Reading While Black

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.