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One day we’re going to have to talk about palatable black experiences in publishing & how growing up w/o a “consumable” black experience, yet having to deal with being asked questions or getting put at the stand to speak about hyperspecific aspects of black experience is chaotic.
The amount of people who have asked me personally about black lower income urban struggle while I grew up in a middle class Jewish community and only have secondhand experience of that struggle based on book research and experiences of friends as an adult is....a lot.
We all struggle in different ways as black people, but if I had to write a book about what it’s like to deal with the socioeconomic and racial circumstances of like......Compton. My ass would be in the library, sweating.
I’m sure the audience who wants to hear about how I had to go to the JCC as a kid and how my first guy crush’s name was Zebadiah and the mixture of isolation and solidarity of having a black experience within another group’s diaspora is not the same people who ask me this stuff.
American Blackness is such a multifaceted experience and the expectation that black authors should write about the same exact flavor of struggle is????? Putting a lot of people in really awkward positions.
Also I want to be so fucking spicy clear about this: black people, N-B PoC and white people have done this to me. It’s......almost never done with malice and almost always people hungry to uplift. It just gets a lil awkward.
Finally, because I don’t like to complain about people who are trying their best without offering solutions:
if you’re reaching out to ppl, send them a quick inquiry email asking if they have experience with a certain issue first. If they politely decline...let them.
if you’re reaching out to ppl, send them a quick inquiry email asking if they have experience with a certain issue first. If they politely decline...let them.
