Sometimes allyship isn't: Why I have accomplices
Jun 17, 2023
This musing was to focus on romance but it’s June.
June is a complicated month for me. On the one hand it is a month where I will always grieve two losses (my brothers), celebrate my Blackness, and honor Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ friends and family who, back in the day, lived and died masking their identity. June is also the month where I reflect on my academic life—the what ifs, the whys, and the willingness to walk away when an academic institution decided that I was symbolically 3/5ths of a professor in terms of pay and status (I would say 4/5ths except the white male was gay). June is also a wonderous month for, in 2010, it was the month I committed to a different creative path. So to June, you’ve brought me joy and sorrow, anger and strength, love and happiness (okay, I absolutely am invoking Al Green with that final pairing).
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On writing
As child, I was frequently (almost always) described as “having my head in the clouds,” or “day dreaming.” Fascinated by the construction of dreaming that doesn’t require sleep, and already obsessed with dictionaries and thesauruses, I fell down the rabbit hole. i continue to day dream and that childhood obsession with words hasn’t disappeared. Not just in terms of meaning/definition but the instability of words in every day human social practice. My essay “Race: A Renaissance Category” (2003) is a product of day dreaming about why ‘race’ had a variety of meanings, and why some are lost in present day conversations. I still daydream about the cultural philology of race.
What I’m reading
Academic:
For research purposes: Nah, just because they were next on my TBR list. The only true sense of order I probably possess.
Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Duke UP 2011)
J.T. Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023)
A Non-Review sorta Review, or why I DNF: Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, 2020
There is a peculiar positionality white women with Black children often take. This positionality can be and often is multiface(t)ed: My child reflects both sides regardless of how they may be seen by society unless they’re white presenting or my child will be seen as Black and therefore I have currency within the Black community and need not engage my whiteness as privilege even if I mouthed the fact. As we see more relationships that traverse colorism (race) and more children born of these unions, we’re also seeing a sustaining of a certain version of white womanhood (savior) born of white supremacist ideologies.
I’ve claimed my status as emerita academic and pretty much say no to requests for book reviews, essay contributions, or conference contributions. When I do agree, it’s often in support of marginalized scholars. I also don’t read every book on race and pre and early modern cultures, especially early modern England: because I’m already familiar with the terrain and, again especially, when these books become retellings of early works on race and religion or race and blood. However, I do read abstracts and the preface or intro to decide what I will read or start to read and DNF (do not finish).
Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England (author Kimberly Anne Coles) is one of these books and a DNF for me. Why you might ask?
Oh dear reader, the introduction and the acknowledgement both reflect a familiar act of sovereignty white academics who may have adjacent status to non-white peoples perpetuate. In other words, authority by proximity or authority by a claim to authority on a subject (one needs only look to African/Africana Studies). Bad Humor begins and ends with a white academic claiming credentials based on proximity to Blackness. The claim is framed, however, in worry—worry about racial profiling, worry about racist/fascist USA, worry about how a child’s ‘Black skin is stamped’. This worry instantiates a book about religion and race. As I’ve stated earlier, I’m familiar with discussions of pre/early modern notions of race in all its permutations: lineage, religion, blood, ethnicity, sex, and nation. It is why I read the preface, introduction, first couple of chapters and the “Coda” (The One-Drop Rule”) and closed the book.
However, I mused (as I often do) over these deceptive interjections. The territorial boundaries established over speaking “Blackness”. The legitimacy a Black child gives a white academic’s “anti-racism” positionality, a white mother’s presumed positionality to “know” Blackness because she has a Black child. The peculiar absence of introspection in the writing of these interjections. Where was the “privileged I” in the author’s writing about her child rather than the lack of “privilege that marks his “Black skin”? In other words, most notable to this Black woman, Black academic, Black early modern English scholar was the absence of authorial whiteness.
What would it have meant for the author to frame the discussion of christianity and racism in early modern English culture in relation to her whiteness, her privilege as an academic, her positionality as a white woman in twenty-first century US? What would it mean for the author to offer a nuanced understanding of the gradations of whiteness in early modern England without the use of Blackness (and thus her Black son) as the counter? To think not of her son but the Irish or Scottish sons (and daughters) whose skin color was no different than the English yet… What if the book was about her whiteness (not her son’s Blackness) and the way early modern English takes on religion render whiteness not just somatic and moral but always already a site of privilege for her authorial positionality?
Soo…
I’m not sure if I’ll return to Bad Humor. I don’t need to write an academic book or essay on race and thus have to deal with bibliographies on the topic. The more compelling reason for not returning to the book is author’s singular lack of self-awareness about how white supremacist ideologies are upheld in her “Black child” interjections. It is, as I see, it a reflection of white saviorism, of ownership. Of situating one’s subject position in a community you can never belong—even if your child’s other parent is Black, or Indigenous, or Asian, or Afro-Latine. It is, therefore, telling that the final “coda” to Bad Humor is titled “The One-Drop Rule.”
#MyBridgertonTake
Colorism is a hell of a racist drug, and folks need to understand it affects all humans and walk away from the ideology.
What I’m reading from my Romance TBR (which gets re-org all the time):
Beverly Jenkins, Indigo (because Katrina Jackson insists. More later)
Mia Heintzelman, Trivialized Pursuit (Tule Publishing, 2023)
What I’ve Read: Romance, Suspense/Thriller, Fantasy:
Romance:
I’ve been on a KU (Kindle Unlimited) binge during April and May. Reading authors rec’d by Black reviewers and bloggers I follow on Twitter. Names I’ve seen but hadn’t read until recently.
Who: Dria Andersen; Alexandria House; Alexandra Warren; Shae Sanders;
Suspense/Thriller and Fantasy:
Who: Attica Locke; L. S. Stratton; Lauren Blackwood; Tracy Deonn
I’ll have more to say about these books and a couple of others in my next musing.
A Thank You
I appreciate the subscriptions and hope you enjoy these writings. As an indie author and underpaid academic, I appreciate paid subscriptions and want to especially thank those you who have supported me in this way. You can always support me by purchasing my fiction writings (I think you’ll enjoy them) or, if white guilt is pressing, become an accomplice and make Juneteenth the day you send reparations to my Venmo or PayPal (look for my lovely face) to help send ChildofMine to London this month. Either reason is fine as they both allow me to do “damage” to Willie S’s canon.
Finally, two notes for the coming months. First, The Cock & Oyster Historical Cozy Mystery series is coming to an end. A complete edition in paperback and ebook is scheduled for release in September. I had such fun damaging several of Shakespeare’s plays. Inspired by the The Man’s Nick and Nora Charles (thank you Dashiel Hammett), my sexy novellas, set in sixteenth-century England, were great fun to write. Currently, you can find them in Kindle Unlimited (subscription) or on www.elysabethgrace.com.
Second, I also have two academic projects in the works and I’ll muse more on them in the coming months. Thanks for reading—MargoH
MargoH's Musings is a reader-supported publication. While paid subscriptions are appreciated they are not required.
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