Mitchell S. Jackson: Searching for Humanity
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell S. Jackson talked about the liberating power of fiction and his techniques for profiling famously polarizing figures during a recent wide-ranging conversation with School of Education and Social Policy Dean Bryan Brayboy.
“I’m not just after the facts,” said Jackson, who will deliver the School’s Convocation address on June 10 at the Ryan Fieldhouse on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. “I’m after the humanity in my subjects.”
In 2022, editors at Esquire asked Jackson to profile Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, an assignment Jackson said he approached from “a place of loathing.”
That changed, however, after he traveled to Thomas’s rural hometown of Pin Point, Georgia. After talking to a local resident who knew Thomas when he was ten years old, Jackson could picture the 75-year-old justice as a small boy in a depressed community, speaking an African language called Gullah.
“I figured even this man who I loathed was once just a baby with the same innocence that all babies are born with,” said Jackson, who wrote part of the story in Gullah. “The heart of fiction is getting inside another human being and trying to see the world from their eyes. I used a lens of empathy.”
Jackson, the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University, is the author of several award-winning books, including The Residue Years and a memoir Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family.
He won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for a “deeply affecting account of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery that combined vivid writing, thorough reporting and personal experience to shed light on systemic racism in America” according to the judges. The piece, called “Twelve Minutes and a Life” and published in Runner’s World, also won a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing.
In addition to teaching creative writing and producing columns for Esquire, Jackson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a highly sought after speaker. A formerly incarcerated person, Jackson is also a social justice advocate who, as part of his outreach, visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon–a place he frequently returns to in his writing–he spoke to Brayboy from his current home in Phoenix. The following excerpts of their conversation have been edited for clarity.
Bryan Brayboy: Survival Math, your second book, feels a bit like a memoir. Your work with Esquire and elsewhere is more like creative nonfiction. How would you describe yourself?
Mitchell Jackson: Journalists are after the truth. I start any project with ‘how can I push myself creatively?’ I'm still beholden to information. But at the heart of everything is trying something creatively that I haven’t done.
BB: O, The Oprah Magazine called Survival Math “shattering.” What is the book about to you?
MJ: I talk about Survival Math in terms of my debut novel, The Residue Years, which explored my childhood growing up in Portland. My mother struggled with drug addiction from the time I was about 10 years old. I ended up selling drugs and going to prison. I was living the fallout from what happens in depressed and deprived communities: gangs, drugs, poor schooling, broken homes. I took impactful moments or circumstances from my life and asked myself, why did that happen? I wanted to understand ‘home’ through a personal lens.
BB: How do you write generally and what was your process for Survival Math?
MJ: I knew I wanted to write essays, almost selfishly, because they are the articulation of someone’s thinking. Being a Black writer, I was paying attention to how we were often described in the literary community and when something is dismissed as ‘raw.’ I wanted to push against that. I really, really wanted to stay in the essay form to force people to reckon with the way I thought about my experience.
BB: How long did it take to write?
MJ: About six years. Halfway through the Black Lives Matter movement I started thinking about the ways people were trying to malign Trayvon Martin by saying he looked dangerous with a hoodie. When I saw the protests of people wearing hoodies I thought, ‘How can I speak to this?’ I wanted to challenge this notion of Black men looking dangerous. So I asked all the men in my family the same question, ‘What's the toughest thing you survived?’ Then I wrote out their stories in a second person narrative. I wanted to respond in a way that also felt artful.
BB: What do we learn about you in Survival Math?
MJ: That the story is never simple. It’s never just, ‘this guy’s mom was on drugs, he sold drugs, went to prison,' or 'he lost some friends to gang violence.’ I am very, very interested in whether you can take this material and turn it into art. It’s not sociology, it’s not anthropology. It’s not journalism. It has to be art, or else I don't want to do it. I want to be a person who was known for taking the raw materials and shaping them into something that's beautiful. Even if the subject matter is traumatic.
BB: Some people may say Survival Math historical, but it very much feels genealogical.
MJ: I’m really concerned with origins. And what is genealogy, if not the study of origins? I’m trying to figure out my mother’s origins, but I can't do that without thinking about Black people writ large in America, which means thinking about the transatlantic slave trade. It is a genealogy because I’m always looking for the origin of this thing that I care about.
BB: Talk to us about revision.
MJ: Revision is looking back to move forward. It’s really, really crucial in the way I think about working on the page and structure in organization. How does that apply to the lives of friends and associates who passed, or ended up in really tough situations? What if they had made one decision vs. another? Fiction is a form of freedom. You can do anything in fiction.
BB: Your most recent book, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, is cultural commentary. Why is style so important to you?
MJ: I can tell you why, from a craft standpoint, any one sentence is composed the way that it is. I can tell you the rhetorical devices I’m using and why that's important. I think the same way about dressing. As a Black man in the classroom -- there aren't a lot of us. I’m trying to create a sense that you can be who you are in the classroom and do well enough to earn the respect of your peers.
BB: How do you feel about suits?
MJ: I’m not against a suit. I’m going to wear a suit at SESP’s commencement -- I've been thinking about which one. But I also want to be who I am in these spaces, not feel compromised. I’m trying to bring my complete self all the time, whether that’s to the page or to a Zoom conversation, or to a commencement speech.