Last week, I happened upon a movie released in 2017 called “The Glass Castle” featuring Brie Larson (Jeannette Walls), Woody Harrelson (Rex Walls), and Naomi Watts (Rose Mary Walls). The film centers a poor white family navigating poverty, intermittent houselessness, and alcoholism in the 60s and 70s. After digging a bit, I found out that the film is based on the 2005 #1 New York Times bestselling memoir of the same name by Jeannette Walls. On Goodreads, the book is described as follows:
“a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.
The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.”
A quick Google search yields gobs and gobs of links with praise for the memoir, thousands of positive reviews on Amazon, and almost astounding characterizations of the book. Kirkus Reviews says it’s a, “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story.”
It was this review that prompted me to actually write this post because, while watching the film, I kept thinking about the ways Walls’ father, Rex, engaged in frequent emotional abuse, deception, and neglect of his children with almost no accountability. He stole money, left his children exposed to violence, abandoned his family, and remained indignant about his inability to find consistent housing and employment.
In many ways, Rex embodied the same traits that, if portrayed by a Black man, would have garnered the labels of “dead beat father,” “lazy,” “angry Black man,” and a host of other stereotypes rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Throughout the film, there was this emphasis on the fact that Rex was “one of the smartest men” Jeannette knew. Even as he was harmful, violent, and unsafe, she saw him as inherently redeemable, valuable, and worth saving.
It was almost astounding to see.
We live in a culture where Black people are disposed of because a white person sees them as “sketchy.” We are hunted by police for simply existing in neighborhoods and communities where we are told we don’t belong. Not only was this white man treated with gentle hands, he was made into the story’s antihero. Every bad choice he made was framed as his effort to protect his children. Every violent moment was couched in his own failings and personal misery. Rather than hate him or throw him away, we were supposed to love him.
Geesh, whiteness is powerful.
The power of absolution is mysteriously precise. And, knowing that this has been a bestselling book that is considered a “thoroughly American story” says so much about who most people think of when they think about Americans.
They clearly don’t think about the rest of us Americans. Our stories aren’t heroic because our failings, insecurities, mistakes, and misgivings are reflections on our entire race. When Black Americans struggle, it’s deemed a personal flaw, not a challenge in the way of our intellectual accomplishments.
In many ways, it’s like white Americans are living in an entirely different world from the rest of us. A world without fear of reprisal for falling down and tripping along the path to success. A world where whiteness is strong enough to redeem all the worst qualities one possesses, leaving no trace they ever existed.
There are layers to this, for sure. There are conversations to be had about who gets published, why their stories are seen as important, and how publications like the New York Times honor that work. There are even other discussions to be had about how books become films and what this means for writers of color. But, we have to first be honest about the world we’re living in and how these decisions reflect the deeply anti-Black and white supremacist systems that underlie everything around us.
Until we get really clear about how these institutions (from publishing houses, to production studios, and everything in-between) are built upon the same biases and racist frameworks, we will keep seeing the same themes repeating themselves. And, I, for one, am deeply tired of it.