But Not Too Black

Introduction

As I wrote in YA So White there is a lack of Black characters in YA; specifically, Black characters are often rendered as sidekicks to the white protagonists, only there to give them support and advance their arc. Or they are whitewashed, stripped of all their flavor to please the bland palates of white readers.

 And in the worst cases they are reduced to passive objects for the white characters to swoon over, as documented by Aisha Monet in her medium.com article Queer Love Interests of Color and the White Gaze. Be it Blue from Simon v. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, Abbey from Leah Out Loud, Dre from The State of Us, or even Starr from The Hate U Give, Black bodies are reduced to mates for white characters.

But Not Too Black

There’s also a pattern of making said love interests light-skinned and or biracial as was the case with Blue and Wesley Hudson from The Summer of Everything, the latter of whom was described as being so light-skinned he could pass for white. Even in Black-lead books there’s a tendency to pair them with white love interests. As I mentioned above The Hate U Give does this, as do multiple stories in the anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America. Admittedly, I’m guilty of this in my stories and it’s something I’m working on.  

Black is Beautiful

The problems with this love interest of color equals passive object are many-fold. First, it robs the character of color of agency and otherizes them. Second, by pairing them with white love interests, coupled with their being light-skinned or biracial serves to uphold colorism and Eurocentric standards of beauty. This proximity to and affinity for whiteness plays into the self-hatred Black people experience. Hair straighteners and perms, skin bleachers, and even cosmetic surgery are methods Black people have employed over the centuries to meet said Eurocentric standards, yet we still struggle for acceptance and representation. Yes, Black is beautiful, but as Toni Morison said in in her 1974 New York Times Magazine article, Rediscovering Black History:  

It was precisely in that spirit of reacting to white values that later, when Civil Rights became Black Power, we came up with the slogan “Black Is Beautiful”—an accurate but wholly irrelevant observation if ever there was one. . . . [T]he slogan provided a psychic crutch for the needy and a second (or first) glance from whites. Regardless of those questionable comforts, the phrase was nevertheless a full confession that white definitions were important to us (having to counteract them meant they were significant) and that the quest for physical beauty was both a good and worthwhile pursuit. The implication was that once we had convinced everybody, including ourselves, of our beauty, then, then … what? Things would change? We could assert ourselves? Make demands? White people presumably had no objection to killing beautiful people.

Third, it’s this preoccupation with whiteness that drives writers of all stripes to whitewash Black characters, reducing them to mere tokens, or plot devices to educate white readers on the evils of racism. Something for which they shouldn’t be responsible as it isn’t the job of the oppressed to teach the oppressors.

Fourth, these relationships aren’t true to life.

Not True to Life

While interracial relationships have become more common and less stigmatized, that doesn’t mean they’ve been accepted by all; racism is still alive and well even among the Gen Z and younger set. And among the LGBTQ+ community sexualized racism is an issue, with white people only wanting to date/hook up within their race, or worse fetishizing people of color. Then you have LGBTQ+ people of color who will only date whites or outsides their race, nuances which these stories fail to capture.

Furthermore, a topic these stories often fail to cover is that dating a person of color doesn’t absolve you of being a racist. Racist attitudes and assumptions are deeply ingrained and will come out in even the most woke white person, especially if they grew up with little to no in real life contact with people outside their race.

Moreover,tThey still benefit from white privilege and have an incentive to uphold systems of white supremacy. Watch how quick they’ll excuse instances of mircoagressions and racist comments when they come from their friends and family.

The other problem with these pairing not being true to life is they are overrepresented. Where are the stories about people of color being in love with each other?   

Love in Color

Off the top of my head, I can list maybe three YA novels that feature a relationship between people of color, and that’s a problem. Black and brown kids need to see themselves in these stories sans a white partner and whiteness. Diversity in the media has been an issue since its inception, but the solution isn’t to pair people of color with white folks and call it a day. All this does is reinforce Eurocentrism and its beauty standards as something to aspire to. This in turn contributes to the lack of people of color in the media, more so in the LGBTQ+ media where we are almost invisible except during Black History Month.  

But why does this matter?

Because every day Black and brown kids are bombarded with messages that they are ugly, thugs, and that their stories and lives don’t matter. And what media there is about them is lacking. This is one of the primary reasons I become a writer; I was sick of not finding people like me in the stories I read. So, I decided to change that.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Black and brown readers deserve to see people like them living and loving without the constraint of whiteness or white supremacist systems. There are literally thousands of white loves stories out there, so why pick another one, when with a little searching you can find tons of own voice ones? Why pen another story about a passive love interest of color falling for some white person, when there are great own voice love stories waiting to be written?

In closing I’ll leave you with another quote from Toni Morisson, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”