Season Two of Bridgerton

Thanks to the second season of the hit Netflix drama, Bridgerton, adapted from the historical romance series written by Julia Quinn, we are having a much-needed international conversation about colorism. This season featured a 19th-century steamy love triangle between the most eligible Englishman, Anthony Bridgerton (played by Johnathan Bailey), and the regal and captivating South Asian sisters, Kate (played by Simone Ashley), and Edwina Sharma (played by Charithra Chandran). Some of the conversations have centered around the excitement of casting two dark-skinned British women with Indian heritage in leading roles.

Bertha Antoinetta Mason

Bridgeton made me think of another romance novel set in the 19th-century that featured a love triangle between an Englishman (Mr. Rochester), a devoted English governess (Jane Eyre), and a Jamaican and Creole madwoman (Bertha Antoinetta Mason). Of course, I’m referring to Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, in which the character Antonietta was portrayed as a gruesome caricature of a mad black woman. Upon meeting Antoinetta, Jane describes her as:

• “a woman tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging down her back.”
• “Fearful and ghastly to me…It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of linaments.”
• “a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled . . . on all fours, it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal”

Instead of simply dismissing Bronte’s racist character descriptions as a sign of the times, let’s explore further. 

It’s important to remember that there is no biological basis for race. Race cannot be determined through science. Race, instead, is a social construct developed by the British ruling class to validate white racial identity and vilify blackness, to protect their power at the time. For over two hundred years, the myth of race was perpetuated through American institutions and society.  Bronte’s racist rhetoric is evidence of a job well done. 

But, in order to fully comprehend the social construction of race, we need to go back to the Bacon’s Rebellion.

The Birth of Racial Identity

Bacon’s Rebellion, led by Nathaniel Bacon over frustrations with the British and the ruling class, was the first rebellion in the American colonies. It took place in Jamestown, Virginia from 1676 to 1677. The most scandalous aspect of Bacon’s rebellion was that he dared to join forces with indentured servants, Native Americans, and Africans to attack the ruling elite. 

This deadly rebellion led to a conscious effort to create a white ruling class, to avoid being overrun. Suddenly laws were being created that granted access to public office, property, housing, and work for Whites only. Whiteness was defined by the physical attributes that were common for fair skin. White racial identity became a mode of upward mobility. For those who were willing to assimilate, change their names, lose their accents, and hide their customs, prosperity was promised.  

Understanding that racial identity is a social construct, created to advance one group while stifling another, helps underscore the impact our characters’ physical attributes can have on our readers. This is especially important when considering the historical undesirability associated with black features. These attributes can carry both painful and triumphant histories.

Accent, hair texture, eye shape, lip thickness, nose width, and skin color are all legitimate ways to illustrate a character’s racial and ethnic identity. But we can longer ignore that these attributes come with explicit values of good and evil. 

In fact, those character descriptions and traits associated with blackness are often deemed as too much, when they appear on black bodies. Lips that are too full, noses with nostrils that are too wide, bodies that are too curvy and take up too much space, hair that is too curly and unruly, and, in returning to our focus on colorism, skin that is too dark.

Colorism

Colorism refers to the explicitly communicated value for light skin tones over dark skin tones within Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Its use as a weapon lays bare for us the cost of white supremacist standards of beauty. As a result, BIPOC communities continue to obsessively identify, evaluate, and categorize each other based on skin color. The way the world perceives lightness or darkness can lead to very different realities. 

Walking through the world with light skin can provide unearned advantages in BIPOC communities through its association with superior morality, normalcy, and intelligence. For example, motion detection devices were designed with light skin in mind. Items like makeup, shapewear, band-aids, and flattering color patterns that match your skin tone are readily available. There’s no need to pray that the school photographer has experience in capturing your skin tone. Popular celebrities and fictional characters of your racial group often match your skin tone.  

Walking through the world with dark skin can mean navigating more than the obstacles like the ones mentioned above. Society associates dark skin with criminality, untrustworthiness, and a predilection toward violence, which can jeopardize health and safety. 

Back to Bridgerton

Season two of Bridgerton is a great example of the power of representation over tokenization. The characters Katie and Edwina Sharma were written as dynamic and courageous women, which provided the space for Charithra Chandra and Simone Ashley to bring them to life and connect with audiences. The story did not overly focus on, nor hide from, their cultural differences. This is what is possible when we craft complex characters and build dynamic worlds that readers with marginalized identities can connect with. #charactergoals

Things To Consider

Crafting character descriptions that include racial identity can be messy and imperfect. We need to accept that we can’t portray “the” experience or create characters that represent everything for everyone. 

We can, however, offer intentional experiences and viewpoints that illustrate the complex experiences of BIPOC. Are there things you would change in your current writing project or character descriptions after reading this passage? Use the questions below to guide you in your writing.

Considerations for Crafting Racial and Ethnic Character Descriptions

• Be specific: why have you chosen this identity group?
• How does this character enhance or advance your story?
• How can you demonstrate the way your character’s racial identity impacts their view of themselves and connections with others?
• Be intentional with the descriptions that portray racial and ethnic identity. Research using credible sources. Interview and listen to BIPOC with varied experiences.
• Consider including the unique and complex experiences of biracial identity.
• Consider using more than skin color to convey race and ethnicity.
• Consistently describe all characters’ traits, not just BIPOC characters.
• Consider describing skin color by pairing hues, shades, and tones instead of relying on food.
  • Note: Using food descriptions to refer to BIPOC is not considered a politically correct writing practice because it can be seen as reinforcing colorism. This is a relatively new concept for me, as someone who has been raised to hear love and affinity in these types of descriptions. However, after researching this concept, I haven’t been able to overlook the possible association that chocolate, brown sugar, or honey could have with the crops my ancestors were forced to grow. Did slave owners use food descriptions to sell my ancestors at slave auctions?

Tell us in the comments: Are there things you would change in your current writing project or character descriptions after reading this passage?

Colice Sanders is a blogger and motivational speaker.  Colice writes YA, poetry, and memoir. Her blog areasontorise.com chronicles her journey of radical self-acceptance through the lens of childhood trauma. You can reach her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!

The post It’s Messy in The Middle: Unpacking Racism & Colorism in Character Descriptions appeared first on DIY MFA.

I often use the metaphor of a hallway to describe the liminal space which I inhabit psychologically, emotionally, and historically. It is an in-between space that offers a tenuous connection to two worlds separated by language and culture. I can enter the two rooms that this hallway connects, but in either one I still feel like I’m in the hallway. This sensation follows me everywhere and informs my writing, which is my attempt to understand it.  

Not a Typical Immigrant Story

Some would say that this is the typical immigrant story. But it isn’t. 

As Puerto Ricans, we are American citizens (since 1917) and our departure from the homeland is not fraught with struggles other immigrants faced. We boarded ships or planes and came here without passports. We could just as easily return home. That was not the case for millions of other immigrants who traveled thousands of miles to escape hardships, most vowing never to return. 

Once in the States, Diasporicans find that we are second-class citizens and face racist and ethnic bigotry. If we return to the homeland, as I did for fifteen years, our brethren admonish us for not being real Puerto Ricans. You can see how this would make anyone feel left out in the hallway. 

Writing about experiences straddling two cultures is nothing new in “American” literature, which is fundamentally multiethnic (and, one could add, multiracial). Much of the “American” ethos is about navigating between two cultures and the conflicts inherent in doing so. 

MFAs, the Publishing Industry, and BIPOC Writers

That continues today as publishers have seen the demographic future of the country and seek to supply the increasing demand for multiethnic and multiracial material. As a BIPOC author, committed to writing stories about my community, I would like to share some thoughts about what it means to write from this subject position and strive to improve your craft while remaining true to your purpose.

I received my MFA from Columbia University in 1981, when there were roughly fifty such programs. Today, with more than 350 creative writing programs operating across the country, it seems that admission to one of them is a given for young, aspiring writers. Although the MFA has its benefits, especially if you want to teach, one can learn to write and publish professionally with the many resources available today. DIY MFA is a viable alternative, for sure. 

No matter what route you take, BIPOC writers will find obstacles and challenges that their white counterparts will not.

In 2014, Junot Diaz wrote a piece in the New Yorker criticizing MFA programs for being “too white” (besides too male and heteronormative). He argued the student population usually contains a sprinkling of BIPOC; faculty is almost always all white; and there is no instruction dealing with race, racism, or the concept of whiteness and white bias. This blindness to race and whiteness often leads to what Diaz calls “blind spots” and assumptions concerning these crucial topics and how they impact publishing and writing. 

His comments were valid then and seven years later still hold true. There is little progress in this area, because a white majority’s values and ideology dominate the academy, as every other major institution in America. This dominance filters to every aspect of the MFA program, including the workshop. As Diaz illustrated, many BIPOC students in these programs have experienced some racist or biased comment or sentiment expressed by either their peers or the instructor during workshop. 

Discussions initiated by BIPOC writers about race and white privilege often meet stiff resistance and are identified as “political” and not “literary.” Essentially, the dynamic within these workshops, and the MFA programs in general, is the embedded, white-privileged conviction that white writers can write about anyone and anything with impunity. Meanwhile, committed BIPOC writers are only being didactic, dogmatic ideologues more interested in politics than creating “Literature.” 

This attitude has not changed much today, except that white student writers and faculty in MFA programs are now versed in the “woke” nomenclature and deflecting strategies outlined so well in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.

If you are a BIPOC writer, you might assume that you can avoid these problems if you skip the MFA. But you will find racism and vestiges of white supremacy in publishing whether it’s literary agencies, marketing, publicity, editors, or the commercial and small houses. Never assume that seemingly progressive institutions in the United States have liberated themselves from racism. Consider the minimal diversity in Hollywood and television, and how little recognition these “liberal” institutions give to BIPOC writers, directors, and actors (the same goes for women and LGBTQ communities). 

What BIPOC Writers Can Do to Learn Their Craft and Publish

Support BIPOC authors committed to writing about their communities. 

Buy their books and study their craft. Follow them on social media. Learn how they convey the authenticity of the culture or community they write about. Be attentive to how they handle themes and topics related to racism, sexism, and otherism in their work and in public. 

Support literacy in your community. Buy books from community bookstores. Organizations like the Bronx Is Reading, help expand readership and book culture. 

Sometimes, unfortunately, BIPOC writers unconsciously write characters and situations in their work that follow mainstream stereotypes and racialized tropes. I personally avoid these writers because their objectives do not align with mine.

Build a community of BIPOC writers and progressively-minded allies.

Join a writing group that is receptive and responsive to the material you are writing. You want supporters who give you honest feedback but admit when they do not know enough about it. Find culturally sensitive readers willing to ask questions without committing microaggressions. 

Seek sites exclusively for BIPOC writers or which support them. Look for positive signs that go beyond the usual wokespeak you find on a site’s mission statement. Is the site’s staff diverse?  Do they feature articles and material that reflect a genuine diverse agenda? Investigate various grants, retreats, and organizations (like VONA, which Diaz co-founded) that nourish, promote, and advocate for BIPOC writers. 

Learn your community’s history.

A deep knowledge of history not only benefits you, but also provides a trove of ideas for your writing. Avoid the pitfalls of stereotyping your own characters and writing racialized cultural material and themes. These can easily slip into your work because we inhabit spaces that constantly bombard us with adverse representations of our communities. Conversely, develop and explore new ways to handle your material. The challenge is to stay true to the lived experience of your characters while placing them in fresh scenarios and situations that ring credible and authentic. 

Find ways to expand the borders of the fictional world that the publishing industry has constructed for your community. Stay faithful to your vision and mission, as well as your aesthetic. Do not come across as didactic or preachy. You are an artist, not a propagandist. 

Challenge the racialized and biased tropes associated with your community, especially the subtle ones that the mainstream finds acceptable and worthy of publication. When you are ready to publish a manuscript, research publishing houses with a track record of publishing BIPOC writers. If you cannot find a publisher, consider self-publishing.

In another article for this site, Ana Maria Spagna writes about being a committed writer who believes in the transformative power of literature. I agree with her, especially because as a BIPOC person and a Diasporican writer, it is imperative to tell the stories of people like me. 

Every marginalized group in this country needs voices to give their group visibility, agency, and hope. The current political and social climate in this country calls for all artists to think critically about how they plan to utilize their talent. I cannot think of a higher calling for a writer than to serve that purpose

J.L. Torres is the author of The Family Terrorist and Other Stories, the novel The Accidental Native, and the poetry collection Boricua Passport. His latest collection, Migrations (2021, LARB Libros), received the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the South Bronx, he now lives in Plattsburgh, New York, where he has taught American literature, US ethnic literature, and creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. You can reach J.L Torres at his website at  https://jltorreswriter.com/, or on Twitter at @Rican_Writer.

The post A Dispatch from the Hallway: Advice for Committed BIPOC Writers appeared first on DIY MFA.

Traci is the author of the critically acclaimed book We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives in northeastern Oklahoma, where her tribe is located. Today we’re talking about her picture book Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer (Illustrated by Natasha Donovan).

Carole is the author of numerous award-winning books including the Newbery Honor book Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom (illustrated by Michele Wood), and R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul (illustrated by Frank Morrison). Today we’re discussing her picture book Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (Illustrated by Floyd Cooper).

When she’s not traveling or visiting museums, Carole is mining the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. She lives in North Carolina.

In this episode Traci, Carole, and I discuss:

• Why they each decided to tell these forgotten stories as middle grade picture books.
• The deliberate and unique choices they made in structuring their narratives.
• How they created a distinct sense of time and place to ground their books.

Plus, their #1 tip for writers.

About Traci Sorell 

Traci Sorell is the author of Sibert, Orbis Pictus, AILA American Indian Youth Literature Award, and Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives in northeastern Oklahoma, where her tribe is located.

You can find Traci on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.

Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer

Mary Golda Ross designed classified airplanes and spacecraft as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s first female engineer. Find out how her passion for math and the Cherokee values she was raised with shaped her life and work.

Cherokee author Traci Sorell and Métis illustrator Natasha Donovan trace Ross’s journey from being the only girl in a high school math class to becoming a teacher to pursuing an engineering degree, joining the top-secret Skunk Works division of Lockheed, and being a mentor for Native Americans and young women interested in engineering. In addition, the narrative highlights Cherokee values including education, working cooperatively, remaining humble, and helping ensure equal opportunity and education for all.

About Carole Weatherford

Carole Boston Weatherford is the author of numerous award-winning books including and Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom, illustrated by Michele Wood which received a Newbery Honor; R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin, The Queen of Soul, illustrated by Frank Morrison which won the 2021 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Book Award. When she’s not traveling or visiting museums, Carole is mining the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. She lives in North Carolina.

You can find Carole on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre

Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation’s history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa’s Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.

News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years. This picture book sensitively introduces young readers to this tragedy and concludes with a call for a better future.

If you decide to check out these books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Classified and Unspeakable where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 375: Bringing Omitted BIPOC History to Light through Middle Grade Picture Books – Interview with Traci Sorell and Carole Boston Weatherford appeared first on DIY MFA.