I like to blog and express myself., but often feel at a loss as to my blog’s direction and style.   PBW had a great post up recently that made me think about this .  It’s about what you miss about the old blogging days.

Author’s behavior seems to be more scrutinized and judged nowadays.  The women’s fiction blogging community seems very high school to me. Personal pile-ons and attacks are very painful and often cause bloggers to shut down and go offline.  Tess Garritsen shut down her great author’s blog after a pile-on over at dearauthors.com.  I notice that many of the gossipy blogs don’t moderate group attacks against a sole person.  No surprise.  it’s high school to gleefully egg on fights where everybody jumps on the designated unpopular person of the moment.

But my main concern is that a huge sector of the online genre community is no place for anybody black to be a part of or participate in unless you can Condi Rice it up with no loss of self respect. 

I got no Condi gene at all, so I go around continually pissed off at the casual racism of the online majority community, even from blogs and folks I’d find cool if I were nonblack.   But if anybody black speaks their experiences of racism honestly and publicly, they’re attacking individuals–this hysteric charge is always used to make the black person the baddie (you mean black person attacked ME and called ME racist!) and derails any productive discussion of any racial issues concerning us.  Any other controversial issues are eagerly discussed in the romance community: Sexism, gays, plagiarism, kinky erotica, publisher bugaboos, conservative issues, but as a whole they really hate blacks and refuse to discuss black racial issues without hysteria and rancor.   

Spaces and places that actively exclude blacks are eagerly supported by authors and the romance community as a whole.  And woe betide any criticism offered them about how they treat black authors or books.   Racist practices are cool as long as they’re solely toward blacks and they are never mentioned publicly. 

Any direct mention of racism towards blacks pisses off nonblack racist folks–folks who can be a career assist if one can Condi it up enough to make them comfortable.  Nonblack authors will be supportive and helpful.  You might be able to get a guilt review out of a romance review site or blog once they notice they’ve not touched any romance with blacks in it for Lord knows when.  Afterwards, that’ll give them a clear conscience to ignore any romance by or with black folk once more.  (Hey, I reviewed a Ms. Condi romance novel within the last year.  How dare you say I treat romance by black authors differently from romance by authors of other races?!)

But what the hell– why deal with racial controversies?  I don’t write straight romance any more anway.  Controversies use up my energy and creativity  to little avail.  I now will only comment on race now in my own blog and safer spaces…and that’s nowhere in any nonblack genre fiction online world except perhaps Teach Me Tonight with its measured, academic tone. 

Other genre communities with majority folks can’t take blacks either, of course, but there are fewer blacks.  The issue doesn’t come up as much, nor are they as threatened.  Romance has an entire black race sub-genre to fend off , degrade, and feel superior about.    I experience much less racism in areas where there are very few blacks than in places where nonblacks have to deal with blacks in numbers and are threatened.  So I think it’s best to go Oprah with the other genres (mystery, SFF) and downplay race and up play commonalities so as to be better accepted.  With the lower numbers of black authors in other genres, acceptance is at least a possibility.. 

So what’s a black genre author to blog about?   It has never worked for me to only stick to innocuous topics.  But getting away mentally from the poisonous, racist romance community is a good thing for any black author and will likely lower my blood pressure too.     There will be less anger and I can go with the flow and blog what’s on my mind with more safety.