Last week, the Romance Writers of America released the finalists for the 2019 RITA Awards, the top award to recognize excellence in the romance genre for the year 2018. Finalists are selected from self-nominated books, as in authors submit books/unpublished manuscripts for a fee and all of the entrants judge everyone else with a scoring rubric. This year, five authors of color made it to the final round, including three Black authors. This was an improvement on the ZERO Black authors who made it for the 2017 slate, sure; but after a year of RWA members promising they’d do better and read more diversely, this paltry showing deemed as among the best of the best in 2018 makes the quality of this “better” suspect. Of course, there was disappointment and dismay over the lack of marginalized authors and underrepresented stories being recognized again this year, but after the disappointment faded and the calls for accountability started, the excuses started rolling in. A perennial favorite among the author-readership that judges the RITA entrants is always some variation of, “I can’t relate to characters who aren’t white.*”
This excuse has special resonance when it comes to Black authors. Given the 37-year history of the RITAs, the absence of a Black winner in a competitive RITA category is glaring. However, beyond that, the fact a vast majority of a genre writing association whose primary goal is to make readers fall in love with characters who are falling in love finds it inconceivable Black authors can a.) write it competently and for b.) Black characters to experience it at all is indicative of
The reason “I just can’t relate to [insert marginalized characters here] ” (particularly Black characters) is not just a frigid take but also a harmful one is that to say such a thing precludes empathy. Empathy is the engine that makes storytelling go, that makes us as a community of human beings stick together. It creates connection not only to each other now, but to our past (hiSTORY) and our potential future. When we hear stories, we immediately find ways to relate our personal experiences to it so we may have a greater understanding of it and ourselves. To have fellow author-readers say in 2019 they “can’t” relate to these characters really means they “won’t.” And by not being willing to relate, they don’t think these characters are worth whatever extra effort it requires to build empathy with them.
Not even a “suspension of disbelief.”
So, here’s the thing: if an author-reader can’t relate to characters who are Black or from another marginalized identity, how can they relate to fellow human beings who share those marginalized identities off the page? Do they even care to do so? It’s curious the author-readers who say they “can’t relate” to Black characters somehow can relate to nonexistent creatures such as dragons/vampires/weres/ghosts, which means they have extended a value judgment that fictional beings > real-life Black folk. But why even invoke mythical beings? Author-readers gave a Nazi character more empathy than Black folks in a previous RITA judging by having that story final in two separate categories and, really, just wow. A Nazi. Meanwhile, an author-reader dinged a RITA entrant a point because the heroine was a Black scientist. Another RITA nominee** this year has a book where the Black grandparents of a Black biracial foster child are the un-nuanced antagonists to the white protagonists’ HEA. #yikes
The question ultimately is: What’s so unrelatable about Black folks that the concept of us loving/being loved makes brains break? Makes that “unrealistic?” How can the stories that feature Black characters and other marginalized characters getting the love they deserve be designated as “no HEA present” on the judging rubric? If we’re all supposed to be fellow romance authors, and are supposedly the “experts” on how romance looks like and works, how is a majority of the judging pool operating with so little imagination? And if it has such little imagination, then how can we trust THIS pool of author-readers is competent enough to determine excellence in romance when it doesn’t even have the range to acknowledge a whole group of people is believably capable of experiencing it or has the talent for writing about it?
And the GAG of it all? A Black woman cofounded this very association that celebrates and advocates for a genre this majority claims Black folk cannot believably write about
I doubt most of us are living in the British Regency era or have shifter partners or live in outer space. Sadly, given the evidence, I cannot trust much of the author-readership has ever had a meaningful relationship with a Black person in real life, either. But if this collective author-readership, who uses imaginations for a living, can’t imagine Black folk being loved, can’t imagine Black folk being loving. Can’t imagine Black folk being worthy of romance. Can’t imagine Black folk
*(white, cishet, able-bodied, Christian theists, Western, neurotypical, upwardly mobile)
**This nominee is also a member of the 2018–2019 RWA Board of Directors as of this posting.
***More information about how whiteness functions and is so difficult to discuss in an interracial setting.
