Reading While Black

Is what happens when I forget my password. Will be back!

After being introduced to blogger Angry Black Woman, I clicked on the Erase Racism Carnival and found a whole host of links, the most important being blogs written by feminists of different colors. What struck me, while reading them, was how much they pertained to the subject of black writers of romance and their position within the romance community. When the topic is raised, there are many arguments and stubbed toes and we end up in an even worse situation than we already have been.

Hitting especially close to the bone, IMO, is this post, by a white feminist and her follow-up (the first part of it). I’d shunned the word “feminist” because it brought up images of bra-burning, man-hating, beauty-hating women. But the deeper I delve into this romance world, the more my ire as a woman gets het up. And even more het up about the chasm between white feminists and black women (whether feminist or not).

I would be foolish, as a young black woman, to proclaim that there is no “black” experience in America. Due to my physical appearance, how I perceive life and how I am perceived by others will always be filtered through my ethnic make-up regardless if I were raised in a life of privilege and entered a room full of strangers with a white woman, a Mexican woman or a Korean woman of my age. We only run into problems when that “black” experience is considered “different”. Not “different” interesting and unique, but “different” I can’t relate or “different” inferior.

A number of romance readers have professed to be feminists, to view the romance genre through the feminist lens, and rightfully so. It is a genre written by women and targeted to women. But there exists a dichotomy between feminism (which is the study and promotion of women’s rights) and black women. Black feminists must battle not only women’s rights but racial rights, as Sojourner Truth noted in 1851, but to most non-black feminists, the woman part of the battle is usurped by the racial part of the battle. Aren’t black writers of romance women too?

I think about that when I enter the romance section of Borders and glance at the shelves in the “Romance” & “Women’s Studies” sections and am forced to go to the “African-American” section for romances featuring black characters and women’s studies written by black women. As long as I am viewed as “different” from the majority of the world, as long as my experience as a woman in America is viewed solely through being black by fellow women, women’s rights no longer is the struggle for equality for all women, and instead becomes a movement whose goals cross with that very majority (white males) feminism supposedly opposes.

Just a thought I’ve mused over for the past week. Over the past two years or so, the online romance community has changed drastically. Where there were a few reader blogs to supplement AAR for those who had tired of happy-go-lucky romance reviews and articles on the genre, there are now many, many bloggers on the web who give hard-hitting reviews and in-depth interviews and articles in the romance and publishing industry while, IMO, AAR has stagnated and become a website visited out of habit.

On the topic of blacks in romance, even if the outcome hasn’t been what is hoped for, bloggers DearAuthor.com and Karen have tackled the subject and review the books, whereas it’s been noted that a few reviewers at AAR have declined to take even a peek at books sent to them for review. When romance heavyweights (La Nora, Loretta Chase, Jenny Cruisie,et al) are reviewed I’m more likely to purchase the book when it’s reviewed favorably by bloggers due to my perception that those authors will always receive excellent reviews from AAR.

These bloggers have breathed fresh life into topics frequently discussed at AAR and spun from a different angle. Where AAR used to be on the cutting edge, at the forefront of practically every bru-haha in the online community (or so it seemed), there to shed light on the topic for open discussion, it has sunk into banalities. Whether the respected pillar of the online romance community has become like the parent who, once stable, now allows their offspring to explore the path they blazed, or something else, I’ve found myself caring less and less about the goings-on at the website.

Katherine D. Jones has passed away. It’s always a shock when someone–whether you know them or not–passes away, and even further sobering occasion when it’s someone who is semi-in the public’s eye. I’d been eying that Candlelight anthology(Cuffed) since the talented Ms. Jenkins headlined it and noticed the unfamiliar authors who were included. I think I’ll purchase it in tribute to the author.

Via Monica Jackson–an article Gwynne Forster wrote for Affaire de Coeur.

I must first admit this: I am a reformed black romance reader who:

a) Didn’t even know there were “black” romances out there until recently.

b) Passed them by with claims of “I can’t relate”.

Which is why I have some understanding (not much, but some) for non-black readers who use the same excuse. I’ve lived most of my life half in and half out of the “black” experience. I’ve lived most of my life as part of the “lower middle class”, yet my social experiences, due to advanced classes, have been mostly with non-black people. I’ve had black friends, but my closest friends have always been non-black(white, Pakistani, Bolivian). I’d participated in sports and activities like band, cheerleading, basketball and track, but I never penetrated the black “in-crowd” who participated in them. In fact, despite my background, I’ve always lived on the fringe of the “black” experience, never quite fitting in and feeling distinctly uncomfortable when I did try.

But fast-forward to today. In re-discovering who I am as a person–just a person–I’ve come to realize that the my experience is the “black” experience. For the most part, we as black people have allowed the exterior to become the interior, and since all we see is the exterior, we seek to emulate it, and as the generations roll on, it has become entrenched so deeply that everyone assumes that it is what it means to be “black” in America. I think that both blacks and non-blacks discount that we are individuals, and as such, have individual life experiences that shape and mold us into individuals. I now personally take umbrage at those readers who use that excuse “I can’t relate” to black characters in a romance and at times will call it hypocritical.

In my experience in a predominantly white society, to be white is to be color-blind–ironically, only to their own skin color. In my book, using the excuse of not being able to “relate” to black characters in a romance to explain why you’d never pick one up? Sad. Sad and very ignorant. Another issue I find puzzling is the assumption that all books written by black people are filled with hate towards white people. Those stereotypical books about “half-breeds” and the white women they love fly off the shelves (you know, the ones where the Native Americans hate white people)–but maybe it’s just a sign of the fashionable (”humanist”) guilt towards Native Americans for stealing their land.

While I puzzle over this, stay tuned for a few reviews of the books in my Queue.