Black Characters Stereotypes Continue

Anita Doreen Diggs writes about how publishers still use stereotypes

 for black characters and nobody else.

I can’t write a novel about Jews because I don’t know anything about their faith, but white writers put black people in their novels all the time, because they ‘know them’ from headline news.

Black characters in most novels are drivers, maids, janitors, drug dealers and all things inferior. They are ample busted but with a sense of humour. All characters in novels are not described as white. They are just characters.

It is one of the reasons why I don’t finish some books. I’m tired of the narrative that somehow, nature gave all races a brain, except the black race.  I just put aside a book to write this piece because the racial stereotype is on the first page.

“She’s Haitian, in her mid-fifties, a little humorless, brusque and professional - exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse.” Page 1.

Let’s remove Haitian for a minute. Does that water down the nurse’s qualities? No. She would still be a solid character. I thought I was going to have a good read because the first line told me what kind of bus or train I was entering. The man is in a wheelchair. I was hooked. Let me read on, so I can find out the reason for his immobility. It is not a white man in a wheelchair, just a man, but Renee is from Haiti.

Is this a requirement by publishers such as HarperCollins? I can imagine editors frowning because something is missing. What is it? Black characters. Then authors infuse them based on headlines and people who do chores for them in their condos and cottages.

Maybe that’s not fair to publishers. Authors also have their bias: how they see the world and how they think it ought to be. My last book before the Haitian nurse was about a Jewish boy’s journey from Brooklyn N.Y. and his parents steeped in Judaism to sunny California, open skies and open way of life. I was enjoying it because I didn’t understand most of it. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? No. It isn’t. It means I was learning about Talmund, Torah, Sabbath, shidduch, yahrzeit, shul and other aspects of a people.

I was having a good time, until I came across the rich kid who was spending his summer in Kenya, teaching locals music. That’s it. What is the point of reading, if the book you are working on, also has stereotypes about black people? It’s very simple. Don’t include black characters, period.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.