‘Little Fires Everywhere’ and the Color Line
“I thought of them as people of color, because I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and our culture…But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.”
The above is a quote from Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, taken from an article concerning casting two of the novel’s central characters as Black in the Hulu adaptation. I had to read that quote several times before I could read the rest of the essay; I dragged it along through the sentences and white spaces between paragraphs.
It’s an interesting, troubling quote. It frames the entire essay, gives it structure and context. It also contextualizes a feeling I’ve been having about this label, ‘person/people of color’, as something less inclusive and more a polite, evasive descriptor for Blackness, without having to say it.
Reading this quote in and alongside the article in which it is featured, I realized I had a severe misunderstanding of the term ‘person/people of color’. It was disorienting to learn that the label only applied to Black people, and not to any non-white person or group. It did not apply to the ‘and Brown’ portion of the new…
