Life's happy little accidents are always intriguing. One of these interesting coincidences happened to me recently when I decided to read Nella Larsen's classic Harlem Renaissance novel "Passing."
I came across this book by chance. Having recently realized that I hadn't read a novel in a long time - only biographies and other nonfiction - I made a New Year's resolution to read more fiction (which I described in an earlier blog post).
Around the beginning of the year, I Googled "classics that are short" and came across a list of critically acclaimed novels under 200 pages. With Black History Month coming up, I figured "Passing" would be the perfect selection.
This 1929 novella is a real page-turner and feels like an amazingly modern tale, despite the plot about an upper-middle-class black woman accidentally running into an old friend who has been passing for white.
Rather than some kind of heavy-handed morality tale about the dangers of hiding who you are, "Passing" feels more like a contemporary thriller or a dark Edgar Allan Poe story about a woman being haunted by a spirit from her past who has a deadly secret.
After finishing the breezy read on Feb. 8, I posted about it on Facebook, recommending friends and family to check it out if they hadn't already. Just a few days after my Facebook post, I came across an article that mentions "Passing" on, of all places, the Latino news site Fusion.net. The interesting thing is, I wasn't seeking out information on "Passing"; I was logging onto Fusion because I'm trying to learn Spanish. So it definitely pays to have diverse interests.
In her fascinating article on Fusion, writer Stacia L. Brown expounds on "The Passing Paradox: Writing, Identity & Publishing While Black."
"To 'pass,' as African American writers in the early 1900s defined it, was to choose to escape from the violence and discrimination attendant to blackness," Brown writes.
She goes on to describe how the concept of passing for another race may seem like an antiquated notion in our 21st century, so-called "post-racial" society in which we have a black family in the White House.
But the unfortunate reality is, as Brown astutely observes, "passing, in its many permutations, is as topically relevant in 2015 as it was in 1915."
Brown goes on to describe the dilemma that some African-American writers face when trying to get published and attract a mainstream audience: should you try to mask your race so that your work won't be pigeonholed as "ethnic," but in doing so will you lose an important connection to your roots, your community and your identity as a whole?
As an African-American male and the author of a novel, The Chloe Chronicles, with a cast of multicultural characters, I've sometimes pondered this notion myself. And my quandary is compounded by the fact that I'm a guy trying to sell a book with a woman as the lead character.
Would it be wise to use a pen name and keep my photo off the book jacket, so as not to scare away women of different races who might buy my book if they didn't know the author was a man? (I go into more detail on gender bias in books, movies and the media, in general, in a previous blog post.)
For most of us writers who are trying to attract readers in a very crowded and competitive marketplace, publishing anonymously is simply not an option. Unless I had a skilled marketing team behind me who came up with some brilliant publicity campaign in which I could promote the hell out of my book while concealing my identity, I'm going to have to show my face. In order to connect with readers and establish an all-important brand or "author platform," as they say in publishing, putting yourself out there is necessary.
The sad but accurate truth is that for as much progress as we've made on racial issues, deep-held prejudices still persist. Like many parts of our society, publishing is still a very segregated field.
I think the publishing business should look to the movie industry for inspiration. Hollywood certainly has a long way to go in terms of diversity, as well, but there are numerous examples of black and Latino directors who helm mainstream movies with either multicultural or all-white casts.
Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is currently nominated for Best Director Academy Award for "Birdman," which is also nominated for Best Picture. Though "Birdman" has an all-white cast of accomplished actors like Michael Keaton, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, no one has been making a big deal out of the fact that a Hispanic filmmaker directed the movie.
And Oscar-winning African-American actor/director Forest Whitaker has directed everything from the all-black big-screen adaptation of Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" to the all-white romantic comedy "Hope Floats."
Movie directors, like authors, are storytellers. And hopefully one day we'll get to the place where black writers, like their cinematic counterparts, no longer feel tempted to "pass" in order to be successful.
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