I’m going to preface this post with an apology, an apology for presumably tripping over my words as I attempt to fire them off and perhaps not getting my point across as well as I’d like. The main reason for it being that I’m angry over this bullshit, furious even, but I’ll try and say my piece as eloquently as I can, before my judgement is wholly clouded by emotion.
My biggest beef with “Save the Pearls” isn’t the atrocious subject matter or the dodgy prose or even the glib inanity with which its author has been talking about issues of race though I assure you all those separate problems make my skin crawl as well. No, my biggest problem with this book, with its writer, with the publishing house that decided to put its official stamp on this drivel is that “Saving the Pearls” is unfair.
Race and racism are topics that, by necessity, concern and touch a lot of people and yet it seems when it comes to talking about them (and being legitimately heard), racial rhetoric is monopolised by white people. Take, for example, one of the most popular books written about race in the last few years: “The Help”, penned by a white woman and translated to the screen by a white man. Or minimise this window for a sec and type ‘great POC writers’ into google and see how many valid entries come up. Try and find a list of great black authors that includes an author, other than Toni Morrison, who has written something this side of the twenty first century. It’s not that those authors don’t exist (they do) and it’s not because the Marlon Jameses and Danielle Evanses aren’t as deserving of credit or blockbuster deals as the Kathryn Stocketts of this world (they most certainly are). But apparently, for some reason, we have decided as a society that white people’s voices count for more and what white people have to say about race (an issue that, I won’t deny, affects them but not with the same staggering intimacy it affects actual people of colour) is more worthy of our consideration. Which is both unjust and dishonest and brings me back to the issue at hand, “Save the Pearls” and my number one reason why it shouldn’t have been published or written in the first instance: it’s not fair. Had a POC author written such a thing or attempted to write such a thing, I highly doubt any publishing house would have had either the audacity or ambition to position it as the next “Hunger Games”. POC literature is marginalised, “other”-ed, relegated to the sidelines even on issues which directly impact people of colour far more than white people. “Save the Pearls” is unfair because it’s not Victoria Foyt’s place to try and overturn racial stereotypes, especially when any POC counterpart of hers could only dream of doing (and receiving mainstream recognition) for the same thing.
Now, you might say that I’m the one whose being unfair, not to mention irrational. “Save the Pearls” has yet to actually become any kind of hit and by the grace of God, hopefully it never will. But it fits in to a larger scheme of things, both in literary canon and life itself: where one white woman’s brief brush with what it means to be a person of colour carries far more weight than a POC’s person whole lifetime of dealing with the same confusion and hurt. I’m sorry for whatever pain and shame that brief scene from Victoria Hoyt’s childhood elicited from her but what she experienced is not what I would term to be racism. Racism is not just one verbal slap in the face that can be suppressed for years and then exorcised in a ridiculous exercise of YA fiction, it is a dozen, maybe even hundred of such insults which needs to be approached in fiction, if not with mastery, than at least with respect and sensitivity. It’s not something that you suffer just once and it’s not something that you can turn over in your mind without ever letting it sink past your skin, it’s a lead brick you carry around in your pocket everyday of your life until you’re exhausted by the weight of it. From her comments, from the brief excerpt I have read of her book as well as its summary, it seems like Victoria Hoyt - with all due respect - knows fuck all about dealing with actual racism and I will be heartily sick if I have to pretend over the next twelve months or so, that she does.
So I suggest the only legitimate way to deal with “Save the Pearls” is treat it in the same way countless better-crafted, more powerful books about race written by POCs have been treated for decades: ignore it.
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on "save the pearls" and one of the problems of talking about race in fiction
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