Sardonic Sistah Says

Will new books send black women to Chinatown looking for Mr. Right?

After the initial success of Terry McMillan’s book, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” African American women were heading to Jamaica to get their own grooves on.

“Jamaica couldn’t have paid for the publicity we’re getting,” a photographer told a reporter back in 1998.  A hotel manager told the same reporter, “We’re seeing groups of ladies coming together that look like the type Terry McMillan was writing about–more single ladies.”

But 10 years later everyone has moved on.  Hell, the story that McMillan told turned out to be just a story after a tabloid divorce and a gay revelation from McMillan’s real life Stedman.

So where will black women go to scour for inspiration about love now?  Prague?  The Seine?  Mozambique?

If three current books are up on the trend then it could be as close as your local Chinatown.  Or Koreatown.  Or Little Taiwan or even your local nail technician or weave peddler. 

The hottest names in erotica has a new book out about AsAm and AfAm couplings.  Honey Flava  is a new book edited by the queen of erotica herself, Zane.  Zane offered an Am/BF erotic story a few years back at the end of her book Skyscraper called “Tattoo” and this book is third in her line of “Flava” books, the first being Chocolate Flava that was about African American erotica and Caramel Flava which showcased African American and Latino lovers.

Another book is the Lotus Blossum Chronicles which is also a foray into erotica.  The book has two stories about Asian males falling for Black females.  Lotus Blossum Chronicles II will be coming this fall.

How hot is AM/BF couplings in books?  Writer Sam Cacas is writing a sequel to his book “BLAsian Exchanges” and his own BlAsian memoir that discusses his attraction to black women.  In most online forums geared to Asian Male/Black Female relationships there seem to be more women than men in the chase.  So perhaps while waiting for their knights in Samurai armor reading these books can be a stand in.

We’re baaaaaack!

And what’s better is, they know they needed us.

The month of July and August in Cincinnati used to have streets overrun with the black masses.  Well, maybe it was just a weekend here (Music Festival) and a weekend there (the Midwest Regional Black Family Reunion).  But it was enough to scare white people away from downtown on the weekends on hot summer nights because although the streets are well lit you never know when someone will roll by with hip hop music blaring from their car windows or roving teens using expletives.  They used to try to deter black people from even coming into the city for the events with hotels raising their rates for the weekend and the police creating barricades that made the streets a maze.  The black community felt like they were being like a stepchild and after the death of Timothy Thomas the call for an unofficial “official” boycott of the Southwestern corridor of Ohio was on.

Actually, I don’t think the boycott has ever been called off, it kind of just faded away along with the few black businesses that had the bad luck of being in the middle of downtown.  But with the election of Mark Mallory to Mayor, the death of Kabaka Oba, and the Cincinnati Police slow down that brought in the Hamilton County sheriff’s department to streets that CPS didn’t really want to step onto black Cincinnatians are still just as wary if not angry.

Our circumspection has historical conditioning, this is the city where slave catchers would come into to snatch us back down south.

But now that the NAACP convention is here with more black events on the way.   After a short hiatus the return of the Macy’s Music Festival at the end of July with the 20th annual Midwest Regional Black Family Reunion following close on its heels.  And at the beginning of September the Black Baptist Convention will be making their way here.  That’s a lot of black people and a long span of time for white Cincinnatians to roll out the red carpet for folks that look like us.

But mostly it puts black Cincinnatians in the spotlight.  White Cincinnatians, too, but mostly it’s about us.  People will go to the Freedom Center and say how wonderful and then travel three miles north to Over-the-Rhine and wonder how we live like that.  And the question isn’t really how can white people let this happen but how can we as a community let it happen.  We have Avondale that has never really recovered from the 1968 riots.  And I worry that we have gotten into the groove of smug in the contempt that others feel for white Cincinnatians for the way we live in racial disparity but the bad part is we African Americans have to continue to live with the brunt of an unequal society.

So black Cincinnati, for one week (and maybe more to come) all eyes are on us.  What are they going to see?