I wrote five years ago that we needed more black girl superheroes. That was before the wild successes of Black Panther, Get Out and Watchmen series.
My old web site is now defunct, but I addressed my frustration many times with the absence of Black girl superheroes in popular culture. Even though Misty Knight and Vixen had flirted with our imaginations through comic books since the Blaxploitation 70s, we had not arrived as heroes in recent film and on television. Unless you count slavery or oppression films, which in their own sense, offer heroism with the backhanded slap of being oppressed in slavery.
And we were basically non-existent in science fiction and young adult fiction. Remember when Hunger Games was adapted from book to film, in 2012, and its reader fans lost their collective minds upon realizing Rue and Thresh were black? Suzanne Collins had described those characters in the book as clearly having:
"dark brown skin and eyes."
Yet, readers of the series were shocked and downright mad to see actual black characters depicted, as if they were intruders who did not belong in that world. Granted, Collins’ description was small enough to go unnoticed, and understandably so. I’m speculating, but most likely, she didn’t want to call too much attention to there being black characters in the games also. If that’s true, the concern was validated with the anger that followed.
That very small inclusion of the black characters in a white world reflects the realities Blacks live with everyday. Making ourselves small in white settings- changing how we talk and show up- so we fit in and don’t draw attention to our differences. As business people, Blacks must live, create, market and strategize with the understanding that prettiness, beauty, glory and strength all flow from white skin. If that means putting white people on our book covers, making our main characters “ambiguous”, or sending out a white “trojan horse” to do our bidding for us, we do it so we can sell.
Black business owners hire white representatives to do the talking so that white customers don’t know they’re really dealing with a black owner. In author world, we call that a “pen name”. I have struggled with this decision for most of 2020, whether to take up a pen name to disguise that I am black while selling young adult fiction. When it comes to black stories as literally being unworthy of acceptance in YA, I feel like a sell out to a little girl in the hood somewhere who wants me to take the risk.
In young adult fiction, we are still essentially invisible. Studies have been done on this very dynamic of “whitewashing” YA book covers, and people of color being absent from YA covers. Young adult fiction is the bedrock of beauty, innocence and glorification. See the comparisons and the research for yourself.
And while the winds of change are finally taking a different turn with NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and Tomi Adeyimi’s Children of Blood and Bone, those winds feel more like a paltry draft in 100-degree scorching heat as readers cross the desert of our imaginations.
We (meaning Black authors and writers) hoped things would change with the crazy box office success of Get Out and Black Panther. As well as diverse television shows like black-ish, This Is Us, and Watchmen.
But alas, young adult fiction — Hunger Games, Divergent, Mazerunner, The Selection, Harry Potter— that great bastion of social training — remains the stronghold for personifications of elegance, beauty, magic and innocence.
Ah, where can the young black girl superhero find her rest?