Colorism, Racism, Romance, and Me
Dec 15, 2022
As promised a musing (or 2) on colorism.
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For Tasha L Harrison and Katrina Jackson (they know why)
Astonishment silenced his tongue when her skin slowly shed its whiteness and became brown as desert sand. His body stiffened when her straight blond hair changed into thick strands of loose dark curls. Her body became taller and thinner as Anne Holland's plumpness disappeared into slender curves beneath the silk gown she wore. With each alteration, Anne saw the slight flinch, Gabriel's cautious withdrawal from her as her body assumed its natural state. She was no longer the white Englishwoman he had planned to take to his bed. (Fate's Kiss, Elysabeth Grace)
As a Black child, back in the day, I frequently heard a saying that stays with me though it may not resonate for others: "if you white, you alright; if you're brown stick around; if you're black get back." Let that sit with you for a while.
Colorism has always been part of my life, either in stark relief or nuanced gradations, so it made sense when I decided to write academically about romance. I would explore this often ignored player in how racism/"racecraft" functions in literary texts. Race & Romance: Coloring the Past, with all its flaws, is a fulfilled promise—to myself. And yet, it is also an incomplete work, akin to stepping into the Pacific Ocean and discovering its power to redefine. To etch land as it sees fit, to conceal what lays beneath, to be forever aware of your insignificance as a human being.
If you've read Race & Romance and its acknowledgment page, you'll know it's my first solo academically published book and my last. It begins with a thought: what if the English author Aphra Behn was race-passing? What would that mean for the celebration of her authorship as a "white woman" literary icon? As I attempt to show in the book, racial or color passing has a history as old as the idea of race and its parent racism. If race is a signifier--as Stuart Hall writes--of racism then colorism is a coordinating conjunction.
Colorism and Romance
A goal that hovers in the background of my romance writing is how to destabilize the predominance of a white-centric ideology about "beauty," subjectivity, and woman-identified bodies. Whether we (writers not classified as "white") recognize it or not, the pervasiveness of this ideology invades our thinking no matter what. It shapes the representation of women's physical appearance in all cultural aspects of lives of those living late capitalism. Recent critiques of colorism’s relationship to beauty standards, especially in Anglo-American cultures, and the representation of non-white women in media draws attention to the problem. Small changes. Pervasive standards.
In the “romance community” (readers, publishers, and authors), colorism shapes representations. Within traditional publishing, most descriptions of skin color/hair/ are mediated by a standard of beauty based on white adjacency. Non-white heroines are frequently mixed race/light-skinned, "straightish or wavy hair," thinner noses and lips, and thinnish body type. Without rehearsing the role traditional publishing has in pushing this narrative (that's a book, not a musing, folks), the idealization of a white supremacist standard of women's beauty is so pervasive in romance that some authors of color often whiteout obvious markers of non-white subjectivity. Black, brown, Asian, and Indigenous women become palpable versions of white women by virtue of colorism. The exception: Black Romance novels (another book topic).
The modern intersection between a woman's beauty and whiteness, fragility and whiteness, perfection and whiteness has a direct genealogy line with the circulation of premodern/early modern romances. The idealization of white skin, small noses, slender (almost non-existent) lips, hips, and thighs, the emphasis on purity and virtue as marks of beauty--we still suffer to this day. For Black romance authors like me, resisting this ideology is a constant struggle—and obvious. For white-presenting who refused to identify as white Romance authors, the battle isn't so obvious, and fighting colorism is also a struggle. Within colorism, being white adjacent offers privileges. We see this most often in the number of romance novels that feature interracial storylines or "white-presenting" or ambiguously racialized characters in traditionally published books.
However, Indie romance authors are not exempt. Many white-presenting writers (Latinx/e, Asian, Native, and Black/African diaspora) draw on cultural elements to mark a character's subjectivity rather than race yet physical descriptions remain rooted in colorism. Culture in no way mitigates the legacy of colorism inherent in the romance tradition, nor the racial capitalism and racism that necessitates that legacy. I am not exempt from similar tactics and I often wonder if our lack of direct engagement with colorism is merely a detour back to a default ("whiteness") or erasure of the problem. Let me provide an example using the epigraph that opened this musing.
My paranormal romance Fate's Kiss's protagonist, Anne Willoughby's "race" is hard to define. Her ethnic ancestry on both sides originates in Algeria (even authors create genealogies that rarely make it into their books), a union of various indigenous peoples (Algerian Amazigh, Fulani, Mande), yet to ensure she’s not seen as a white-presenting Algerian, I describe her skin as “brown as desert sand.” While her epidermis is steeped in melanin, shapeshifter Anne can become whatever she wants. She color passes as a white Englishwoman in 17th-century London. It was important to me that her color-passing is seen as performative and distasteful to her. Like Beverly Jenkins’s Galen Vachon (Indigo) and Rhine Fontaine (Forbidden), Anne uses her presumed “whiteness” for political reasons. She’s an abolitionist on her home island of Barbados. Her life in danger, she flees the island for London and establishes an exclusive sanctuary/brothel for witches (y’all need to read the book).
For the majority of Fate’s Kiss, Anne performs whiteness. In her character, I wanted to explore what that might mean when the performance is antithetical to her. I’m not sure I fully captured the politics of her performance. She manipulated an ideology of color hierarchy but, I fear, did nothing to fracture its hold. Anne is successful as a white brothel owner because no one can “see” past the performance, yet, in retrospect, she is a representational failure because colorism’s hierarchy remains intact.
End Part 1
© 2024 Margo Hendricks
