Miltantly Romantic

I fell down a work/high holy days hole there.  But I have mostly crawled out.

As a preface to what I am about to talk about, let me state, categorically, that I believe that #OwnVoices literature is important and will always be important, even in a world where humanity could manage to stop being raging cocksnots toward each other.  And that is notably not the world we live in.  Nothing that goes after this is to suggest otherwise.  Rather, it is to suggest that (1) for diversity to exist, #OwnVoices cannot be the only people writing stories about non-privileged communities, (2) that there are ways for people who are not part of a community to responsibly write characters from it, and (3) the greater the proliferation of #OwnVoices and outsider texts there are, the greater our ability to determine what might be problematic elements in a text, and not take them as gospel truth.

At the beginning of this week, one of the romance newsletters I subscribe to linked this discussion of romances with Indian leads written by Indian-American or Indian-Canadian women .  While this summary does not do the article credit, the author argues that all of these books are written on the theme of proximity to whiteness--with whiteness being a desirable thing--and, as such, are written for white audiences.  I will discuss in a moment why I do not agree with that thesis, but I nonetheless recognize it as a valid frustration.

Today, entirely by coincidence, I read this Modern Love column in the NYT, in which a Pakistani-born, American-raised woman talks about learning from Bend It Like Beckham that white men were romantically desirable as brown men could not be, and how, when she finally fell in love with a Pakistani man, there were a million ways they understood each other that she had never managed with white men.

To explain my beliefs on this issue, it is necessary that I give a broad overview of American anti-Semitism historically and currently, and living as someone who practices Judaism as an element of her daily life. 

I am 97% Ashkenazi.  My father's family left Russia to escape the progroms, my mother's grandmother made it out of Germany in time to survive.  The rest of her family did not.  I am, in the eyes of today's world, white.

Anti-Semitism is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it, and yes, that includes people who have experienced other kinds of "isms."  For one thing, it comes in different forms from the right and from the left.  For another thing, it no longer looks the way most other isms do.

Let me be clear: this change to being more subtle is a fairly new thing.  And it is something that has been accomplished only by the majority of American Jewry's willingness to assimilate.  That is: it has been gained by our willingness to give up the things that make us Not White.

(Side note: when I presume whiteness of Jews in color, I am referring very specifically to genetic Ashkenazis.  Sephardis and Jews by Choice are often not Caucasian, and so there are a completely different set of circumstances.  That is outside the scope of what I am discussing here.)

Brandeis is the Jewish version of the HBCU.  It was created because Jews weren't allowed into the Ivys, among other institutes of higher education.  I grew up going to a Jewish country club--founded because Jews weren't accepted into the others.  In fact, it was not until the mid-1990s that Kansas City Country Club accepted someone Jewish, and they did it only when forced.  That Jewish person was Henry Block, of H & R Block.  They had turned him down, but the golf pro who played there, Tom Watson, was nationally known, and he had married a Jewish woman and had children with her.  He threatened to leave the club if they did not accept Block.  They did so, grudgingly.

The racial covenants for housing that were struck down in '48 but remain on the books until this day?  Jews were included in those covenants in many places, my hometown being one of them.

Many Americans, knowing very well what was happening in Germany in WWII, wanted to side with the Germans.  After WWII, unlike the Russians, who prosecuted Nazi scientists, America pardoned them and gave them a home.  Meanwhile, it was highly reluctant to accept the Jews streaming out of Europe, desperate for somewhere to go.

This kind of anti-Semitism fades as religious Judaism fades outside of haredi pockets like Williamsburg.  It no longer looks systemic and easy to point to, except for the incidences every few years where someone shoots up a Jewish dayschool, pre-school, Jewish Community Center, etc.

I was almost eighteen when I figured out that (white) churches didn't hire security for every service, the way synagogues did.  All religious buildings are inherently dangerous, right?  I was a full-grown adult when I learned that not everybody has a passport that they keep updated religiously (pun intended) which they've had since birth just in case they need to flee the country.  

Every single year that I was in school, every single one of them, there was one teacher who would be an absolute dickmunch about me taking two days for Rosh Hashanah and one for Yom Kippur.  Without fail.  Employers were often worse.  This year, I put in for a religious accommodation at my work and was told that I didn't need one, but I could take a disability accommodation instead if I got a doctor's note.  Thankfully, my therapist is Jewish.  I cannot even begin to tell you how many major work trainings and life events get scheduled on major Jewish holidays.  AwesomeCon in DC was impossible for me to make for years because it was always on Passover, which is not an easy holiday to work around.  The amount of resistance I have encountered around certain requests for essentially vegetarian meals to make sure I wasn't getting something egregiously unkosher has been unreal at times.  Also, people treat keeping Kosher like you're a high maintenance picky eater.  (True story: I can find something to eat ALMOST anywhere.  Except soul food restaurants.)  

A lot of anti-Semitism is being treated on a semi-constant basis, like you're a problem.  And if you would just stop being a problem, everything would be fine.

There are also the elements of just not being welcome in certain spaces, like my complete discomfort with lesbian spaces since they've started disallowing Jewish star flags in parades.  That's a sign of my religion.  You have told me, a lesbian, I'm not welcome in this lesbian space.  

My point to all this is that while I might not be able to speak to the experience of proximity to whiteness, I can certainly speak to the experience of proximity to Christianity/secular Protestantism, and if you think the two are all that different in the U.S., I would truly advise you (a) to consider whether you would think that if this were a Muslim talking, and (b) to think about the fact that the closest thing there's been to a non-Christian president in the U.S. was a Catholic.  And that was quite the uproar at the time.  (I see Catholics as Christian, but within the U.S. there is no question in my mind that theirs is an existence of proximity to Protestantism.)

When Jews are in the media, which is exceedingly rare, it is always and forever about their proximity to Christianity.  Jews in media (1) are so assimilated that the only thing that signals their Judaism is either their name or something far more offensive such as a high level of neuroticism mixed with dark hair and a longer nose, (2) relate to their Judaism only through Hanukah which any practicing Jew will tell you is one of the least important holidays of the year and only well-known because, yup, of its proximity to Christmas, or (3) both.  I saw one representation of Judaism in the media that I was like "okay, this could be something," and that was when Kate Kane was brought to the screen.  It wasn't amazing.  But there were elements of Kate's Judaism woven in slightly, beyond "I don't celebrate Christmas" aka, Judaism as the ABSENCE of Christianity.  Then Ruby Rose left, and they kept Batwoman's lesbianism and jettisoned her Judaism.

In romance, Judaism is even more rare.  And if there exists a romance novel where both hero and heroine are Jewish, I'm unaware of it.  (That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  But at the same time, I have looked.)  The closest, I would say, is Felicia Grossman's second, Dalliances & Devotion, where the heroine is the child of a mixed marriage but identifies as Jewish, and the hero is Jewish.  Grossman's first, Appetites & Vices is an intensely smart commentary on the safety acquired by moving toward the Christian norm (and the dangers in trying to get there).

Here's the thing, though, and this is why, in the end, I disagree with the assertion that because a story is about proximity to the dominant culture, it's written for the dominant culture: for a lot of Jews, this is their story.  It's not mine.  My Judaism runs on a calendar wholly apart from the Roman one, it involves a community that is nothing short of family, and it knows exactly what the Pakistani author is talking about when she discusses how she fits with another Pakistani more than she ever managed with someone white.  I tried dating Christians.  Unlike the author of the article, for me it was "this is what there is" rather than "this is what I prefer", but I tried.  And no matter how secular they were, Christianity was always a thing between us, largely because Americans often think things that are Christian are secular.  

While a story that aligns to Christianity being a default might be more comfortable for a Christian/secular American reader, that doesn't make it for that reader, in the same way that because white readers might find stories of racial assimilation more understandable, it doesn't make those stories for white people.  I feel like it's harsh to say that because someone desires assimilation/acculturation, their experience isn't legitimate and they don't deserve to see themselves in fiction.  The issues underlying that desire are certainly a problem, and one that we, as a society, should be working on, but I don't think delegitimizing the experience of living in a problematic society is a fair  or even productive way of going about that.

So, just because the Jewish stories I see around me aren't my Jewish story doesn't mean they shouldn't get told.  What it means is that someone like me, or someone who's not Jewish, but is interested in writing about someone like me, needs to write more stories.  Now, is it risky for someone who's not Jewish to write about my kind of Judaism?  Boy howdy.  Jews are insular for a million reasons, we're a hard nut to crack.  A good way to crack it, though, to crack that problem with any community, is to find sensitivity readers.  And not just for the sake of using their brains.  For the sake of listening to them as humans who have lived whatever it is you're writing.

And sure, if we could say "only #OwnVoices get to represent" and that meant that tomorrow there were--for simplicity's sake, leaving out religious, sexual orientation, and gender identity disparities, among others--20% Latinx creators, 20% Black, 20% Arab, 20% Asian, and 20% white, that would be a pretty sweet world.  In the meantime, as the author of the critique notes, eight percent of romance writers are non-white.  So if only #OwnVoices write non-white characters, only eight percent of romance novels get to have them.  And within those eight percent, as discussed above, only certain types of minority experiences get told.  Frankly, that's a shitty solution.

To be clear, like all problems with representation, I don't think there's a good or right answer here.  The only thing I can say with any certainty is that I don't believe limiting representation works nearly so well as pressing for an increase in the sheer volume of it, even when that road has foreseeable pitfalls.