no more “Becky books”

When a friend asked me last fall to address the problems she found in Dear Martin, I hedged. Few people thanked me for pointing out the issues I had with All American Boys (though many were quick to praise Jason Reynolds for his “gracious” response), and I didn’t want to become known for “targeting” or “picking on” Black authors when so few of us manage to get published. But in the end, I decided something needed to be said because I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in publishing: novels by Black authors about police violence against Black boys where White girls take center stage. I decided not to blog about The Truth of Right Now (2017) by Kara Lee Corthron when I read it last fall. Another friend urged me to read that YA novel; he found the writing superior to The Hate You Give (2017) and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t garnering equal attention. It’s a very different kind of story; a White girl attempts suicide after being raped and exploited by a White male teacher at her high school; when Lily meets Dari, an artistic Black boy with an abusive father and absent mother, her outlook on life changes and she invites him to move in with her and her mother. Dari then becomes the object of desire for both mother and daughter, and the novel concludes with an ugly confrontation in the street with police. When Lily denies knowing Dari, he is brutalized by police and hospitalized. It was clear to me why this novel didn’t achieve the blockbuster status of THUG, and I wondered why such a strong writer would choose to tell this particular story. I support the right of artists to create freely, but with so few Black female YA authors getting published (see Edith Campbell’s research), it’s frustrating to see several choosing to put the focus on Black boys and White girls. Where does that leave Black girls?

On Monday night PBS aired a documentary about the last few weeks of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life. The camera crew was given permission to sit in on planning meetings for the Poor People’s Campaign. King was assassinated before he could lead their march on Washington, but the footage reveals how much his colleagues loved and respected him. They were also quick to come to his defense when more radical Black Power activists leveled accusations of irrelevancy and the ineffectiveness of a nonviolent strategy. Earlier that day, before I presented at Eagle Academy for Young Men in Brooklyn, I asked the room full of Black boys how many considered King their role model: three 7th graders slowly raised their hands. I told them about Dear Martin, admitted I found it troubling, and then asked, “How many of you could see yourselves writing letters to Malcolm X?” Almost every boy in the room shot his hand into the air. It’s no surprise that this bestselling novel isn’t titled Dear Malcolm (or Dear Nat, or Dear Marcus). King remains the favored civil rights leader of most Whites (and some conservative Blacks) who wrongly fix him in the moment of his 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech” and ignore King’s later, more radical vision that condemned not just racism but capitalism and the Vietnam War. King grew up in the Black church, married a Black woman, raised his family in a Black neighborhood, led a Black congregation, mobilized and served Black communities across the US and beyond. He attended a historically Black college (Morehouse) and was clearly driven by his love for his people. We can’t talk about King in 2018 without acknowledging the evolution of his ideas, the sanitizing of his image, and his limitations. He was a philanderer, a fact represented in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film Selma. Like King, the teen protagonist in Dear Martin is from Atlanta but, as far as I can tell, that’s where the similarities end.

We meet Justyce late at night; why he was given that name, I’m not sure. He follows news reports of young Black men killed by police, but doesn’t seem engaged in any kind of activism despite plans to earn a law degree and work on social policy. Wearing a hoodie from his prep school and earbuds, Jus is on his way to rescue his on-again-off-again girlfriend. He finds Melo in a parking lot, drunk but determined to drive her red sports car home. Jus’s best friend Manny advised against acting as “Captain Save-A-Ho” (4) but Jus knows his ex is vulnerable. Plus he “can’t deny Melo’s the finest girl he’s ever laid eyes—not to mention hands-–on” (5). We soon learn that Melo has her White mother’s “milky Norwegian complexion, wavy hair the color of honey, and amazing green eyes that are kind of purple around the edge;” thanks to her Black NFL player father, Melo also has “really full lips, a small waist, crazy curvy hips, and probably the nicest butt Jus has ever seen in his life” (5). Melo resists Jus’ efforts to help her but after vomiting on him and spitting in his face, he manages to get her—literally kicking and screaming—into the back seat of her car. And then, of course, the police show up and Jus is cuffed by a cop named Castillo on suspicion of attempting to carjack a White woman. Throughout the arrest/assault, Melo says nothing to defend Jus.

Last night at dinner I handed Dear Martin to my Black feminist friend and had her read the passage describing Melo. She handed me back the book and said, “So at age 15, that’s the point where I would have stopped reading this book.” It took a real effort for me to finish reading it, and throughout I wondered, “How would a Black girl feel while reading this book? Invested? Invisible? Indifferent?” We never learn how Melo identifies in terms of race; she only utters about 100 words in the entire book, and it’s implied (by Manny) that she has cheated on Jus with other guys. Jus admits that he uses Melo to enhance his status: “There’s a lot of stuff Manny has that Justyce doesn’t—two parents with six-figure salaries, a basement apartment, a badass car, crazy confidence…What does Justyce have? The hottest girl in school” (17).

Traumatized by the encounter with Officer Castillo, Justyce starts an “experiment.” It’s unclear to me why Justyce chooses to write letters to Martin Luther King, Jr. and by the end of the novel, Jus can’t understand his motivations either. It seems at the outset that Jus wants to know how to “turn the other cheek” and remain nonviolent while being harassed or brutalized simply for being Black. King is rarely quoted in the novel, but when Jus is asked to dress like a “thug” for Halloween alongside one White “friend” in his crew wearing a Klan robe and hood, Jus swallows his perfectly reasonable objections, declaring “it’s cool” because “he stumbled upon Martin’s definition of integration—‘intergroup and interpersonal living’—and decided to just go with it. He’s not sure this is exactly what Martin meant, but what is he supposed to say?” (41-42).

There are plenty of moments in this novel that strain credulity. Of course, the photos taken during Halloween come back to bite Jus; later in the novel, the lawyer of the cop who shot him and killed Manny uses the photo to argue Jus was a menace to society. Black girls are rarely mentioned in Dear Martin, and the conversations about them are equally problematic. Manny invites Jus to join the circle of racist rich White boys that Manny has considered friends for years, but it’s to Jus that Manny makes this unexpected confession: “I’m scared of black girls, man” (72). Despite being described by his White “friend” Jared as “a titan with the ladies” (208), Manny dreads interaction with Black girls because his cousins are “real attitude-y” and “kinda…ghetto” (72). As an incoming freshman at Morehouse, Manny worries about his ability to relate to his Black classmates when he has only ever had White friends. Jus reassures him: “You’ll be fine, man. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of dudes you’ll vibe with at Morehouse just like you vibe with me” (73). But when it comes to Manny’s anxiety about the Black women at Spelman, Jus falters: “It’s not like he has any experience in this area either. Melo’s half black, but she’s def not the type of girl Manny’s talking about” (72). Ultimately, Jus hazards a guess: “All I can say is they’re not all alike, just like we aren’t” (73).

I attended PWIs (predominantly White institutions) for my entire academic career but I’m not from the South, so I asked some friends from Atlanta how likely it is that two Black teenage boys from working-class and upper middle-class backgrounds wouldn’t know any Black girls; all responded that it was highly unlikely. Why is it that Manny’s parents, Black professionals and members of the country club, never had “the talk” with their seventeen-year-old son until shortly before his DWB death? In my experience, Black girls outnumber Black boys at elite schools so it wouldn’t have been a stretch to have a Black girl on Justyce’s debate team. Or she could have been on a team from another prep school—at least one such Black girl exists in the book, though she’s referenced in a derogatory way by Blake (wearer of the KKK costume). He invites Manny and Jus to his birthday party but then immediately asks for their help: “‘There’s this fine-ass black girl here from Decatur Prep, and I was thinking you guys could wingman it up for me and shit. Homegirl’s got the fattest ass I’ve ever seen, and I think if she meets my niggas, I’ll have a good chance of getting’ [sic] her upstairs. You feel me dogs?'” (90). Despite not knowing any Black girls, Jus takes offense; drunk and sick of the White boys’ liberties and slurs, Jus slugs Blake and calls Manny a sellout. Manny subsequently quits the basketball team and slugs Jared. Jared’s father presses charges, Jus goes for a ride with Manny in his Range Rover, and his best friend loses his life.

One thing Angie Thomas did well in The Hate You Give was to provide Star with a diverse community. Like Jus, Star has racist and “woke” White classmates in addition to friends of color at her elite school. But Star doesn’t live on campus and so she stays connected to and gets support from her large extended family, neighbors, and community activists. All help to shape her worldview, whereas Jus has only an overworked, largely absent mother. When Jus needs to talk, he goes home but finds his mother more interested in watching Judge Judy (84); when he tries to talk to her about police violence and his struggles at school, his mother goes back to reading her book after unsympathetically reminding Jus, “‘I didn’t raise you to punk out when the going gets rough'” (36). By comparison, the parents of SJ and Manny adore Jus, welcoming him into their wealthy homes, hugging him, and even cooking his favorite meal. When his mother urges Jus to keep his White female classmate as a friend and nothing more, Jus shuts down but “wants to call Mama on her prejudice. Tell her, in his mind, she’s just as bad as the guy who shot him and Manny” (130). That’s right—his Black mother is JUST AS BAD as Tison, the White off-duty cop who shot two Black teens for playing their music too loud. This isn’t the only false equivalency. Jus’s only childhood friend, Quan, is a gang member in prison for shooting Castillo. Quan is also the cousin of Manny, and while visiting him in prison Jus learns that Tison saw Quan kill his partner (Castillo). Jus then wonders—rather charitably—whether Tison shot into their vehicle because he was suffering from PTSD, just like Jus’s army veteran father who used to get drunk and beat his mother (142). When Jus decides to meet with the head of Quan’s gang, Jus leaves his valuables at school and then chides himself for being part of the problem: “How can he be mad at white people for profiling when he’s doing the same damn thing they do?” (158). By this point in the novel I wouldn’t have been surprised if Jus made a case for “reverse racism” and attributed it to King.

Jus ultimately uses his letter-writing experiment to justify his desire for SJ, his White female debate partner: “she’s gorgeous for a white girl—she’s tall with long brown hair, and while not a big-booty Betty, the lacrosse body is tight” (51). It was SJ’s attorney mother who got him released from police custody that night, and she demonstrates during a class on racial equality that she’s clearly “woke.” Though his own mother has warned him not to bring home a White girl (apparently without explaining the history of lynching), Jus is drawn to Sarah Jane (“She’s Jewish! She knows about oppression!”) and Manny implies that King would have sanctioned their interracial relationship: “‘If you’re doing this Be Like Martin thing, do it for real. Refusing to date a girl because she’s white is probably not the Kingly way, bruh'” (74). Jus goes for it but gets unexpectedly rebuffed when he tries to kiss SJ; he writes to King, of course, to report on his “failed attempt at ‘romantic integration'” (82) but after his near-death experience, Jus decides “to let his instincts lead” (165) and they lead him to SJ. At the end of the novel, Jus is at another PWI (Yale) and SJ is close by at Columbia. Jus no longer wants to be like Martin and is committed to the path he’s on, telling Jared (who’s now minoring in Black Studies), “That girl is gonna have my babies one day, dawg” (208). Though Jared contributed to the circumstances surrounding Manny’s death, all is forgiven in the end!

Had a White woman written this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If it had been set in MAINE, it would have made more sense. But for the author to be a Black woman—an Atlanta native AND a Spelman grad—is perplexing. Almost as disappointing is the long list of YA authors whose rapturous blurbs decorate the novel’s front and back cover. When I told a scholar friend about my concerns with Dear Martin, she warned me about “another Sarah” in Ghost Boys (2018) by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I’m about done with these “Becky books” and hope the editors green lighting these projects are giving equal consideration to stories about police violence against Black women and girls. I’m very glad that I’ve got a Black woman editor working on Say Her Name…