We Need To Talk About The Tulsa Race Massacre (and Why I Don't Write BIPOC Main Characters)

This post addresses a review that someone left on my book, Prohibited. If you encounter this review in the wild, PLEASE DO NOT harass, attack, or otherwise engage the person who made these statements. They have the right to share their opinion and I am grateful to them for raising these concerns so that I have the opportunity to address them here.

Today, I want to address a couple of really sensitive topics.

First of all, I want to state emphatically that I believe reader spaces are reader spaces. Readers have every right to express their opinions in their spaces about the things that I say and do regarding my books. And, symmetrically, I have the same right to do the same thing in my space.

Second, I want to state that I do not ever have an issue with readers not wanting to read my book. Reading is so subjective, so personal, and romance is doubly so. I think it’s incredibly problematic to attempt to police or guilt people into reading anything. As authors we are never entitled to readers’ time and attention, no matter what sort of justifications we can come up with.

All that being said, I want to talk about a review (or not review?) that a reader left regarding my book, Prohibited. In it, they express disinterest in reading my book because:

1.        it’s set in Tulsa in 1920, the year that precedes the Tulsa Race Massacre and, according to them, they don’t want to read a story in which they don’t know for certain if the MCs would have "instigated" the Massacre

2.        I could have set the book anywhere else in 1920, but I chose Tulsa, the year before the Massacre and, in their words, that’s “a CHOICE.”

3.        The MCs are all white in this setting

First of all, what is the Tulsa Race Massacre?

It’s a horrific event that happened on May 31st/June 1st, 1921. Essentially, a young black man was falsely accused of attacking a white woman and he was taken to jail. A white lynching mob started to gather outside of the jail in Downtown Tulsa and a group of Black WW1 veterans came down there to try to diffuse the situation and offer the incarcerated man protection from the mob.

And things imploded in the most devastating way imaginable.

To give further context: there was a thriving Black neighborhood called Greenwood in Tulsa at this time. It was nicknamed Black Wall Street because it was the single most prosperous Black neighborhood in the country with wealth that reportedly rivaled the wealth found on Wall Street in NY, hence the nickname. There was a LOT of racial tension in Tulsa at this time. A lot of the white citizens resented the prosperity of the Black community. Tulsa newspapers written and published by white men at this time fanned the flames of this hatred by publishing hateful rhetoric about the Greenwood neighborhood and its residents.

The events that occurred on May 31st were the catalyst of events that destroyed the lives of thousands of Black citizens of Tulsa, whose effects have been felt for generations.

The white mob of ten thousand began to burn and loot the Greenwood neighborhood. Black people were beaten and raped and murdered. Hundreds of Black people were murdered. Their valuables were stolen. Their businesses and their homes were burned to the ground. The Mayor called in the National Guard and the US Government was literally firebombing the Black citizens of Greenwood from the skies.

It is one of the most shameful events ever to occur in US history.

And I’m sure there’s a large majority of people reading this, saying, “Why have I never even heard of this?”

First of all, because it’s shameful as fuck, so of course it’s been swept under the rug.

And second of all, because for a long time it was put down as a “Race Riot,” i.e. the Black people of Greenwood were the ones causing this problem and rioting, etc.

To this day, the victims (there are only two women left alive who lived through it), and the descendants of the victims have never received reparations for the wealth that was stolen from them, or the physical and emotional devastations inflicted on them. The first formal apology they received from the City of Tulsa was in 2020, almost 100 years after the fucking Massacre. The US Government has, to this day, never acknowledged or formally apologized for the role they played in the Massacre, either.

It was an incredibly devastating and unimaginably awful thing. I sincerely encourage you to seek out more information about it, and read memoirs written by the people who lived through it. Magic City Books in Tulsa carries many books written by local authors on the subject that you can locate on their website, or you can call and speak to them and ask them for more information.

So, now that we have the context for what the Massacre actually is, I’d like to address the concerns that this reader expressed.

First of all, I’d like to say that if you as a reader ever have concerns about the content of my books, or what my characters would and would not do, I am more than happy to address those concerns. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that my MCs would have NEVER participated in the Massacre. Moreover, I have absolutely no interest in writing or reading stories about people who would do something like that. As an author I have total creative control over the people that I write about and it's my prerogative to make decisions about their respective moralities, which makes me the ultimate authority on my books. That's the beauty of fiction.

This also brings up a point about creative control and how we project onto other people's creative work. It's inevitable, of course, because so much of the experience of reading is that we bring our worldview and experiences into it with us. That being said, I think we should probably draw the line at deciding for an author what their characters would and would not do, especially when a reader has never actually read the book and has no evidence whatsoever to support their unfounded and potentially damaging speculations.

Which brings me to my next point: why did I choose to set my book in Tulsa in 1920? This reader pointed out that I could have set this book anywhere. Why Tulsa in 1920, the year before the Massacre?

I chose to set this book in Tulsa simply because I live here. I set it in 1920 because I wanted to write a story set during the Federal Prohibition because my MMCs are career criminal bootleggers. And I also set it in Tulsa because it was one of the wealthiest cities in the world after WW1 and it was also the Art Deco capital. It seemed like a rational and likely setting, a city small enough that it wasn’t swamped with crime syndicates like St. Louis was, but wealthy enough to support the cutthroat bootlegging business that I wrote about. And it's a city I have direct access to in terms of research.

And I deliberately chose to set the book in 1920, before the Massacre, because I do not believe that it is my place as a white person to tell the story of this catastrophic and devastating event. I needed the book to be set no more than a few years after the end of WW1 (because several of the characters are veterans, freshly coping with their war related PTSD) and I didn't feel at all comfortable setting my story so soon after the Massacre because then I would be in a position of either having to ignore the event or tell the story, and neither of those choices felt at all appropriate to me.

It's still not a widely known event and as much as I would love to see stories that deal with this subject matter, it feels really out of line for a white person to be one of the first people to deal with it in the Romance community. I seriously considered setting the book after the Massacre so that I could address it in some way, but I didn't see how I could handle it in the context of my book without creating some sort of White Savior situation that seemed really harmful.

And more than that, it is, in my opinion, never a white person’s place to write about Black pain.

I do address the Massacre briefly in the next book that I'm working on now (set in St Louis in 1925) in a conversation between two characters who were journalists who covered the Massacre through a (fictional) independent newspaper. They discuss how fucked up and unjust it was. I’ve included this because I do want my readers to know about it. Not nearly enough people outside of Tulsa know about it. But again, I just feel like it's not my story to tell and it would be very disrespectful for me to try and tell it.

As far as all my main characters being white, this is something I have ripped my hair out about and gone around and around about with myself over and over again.

Ultimately, this is what I have landed on: I have chosen to write only white characters (with the exception of side characters because I am not in their heads, trying to convey their lived experience) because, after listening to so much discourse around this subject from BIPOC authors, I've come to the conclusion that 1) unintentional harm is imminently possible and very probable when white authors write BIPOC characters, and 2) those aren't my stories to tell, and 3) it feels harmful for me to try to build my career on and profit from telling stories of marginalized communities that I don't belong to.

Writing around history is always difficult and these are all things that I agonize about.

Racism and colonialism are not only a shameful part of history, they're also still happening to this day, and inadvertent harm seems possible in every choice we make, in the stories that we do or do not choose to tell as part of our books.

But ultimately, I'm not interested in shying away from setting books at certain times, in certain places (with the exception of writing specifically about events and experiences that I have no business depicting, obviously) because if we started to do that, there would be no time and no place left to tell stories because of how catastrophically fucked the history of the Western world is up to the present day. It's a logic that begins to unravel the fabric of all fictional stories set in the Western world if you pull hard enough. By this logic, we shouldn't be writing any historical romance novels at all.

I believe the best actions I can take as a white author are: 1) to highlight historical events when appropriate that have impacted BIPOC people without attempting to tell the stories that don't belong to me or my community, 2) to never create harmful situations for BIPOC characters or create harmful characters who actively do harmful things to BIPOC characters for the sake of 'historical accuracy,' and 3) to support actual Own Voices/BIPOC authors who are telling the stories of marginalized communities.

Of course, I am always interested in continuing this discourse with BIPOC authors and readers and my door is always open for more conversation on the subject.

The best approach, in my view, is to try to take the most sensitive path with the least amount of potential for harm, and I believe that the approach I’ve outlined above is the one with the least amount of potential for harm.

I am always trying to learn, to be better, and to very seriously consider how my choices might inadvertently cause harm to people I have absolutely no wish to hurt. I am always thinking of the potential for harm in everything that I write. And while I may not always get it right, but I do put a lot of time and consideration into how to handle these topics and I will continue to do so. I am always open to feedback about how I can make better choices. I never approach navigating these things lightly and I will continue to treat them with the deference and consideration that they deserve.

xoxo,

Madz