over the weekend, we were discussing on Twitter the books that we loved reading as kids. of course, we read “Babysitter’s Club” and “Sweet Valley High”, “Amelia Bedelia”, “Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys” and  “Encyclopedia Brown”, (i.e., typical young adult literature). i loved ordering off of that Scholastic paper from school; i always had the largest order in the class and usually got to take my order home in a large box. i gave my classmates all of the free stickers and pencils that Scholastic gave as a bonus for large orders. I was like Little Miss Sanny Claws. i was Nino Brown handing out turkeys. SWAG ME OUT.

i didn’t grow up in a censored household, so my mother bought books with a more grown-up bent to them. VC Andrews’s books caused me great anguish but they were thrilling page turners. I will never forget the sadness I felt reading about the horrors inflicted on the black girl in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill”. a great summer memory of mine? sneaking into the bathroom and reading momma’s Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins novels; they had the best sex scenes! today, i couldn’t tell you the plot of the stories, but it’s hard to forget nipples that were “flicked to erect points”,  skin that “flushed hot and pink under his touch”, or “gossamer hair that smelled like roses in bloom”.

but wait.

always a long, ginger-haired beauty with creamy skin. they pale when scared or frightened and colour when angry or ashamed. when they grip the bed posts in ecstasy, their knuckles whiten….and then when they re-enter the party after that passionate, back-room tryst, there’s only a flush of pink on the tops of their cheeks to hint at their subsiding orgasm.

hm. wait.

is this normative whiteness? i wonder what the 9-year-old me would have thought of my body, my skin, my hair and eyes, if there were black women in these novels being loved and cherished, adored and sexed?

today, I saw a tweet from a Twitter page for writers titled “25 Young Adult Novels Everyone Even Adults Should Read” – and when I clicked the link, there was only one Black and one Native American book on the list. are our lives not as important? shouldn’t everyone, even adults, read about the lives of African-American youth?…….you know what? this is normative whiteness.

there should be more books for our teens to read. i remember being so enamored with Kendrick Lamar’s “The Art of Peer Pressure” from his Good Kid, Maad City album because it speaks truthfully about the internal struggle of teenagers, presented in a much less corny ass form from the one I remember in the late 80s, the Nancy Reagan/D.A.R.E. days*. we need this in our literature. our experiences. our lives. the citified, the countrified, the suburbanites, the suburbanites that want to be citified, all of it. if there are books inside of you, write them. there must be more books for our teens to read, and books for those interested in reading about our experiences. a Black 9-year-old sneaking her mother’s romance novels should read of Terrance’s deep fascination with Ebony’s chocolate chip nipples and 4B hair (lol). We need Black Girls Rock, and Black Is Beautiful because we need that affirmation, living in this culture. We can affirm in our literature, too.

the average, White middle-aged person (i.e., the “Everyone” to whom the aforementioned tweet referred) should read the struggles of a Tyrell**. perhaps, just maybe, this would facilitate sympathetic understanding in places where there may now be judgment.

 

 

Side Note: i would LOVE a discussion about the under-representation of Blacks in fantasy literature. i have been reading that directors have received backlash for casting Black actors in roles that were White in the novels (e.g., Idris Elba in Thor, Jeffrey Wright in The Hunger Games).

*(do any of you all remember that? lol….I remember vhs tapes played during sex ed class of kids on street corners, one with a joint in his hand, offering it to his dear friend saying, “*stupid high giggle* Come on, bro. Everybody else is doing it.”)

**Tyrell is the protagonist in Coe Booth’s young adult novel titled “Tyrell”. You should read it.