask you but never do?
    
    I’m always just interested in the kinds of questions that people ask me and in general people ask me good questions. So, yeah, I’m fine with the questions that I’m asked. I wish people would recognize that I contain multitudes. And so I can talk about lots of other things. And so I wish people would ask me about the craft of my writing and things like that. So I don’t have a desperate desire for specific questions.
    

You said that you would not describe yourself as an activist. Why not?

Because I think that there are actual activists out there who are putting their bodies on the line every single day. I’m a writer and I certainly have my heart in the right place. And I certainly try to do what I can, but am I out there every single day, marching, protesting? No, I’m not. I do what I do, and I’m very proud of the work that I do, but I believe that activists deserve to be recognized for what they do. And I think it’s important to not minimize what they do by just calling everyone who writes about social issues an activist.