Color Me Romanced

by Nana Malone

Love is blind. Or so I’ve been told. I grew up in Wonder Bread land. I remember at all the school dances, my friends would eagerly point out any brown boy who’d wondered in from a visiting school regardless of if I found him attractive or not. When I wanted to know why I couldn’t crush on TJ Smith, our hot blond quarterback, no one had a good answer for me.

As an avid reader of romance, I thought the heroes in romance novels weren’t for me. None of the heroines looked like me, but that didn’t stop me from devouring all the romance I could get my hands on. I loved the idea of love, the idea of falling in love. I thought one day there’d be a heroine like me. Cue African American romance. At last, someone I identified with, but soon I started to wonder why everyone had to match like Black Barbie and Black Ken. Why couldn’t black Barbie go out with White Ken? Lack of anatomically correct parts notwithstanding.

When I started to write my first romance novel. Not only did I initially want to write heroines that looked like me, I wanted the heroes to reflect the smorgasbord of men available. My secret list(The one my husband lets me keep) has beautiful men of all skin tones. I love a good Brad Pitt. I also love Daniel Oh and Boris Kodjoe. Why limit my heroines?

Will my interracial couples deal with issues that mono-racial couples don’t deal with? Absolutely. When writing Interracial or multicultural books, to attempt to ignore the racial conflicts or socioeconomic conflicts inherent to all relationships would be doing the characters an injustice. It would also be plain dumb, since for writers, one of the main ingredients to your romance dish is conflict. But to me it’s important that it not be the focal point of the story. The characters will have to deal with some aspects of race but it’s not going to be in their faces throughout the whole book. I’m an African woman. Sure. But me being an African woman doesn’t come up in my daily life. How tedious would DH find it if I reminded him every day I was an African woman.

People ask me a lot if I feel there’s a lack of an authentic voice if someone of one race writes a different race. For me, the answer is no. Just because I’m a woman of color doesn’t mean I can’t write a character who is white. Like all things, writers have to do their research and be careful not to write flat two dimensional caricatures. I feel like some excellent authors shy away from giving their books a little spice and flavor because they’re fearful that they won’t get the voice right and risk alienating readers. I’ve read too many Wonder Bread novels. I’d love to see more pumpernickel.

For anyone interested in some excellent authors that have great I/R stories, here are some of my favorites: Eve Vaughn, Shiloh Walker, Kate Douglas, Kayla Perrin, Suzanne Brockman (Trouble Shooters #6), Kimberly Kaye Terry, Lena Matthews just to name a few.

*Images courtesy of Google Images and Banana Republic