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Many of my older relatives, who remember growing up in all-black communities where all of the grocers, doctors, carpenters
and tailors they patronized were black, talk with a sense of irony about the demise of legal racial segregation, which for
decades had closed off most of the mainstream retail and service sectors to African American customers.
On the one hand, the end of the official "white only"/"colored only" Jim Crow dichotomy legally freed black citizens -- in
theory, anyway -- to spend their money wherever they wanted. But on the other hand, it spelled the beginning of the end of
an entire economy serving exclusively black customers: black vacation resorts, black sports leagues, and an abundance of black
service providers. Racial integration, although it brought certain freedoms to black Americans as citizens and consumers,
also brought the beginning of the "minority" business mentality, whereby formerly dominant black economic figures were either
obliterated or absorbed into the white-owned mainstream as bit players. It's a dynamic that remains true today, as black coaches,
would-be team owners, college administrators, business owners and others find themselves at the mercy of industries and enterprises
controlled almost entirely by whites.
Sure, it was progress. But at a cost.
What brings this to mind is an article in the December 6, 2006 Wall Street Journal about the controversy over segregating
books by black authors, particularly fiction, into special "African American" sections in bookstores. Browse through most
chain bookstores (except Barnes & Noble, which as a rule does not segregate) and many indie book shops as well, and you'll
find contemporary novels by black writers about black protagonists shelved in their own "black" section, while novels by whites
about whites are treated as simply "fiction." This is often true of nonfiction as well. (I usually find my book, Race Manners,
a guide for blacks and whites, stashed on the "African American" shelf.) It's a distinction that limits my exposure and my
sales as an author, and I don't like it. Neither does bestselling novelist Terry McMillan, whose Waiting to Exhale helped
black pop fiction writers to break down the doors of the publishing industry. She told the Journal she considers the book-segregation
practice to be "racist" and a "disservice."
But hold on. The Journal story also quotes other black fiction authors, such as suspense writer Tananarive Due. She says that
being set apart for recognition by black readers and black bookstores is a mainstay of her career. The story also quotes black
writer Brandon Massey as saying he has mixed feelings about his horror novels being sold as "black fiction" because it has
nourished a loyal audience for his work but it also limits his sales. And it quotes the publisher of the romance novel industry's
leading trade journal (which ignores its usual 10-genre breakdown in order to treat black-written books of all genres as simply
"African American") as saying, "We know we're walking a fine line, but the reader wants to know if a book has African-American
characters."
All of this starts to sound an awful lot like what black team owners and shopkeepers might have said 60 years ago about the
way in which Jim Crow fed their businesses, and about the necessity for someone to serve black customers when the mainstream
ignored or mistreated them.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. What is driving the economic logic of today's segregation in publishing is the same
fact that drove it in society as a whole decades ago: the American mainstream treats blacks differently than it treats whites.
White fiction readers as a whole are, out of habit, more interested in novels about white characters than novels about black
characters. White-run publishers, as a whole, have only recently accepted black-written pop fiction as being viable at all,
and still ghettoize it as a product they see as sellable only to blacks. White-owned bookstores, as a whole, view black-written
fiction as an "ethnic" literary satellite to be shelved away from the central and presumably non-ethnic (read: white) category
of plain old "fiction."
Yes, the political sea changes of the 1960s and 1970s created an intellectual demand, and a powerful function, for African
American sections in bookstores and African American Studies departments at universities. And a book like W.E.B. DuBois' The
Souls of Black Folk or Haki Madhubuti's Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? arguably belongs in a section dedicated to
the analysis of black culture and history. But a "black fiction" section exists for one reason and one reason only: white
audiences and white publishers think stories about black characters are not universally interesting.
And so black writers of such stories have a hard time garnering wide attention. And under this duress, these black writers
come to depend upon segregation as a way of gaining what attention they can muster -- that is, the attention of grateful black
audiences starved for stories about themselves in a society that considers the white narrative to be the central one.
In the Journal piece, I thought Terry McMillan offered a decent stop-gap solution: put black-written novels about black characters
in both the general "fiction" and "African American" sections, enabling fans to easily find them and non-fans to discover
them. Fair enough. For now, at least.
But wouldn't it be far more fair if the mainstream's idea of popularly-sought fiction were not a "white only" zone?
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 12/9/06
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