The annoying hypocrisy of "struggle love."

Once or twice a quarter on social media, a Black reader, content creator - sometimes even an author - will feel the need to share with an unsuspecting public that they “don’t read Black romance/urban romance/urban fiction” because they “don’t like struggle love.” The first time I remember hearing this phrase in the book community, I’m sure I rolled my eyes. I roll my eyes at everything – and so do my characters – because there’s a lot of bullshit in the book community and the world. But by the second, third, tenth, twentieth times, my responses had fluctuated from more eye-rolling to subtweeting to vocal denunciations to blocking, and finally to just plain tired.

That’s where I am… fucking tired.

Thankfully though, for the last two dust-ups I haven’t been as chronically online as before, so all I’ve seen were fantastic creators dismantling these arguments with ease like this or this or this. But still, I’m irked and I wanna talk about it. :)

It’s not that I’m shocked that people, including Black people, in various romance reading communities are anti-Black. Believe me, I know that. It’s because we keep dancing around the two issues that are feeding this particular trash take: the anti-Black man bias Black women feel comfortable expressing in these spaces and the relatively large platforms Black women can build off of putting white men on a pedestal.

And that shit is gross.

Sometimes, after one of these unsolicited admissions, there will be a “community” wide conversation about the inherent anti-Black bias of these statements which are easily deflected because “I can’t be anti-Black. I am Black” or whatever people say when they don’t want to be held accountable. The logical fallacy of that assertion doesn’t do much but annoy me, but it also has the added benefit of convincing white people with BLM in their bios that the people calling them out are just haters or whatever.

But the most significant and frustrating response is watching really dope, smart, interesting, and creative Black women take the time to try and educate these specific people, and their larger audience, about why this is a problem. Frustrating because I am pretty damn sure that none of the people hopping on any app to giggle about Black romance being full of trauma and struggle – three videos or tweets after recommending a book whose MMC is stalking and kidnapping the FMC – do not care.

Like at all.

Not even a little bit.

No one at the ripe old age of “I have a car note and bills” who’s hopping on the internet talking about '“all Black romance is struggle love” or lying about “they look however I want in my head when I read” is open to changing their mind.

 (Sure, there might be someone, but I’ve yet to see them.)

(Also ALSO, y’all must not be listening to white women talk about dating white men if you think they aren’t also struggling.)

Readers who will happily read a dark romance that begins with the “hero” - human or otherwise - kidnapping his love interest or a historical romance where rape isn’t an allusion, but the “meet cute,” or an interracial romance where the non-Black MMC will marvel at her “caramel/chocolate/nutmeg skin” and “coily” hair with the kind of faux intellectualism that would make a eugenicist happy, do not want to be open to Black romance because they don’t want to confront the possibility that reading about Black people loving one another makes them uncomfortable, unhappy, hell maybe even disgusted. There was a moment when I thought it could be worthwhile to examine and contextualize these kinds of responses – if only so I can understand them – but who has the time, the energy, or the diminishing brain cells for all that shit?

(Cynwithdapen said, interestingly and sympathetically, on Tik Tok that Black women readers might be avoiding Black romance because they don’t think they can have a Black romance like the ones they’re always suggesting don’t exist in fiction or reality. That is such a kind and gentle take on this situation that I hadn’t considered. I tend to ascribe a more hateful impetus to these people, but there are so many anti-Black Black female readers that there’s room for us both to be right.)

Anyway, back to the point. In my opinion, it’s not that these Black women readers don’t like “struggle love” in their romance books, it’s that they don’t like too many Black men in their romances. They have no problem with reading white characters abuse each other. Hell, some are practically ecstatic to read white men enslave, stalk, kidnap, and otherwise imperil women of any race – so long as at the end the white man tells her she’s beautiful. (Bonus points: she’s more beautiful than his inevitably white ex, because of course she will be his “first” Black woman, if not the first Black person he’s ever met.)

Readers who feel compelled to tell us that they don’t enjoy “struggle love” ignore the countless authors who enjoy writing low angst Black romances. They use their “polite” screeds to say – without ever saying – that it’s Black men who are the problem. (Although sometimes they will offer up a ruse that they don’t care about the race of the characters on the page because they just imagine them as Black anyway. I mean I guess it’s a supreme coincidence that their favorite books are white or interracial, but whatever. Accidents happen.) The escapist fantasy they are looking for when they open a romance novel isn’t the workplace tension of the boardroom or the hijinks of a dating show or forced proximity or the thrill of a high-speed car chase with a little fingering, but the fantasy of cishet white men with money, power, and the ability to tell the (Black) female character that they are exotic, new, wanted and safe with a white man who doesn’t know or acknowledge his privilege but is kind… to his love interest…eventually.

Apparently, that fantasy don’t hit the same with a Black man.

I’ve been thinking about this for years and talking about it for years. In fact it’s one of the reasons I wrote Back in the Day. I wanted to tell a romance from the POV of a Black man because I love Black men. I’ve read a number of Black women say that they can’t read Black romance because Black men have abused them in their life. I understand that. My earliest abusers were Black men, but the kind of shit white people have done to me and generations of my family would make it damn hard to read a white romance if I was keeping score like this. And so this is another thing I think we could all see a couple therapists about. Why do Black men being misogynists ruin the fantasy but white men being racists, misogynists, and/or LITERAL COLONIZERS don’t?

But back to my book.

I wanted to write a Black man who loved his Black wife from the moment they met. I wanted to see a Black man on page who spent decades loving this woman, so much so that death couldn’t diminish it. I wanted readers to see Ada in the memories of her husband and son so we would know how Black men loved this Black woman. I wanted us to be confronted with her daughter’s grief and her community’s reverence so we could see a Black woman who had been surrounded by so much love in life that it held those who loved her together in death. I wanted to see Black men and women who felt real to me, because I have known so many like Ada and Alonzo. But by no means am I the first or the last to do so.

I happily join the chorus of Black readers and writers who dare to say that we see you and mean Black men, women, and nonbinary people.

But I also see you. I know what you mean when you call it “struggle love.” I know what white supremacy looks and sounds like.

What does it mean to be perfectly fine reading representations of white women facing misogyny head on but balk at reading about a Black woman facing racism? Do you not face misogynoir? What does it signify when Black readers will happily consume the fetishization of Black women by white love interests because it’s “romantic” but draw the line at a Black character saying nigga? Are we supposed to take the white gaze into our interior stories? Our homes? Our souls? And, on top of all that, what’s the point of having the nerve to waste your breath speaking on diversity, representation, and inclusion, when the inclusion you’re seeking is something wildly similar to what Clarence Thomas just did in the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, i.e. pulling the ladder up behind you? What’s the point of fighting your way into the room constructed in part by your very exclusion, only to let out a sigh of relief while you promise not to let Black men in behind you?

Many of us know what internalized anti-blackness sounds, feels, and tastes like. We know what white supremacy does to the brain.

You, however, seem to be the only people unable – or maybe unwilling? – to know what is right in your face, in your heart, and all over your TBRs.

I’m struggling with how to conclude this thought experiment for lots of reasons; first and foremost because, as I said above, I’m tired, but secondly because what else can we say or do? So often, goodhearted and less jaded people respond to these attacks with recommendations of books and authors writing “soft” Black romances and I understand why, but I’ve grown so tired of this labor as well. (Tired for me, other people should do whatever feels right for them.) I think the thing that tipped me over the edge was when I started seeing my name and books on these rec lists. I’m sure it’s not meant this way, but on a bad day, I read those recommendations and saw something akin to “Look! Read her! She’s a good Negro!”

I am not. So jot that down.

But more importantly, if they wanted to, they would. If they wanted to read Black romances that couldn’t be identified as “struggle love” they would look for and find them. Easily. If they wanted to read books where the Black characters aren’t facing racism and misogyny, where Black people love on one another, they could have deleted the video draft, found those books, and read a couple.

But what they want is to tell us about their anti-blackness. They want to make sure that everyone knows they too want a blue-eyed, blonde billionaire to marvel at the new-fangled invention known as a satin cap, discover braids for the first time in the 21st century, try lotion for the first time in their thirties, and then take his negress to Paris for their honeymoon or whatever. They want us to know that they’re not like us other Black girls.

So often, I wonder if the message they also want to send is a plea for their audience to stop recommending Black romances to them. Stop asking them to read about Black people in love with one another. Stop expecting them to confront that such a thing is possible. So, I’m gonna pass on more wasted effort. I get enough of that at my day job.

What I will say is that we’re long past time to have an honest conversation about the kinds of anti-blackness that Black people in the book community enact, contribute to, and validate. Maybe if we can get past that struggle, we can stop using “struggle love” to describe the ways in which Black men and women can come together in books in ways we do in real life. And maybe then we can all read whatever we want without spewing anti-Black hatred on the timelines when some of us are just trying to find a good recipe for banana bread.