Introduction
From the recent videos of police brutalizing and murdering Black people and those depicting violence against LGBTQ+ folks, to Books like The Hate U Give and Red, White & Royal Blue, trauma porn has been in for a while now. Trauma porn is defined as any media where the primary focus is on the suffering or pain of its characters.
Now you might be thinking, “Doesn’t everyone face challenges?” And you’d be right. The issues comes when the people in these stories primarily come from marginalized communities. Take videos of rundown buildings in Detroit and other majority minority cities for example. The purpose of said videos weren’t to humanize the residents of these cities but to provide entertainment for the bourgeoise whites and others who watched them. Likewise, when these same people read about Black and LGBTQ+ pain, they consume them as entertainment, which resultes in the dehumanizing of both communities.
More Than Our Pain
This wouldn’t be an issue, if it weren’t for publishing and the media constantly telling Black and LGBTQ+ writers to mine their trauma and suffering for the amusement and edification of majority white audiences. Repeatedly, the stories Black and LGBTQ+ writers are allowed to tell focus on “the struggle,” and while these stories have their place, they shouldn’t the ones we get to read and watch.
There is so much more to being Black than racism, poverty, police brutality, gangbanging, or life in the inner city. And being LGBTQ+ doesn’t begin and end with coming out. In both cases, the narrow range of stories publishing and the media allows us to explore results in a sanitized limited portrayal of these communities, which in turn results in the further marginalization and othering of these groups.
Another problem is how the media frames Black and LGBTQ+ people.
The Press Effect
If you’re Black or brown, then you already know how the media routinely leaves out the race of criminals and persons of interests unless they happen to be Black or brown. They will frame the same crime differently when it’s committed by a white person. Case in point, during coverage of Hurricane Katrina, reporters referred to white people looting supplies as “liberating them,” while they called Black people doing the same “looters.”
Moreover, when a white person commits a crime, reporters will often go out of their way to humanize them, while doing everything in their power to find dirt on Black and brown people accused of crimes.
Some magazines and papers will go even a step further to otherize them by digitally darkening their skin, such as they did with pictures of OJ Simpson, or as Kelly Loeffler did to pictures of her opponent Rafael Warnock. In both cases the media shrugged it off and moved on.
When it comes to fairly and accurately reporting on race, the media has a long-standing problem, but this isn’t its only problem.
When crimes occur involving members of the LGBTQ+ community, reports will often play up this aspect of their identity to the exclusion of all others—if they’re reported at all, as is often the case with the murders of trans women of color. The way the press covers these cases is often through the lens of allo, cis, het, whiteness, which presupposes white, cis het males as the default. So when dealing with the death of say a trans woman of color, it’s often reported as though they’re talking about an alien species. But the media isn’t alone in this.
The Unbearable Blandness of Publishing
As I wrote in YA So White, publishing has a diversity problem. They would rather publish books like American Dirt and a billion m/m romances by allo, cis, het, white women, than actual own voice books. The few books by Black and LGBTQ+ writers that do get published by major publishers are often het-washed and whitewashed. The result being books that are made for the white gaze and female gaze.
These books don’t actually contain Black and brown, and LGBTQ+ characters so much as caricatures of them. By now we should be acquainted with all too familiar LGBTQ+ or black best friend whose only goal is to advance the plot of their white bff. Or if they happen to be the protagonist, their story involves teaching bigoted whites the errors of their ways.
Yeah. No. It’s not the job of the oppressed to teach their oppressors. Yet in story after story ( The Hate U Give, The Sell Out, The Underground Railroad, Simon Vs. the Homosapien Agenda, The State of Us, and Hero By Perry Moore) this is exactly what happens.
This is disrespectful to Black and LGBTQ+ people and needs to stop. We are more than our race, sexual orientation, or gender identity and deserve to have media that depicts the full range of emotions and experiences beyond our pain and trauma. To do otherwise is to legitimize the false notation that being Black and LGBTQ+ is a sorrowful existence and that we are to be pitied.
What Can Be Done?
First, the MSM and publishers need to stop focusing on Black and LGBTQ+ pain and instead portray us as full human beings. Let us save the day and just exist. Yes, we can still have coming out stories and stories about race and racism, but that shouldn’t be the breadth of our narratives. There is an infinite rainbow of stories about what it means to Black, LGBTQ+, and both.
Second, we need to stop centering allo, cis, het white folks as the default, and their stories as universal. This means stop telling marginalized writers they must write to the white gaze and female gaze if they want to be published, so they are free to explore their stories to their fullest without worrying if Becky in the Midwest will like their book.
Third, speak up. If you’re an allo, cis, het, white person, then speak up when you see your peers framing media about Black and LGBTQ+ folks through the lenses of trauma porn, the allo cis, het, white gaze.
Also call out them when they appropriate Black and LGBTQ+ narratives, as they are taking space from own vice writers. Hype up stories by marginalized people and call out any media outlet that tries to frame these stories through the allo, cis, het, white lens.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the only way things will change is if readers and writers effect change. We writers need to stop taking a seat at the table if membership requires us to exploit our trauma. We deserve to write about all facets of our lives; the triumphs and the tragedies, and that will only happen if we stop whoring ourselves out for the possibility or publication or our work being greenlit.
And as consumers, we must demand better of publishing and the media. If they won’t produce work that showcases the full breadth of the Black and LGBTQ+ experience, we must support work that does.
In closing I leave you with this:
Our pain isn’t fodder to entertain.
Our trauma isn’t a drama.
Our bodies aren’t commodities or
Oddities to fuel your tokenized,
Romanticized, “diverse” media
That only serves to further otherize.
Forget the media hocus pocus. Focus on us.
See all of us. We are human just like you.
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