G-Spot

 

🎉🎉QOTD: How do you feel about the current trend emphasizing interracial relationships and multi-culturalism?📚📚

Diversity. Multiculturalism. We see examples of them everywhere (maybe not enough for some of us, but we’re getting there). It’s on billboards, in our commercials and movies and our favorite TV shows (i.e., Blackish, Modern Family, and the entire Star Trek franchise that’s been doing its diversity, multicultural thing since the sixties, thank you very much!). It’s a Black and white couple with their multicultural kids enjoying a vacation, or a same-sex couple grocery shopping or out to dinner, or a transgender individual having a beer. Gone are the days of needle-across-a-record double-takes when we see famous or not-so-famous interracial couples out and about. For the most part, it doesn’t garner much of a stir, especially not in Hollywood. Of course, this phenomenon might just be in the “blue states” for all I know.   

What got me wondering about this multiculturalism “trend”, was a comment in a recent review of one of my books.

I’ve seen the following observation or similar at least a couple of times in reviews for On the Edge, which was published in early 2019. It’s from a 5-star review on Amazon, so I guess I shouldn’t be completely offended:  “…although fairly stereotyped to the point of being clichéd to fit in with today’s trendy emphasis on multi-culturalism and inter-racial relationships…”

“…to fit in with today’s trendy emphasis on multi-culturalism and inter-racial relationships”? Excuse me?! I took offense (also following a world-wide ”trend” I might add J). Especially since I never set out or intentionally made/make my characters interracial to fit into any “trend”, multiculturalism or otherwise. I didn’t suddenly discover and jump on a multiculturalism bandwagon. My characters, like myself and my friends and family, are multicultural or come from multicultural backgrounds and interracially procreate and mingle and have done so since before I was born. So naturally I write what I know as well as what I see and research. I happen to love reading about interracial couples in my romance too and have for a long time, long before the current “trend”, probably since I was seven and the hero and heroine in my first action/adventure/romance were Asian teens. I like reading about interracial relationships because I see myself and my loved-ones in the characters; the characters are relatable. And isn’t this why most people read certain books and/or tune into most TV shows and movies? To see themselves reflected back at them?

For a long time this wasn’t the case. I couldn’t tune into any show on TV and see myself in the characters. When I was young, we had The Brady Bunch, Father Knows Best, Family Affair, My Three Sons, and Leave it to Beaver – all shows I avidly watched, but all representations of perfect, lily-white, patriarch-led families (even in Lost in Space where the only diverse character was the Robot…and maybe Dr. Smith, but shhhh). Rarely did I see a Black or brown face on TV. Yes, we did have Julia and I Spy, but these were the exceptions, not the rule.

As a kid with little choices about what I could watch on TV, the lack of diversity didn’t occur to me. What’s the saying? You can’t miss something you never had? Don’t get me wrong. I loved the “white” shows I grew up watching, especially those like The Flying Nun, The Addams Family, The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and The Twilight Zone, all of which fostered my life-long interest and appreciation of being other and the supernatural. Then came Good Times, What’s Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, That’s My Mama, Amen, Benson, The Jackson 5ive, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and even Chico and the Man. They weren’t perfect (and all would probably be considered problematic in today’s TV landscape of diversity and multiculturalism; what wouldn’t be?). But they all featured Black and brown faces and were signs of progress with images I could look at to see myself, “my people”. Of course I can’t forget the afore-mentioned Star Trek (Trekkie here from way back) that represented all cultures and skin tones, even green, long before most of these shows.   

Today’s kids and teens have so many choices. They can see themselves reflected back at them from so many book and magazine covers and on the big and small screens. I’m glad for them. I’m glad for us. Maybe soon being interracial or multicultural won’t be considered a “trend” but just the norm. Just the way things are and should be. And no reviewer will have a reason to point out that a writer is “being trendy” because their book features interracial or multicultural characters.