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How Can White Folks Join the Fight to End Systemic Racism?

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Racism lives in our minds and bodies—to end it, we must first find and feel it. 

By Amy Banks MD

Like so many in our country, I am sick—not from the coronavirus, but by the ways systemic racism continues to shackle and kill people of color in our country and by the ways in which too many white Americans continue to deny it, look the other way, and/or fail to see how their lives benefit from it.

In the U.S., systemic racism is one of the primary default programs all citizens use to filter day to day experiences. The random fact of being born white comes with unearned power and an unseen advantage over people of color. I have learned from antiracist friends and colleagues that racism is so deeply embedded in our societal structures and subconscious minds that if you live your life without examining your biases and the biases of people who were instrumental in shaping your beliefs, you will inevitably replay the learned racism consciously or unconsciously.

For many white people, it is too easy to believe that you care deeply about social justice but are too busy with work, taking care of kids, or paying the bills to join an all-out war on racism. It’s been too easy to only think about Black lives mattering immediately following the killing of another Black person by the police. The mass of diverse protesters across our country are screaming in one voice that inaction is no longer tolerable. It is time for white people to take responsibility for changing the culture of racism by changing themselves and the unequal social structures they have created. Silence is not an option. 

In more intimate groups of well-meaning white people, I have heard many share how they feel stuck, frozen by guilt or fearful of doing or saying the wrong thing. They want to jump in but don’t know how or where to start. Taking responsibility must begin with an increased awareness of one’s own biases—how they were created and how they benefit all white people. Only then can any of us honestly own the role we are playing in perpetuating the status quo.

Racism lives in our bodies and therefore we cannot simply think our way of it. We cannot escape into our heads and create a new community ideal without first feeling the impact of racism. We must feel the pain that people of color have endured and to use that pain to fuel action for change.

Examining my own whiteness and unearned privilege takes me back to my roots in Maine, which remains the whitest state in the nation (2020). Here I can begin to understand how seamlessly my own racist education started and how deeply it lives in my cells. This is not an exercise in self-flagellation, but rather an attempt to see where it stills lives in me. I understand that it is impossible not to be racist when you grow up in an environment with toxic levels of bias, judgement and misinformation about people of color. I cannot become an anti-racist without owning and identifying where racism lives within me and in my communities.

To say that race relations were not on my radar growing up would be an understatement. In fact, in high school I was just coming out to myself as a lesbian and I was preoccupied with the injustices in the LGBTQ community in the later ’70s. In Maine, there was plenty of homophobia to worry about. However, for my family, that changed in the spring of 1979 when my father traveled on business to New Orleans. On his first day in NOLA, after eating dinner in the French Quarter, he and a colleague walked back to the Hyatt Regency. At the entry to the hotel, they were held up by two young men, and my father was shot and killed. 

Within hours, my family was told that “two Black men” had tried to rob my father and his colleague. This was my first substantive exposure to someone from the Black community. My family had been shattered by the murder and naïvely believed that the legal system in New Orleans would help us seek justice for the death of my father. We had no idea that what we were told was filtered through the New Orleans legal system well known for its racist attitudes. When the photos of the suspects, Isaac Knapper and Leroy Williams, popped up in our local newspaper, I remember looking at them closely and wondering what in their lives would have caused them to rob and kill. It never occurred to me that the prosecution would withhold exculpatory evidence at the trial and that one of the young men, Isaac Knapper, would be wrongly convicted for murder and sent to prison for the rest of his life. My family did not question the arrest and verdict for many reasons, but the biggest was that my family was solidly part of the white, dominant culture. One does not have to be an avowed white supremist to be racist—you simply have to be brainwashed 24/7 by a culture that defines health and acceptability as the birth right of all white people and associates people of color with violence.

When I found out in 2005 that the alleged killer of my father, Isaac Knapper, had been exonerated in the early 1990s, I was shocked and sickened. By then I had become a psychiatrist with a deep interest in issues of social justice and was well aware of the gross inequities that existed in America between people of color and white people—in health care, life expectancy, educational opportunity, housing, wealth … the list goes on and on. However, until I learned of Isaac’s exoneration, I had no way of knowing how entwined my own story was in America’s racism. The traumatic memory of my father’s murder was now exponentially more painful as it now involved the wrongful conviction of a sixteen-year-old boy. The anguish was now compounded by images of Isaac as a young man in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola where he was sent to live out the rest of his life with no chance of parole.

By 2015, I was both curious and furious. Eric Garner, Freddie Grey, Michael Brown—the killings of Black men by police just kept happening. I decided to take personal action to more fully understand the horrendous racist event that my family had unwittingly been involved in. With much fear, I reached out to Isaac Knapper (who had been released after thirteen years and was living in NOLA) and asked to meet. In December of that year my sister, Nancy, and I met with Isaac and his wife in New Orleans. The meeting and our friendship have transformed my life. What surprised me the most was how easy it was to be together—how we didn’t stop talking and sharing the entire weekend we spent together. What disturbed me to my core was hearing Isaac’s personal experience of police brutality. How much worse his experience had been then I could even imagine. He shared his violent arrest at 5:45 a.m. when he was awoken with guns pointing at his head, the brutal interrogation where police beat him to within an inch of his life in an attempt to force a confession (it failed), and the utter disregard for his humanity at every turn of the legal proceedings. Yet, despite all he had been through (and continues to go through as a Black man in this society), he also listened to our story and our pain with deep compassion and caring. 

From left to right: Laurie White, Nancy Banks, Isaac Knapper, Amy Banks

One lesson I have learned from Isaac and his family is that the process of healing racism will hurt and at times, the risks you will need to take will be terrifying. But the pain is not penance for bad behavior (though there is room for that as well). When you hurt so badly you feel you will die—pay close attention. Feeling unspeakable pain may mean you have finally begun to feel clear empathy and resonance with the relentless agonies and indignities faced by people of color. You must walk directly into that pain to fully understand the price Black and brown people have paid for your/our white privilege. If you can’t stand it, don’t stop feeling, find someone who can help you hold it. Do you dare to risk everything to be part of the movement to repair the racial divide that has plagued our country since white people enslaved Black people over 400 years ago literally using their Black bodies to build America?

Isaac and I have established a deep friendship—one that feels more like family. It is a chosen family that I cherish. Within it I have had the opportunity to heal and to grow and to witness my own biases in a way that humbles me. We have chosen to write our story in an upcoming book, Fighting Time. In sharing our story, we hope to inspire people to move into the fear and the pain of systemic racism and to have the conversations that are desperately needed to see and feel one another and to help our society grow beyond our tragically racist roots.

Fighting Time, by Isaac Knapper and Amy Banks, M.D., will be published by Regal House Publishing/Pact Press in 2021.

Amy Banks is the author of The Complete Guide to Mental Health for Women, published by Beacon Press in 2003, and of Four Ways to Click: Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships, published in 2015 by Penguin. Her second book captures the work she has done over the past fifteen years studying the neuroscience of relationships and how essential supportive connections are to overall health and well-being.

References

Walker, Maureen. When Getting Along is Not Enough: Reconstructing Lives in Our Lives and Relationships. 2019, Teacher’s College Press, New York, NY

Kendi, Ibram X., Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. 2016, Nation’s Books, New York, NY

This article was first published at Psychology Today

Bookbound: Amherst Books

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A literary powerhouse in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley

by Shirley Reva Vernick

What better place to locate a bookstore—one with a sprawling poetry section—than just up the street from Emily Dickinson’s house and around the corner from Robert Frost’s home? Amherst Books proprietors Shannon Ramsey and Nat Herold knew what they were doing when they chose Amherst, MA for their indie bookstore in 2003. And they’ve been delighting customers ever since with their diverse collection (including small press offerings), outstanding literary events, and welcoming atmosphere.

Amherst Books and I arrived in town just months apart in the early 2000s. Even after all these years, I still get a special joy when I walk inside, like I’m coming home. The literature wall with the rolling ladder, the spacious children’s corner, the comfortable armchairs, and the warm lighting all combine to create a timeless, made-for-bibliophiles quality. As one Yelp reviewer wrote, “Pitch me a tent, and I’ll just live here.”

Discussing the magic of bookstores with me, Nat quotes French philosopher Roland Barthes, who said, “Every book chooses its reader.” Nat adds, “I like to say we’re midwives in that process.”

And what well-stocked shelves these midwives keep! The store carries new and used books from local, national and international authors, including no fewer than 45 books by or about Emily Dickinson alone. With particular strengths in philosophy and poetry, the collection also includes general and science fiction, children’s literature, and books about cooking, history, gender studies, women’s studies, black studies, the sciences, essays and more.

In addition, Amherst Books hosts around 170 literary events yearly (when the country isn’t in quarantine). Luminaries like Min Jin Lee, Jericho Brown, James Tate, and Norton Juster have given talks or done readings here. So have regular-Joe local authors like yours truly. As a writer, I believe that a book’s story isn’t complete until it’s read and, ideally, discussed. Platforms that bring authors and readers together in one room elevate this co-creation to new levels. I’m grateful to Amherst Books for hosting the launch of all my books to date. 

Booksellers’ origin stories

Nat grew up in a house of books and readers. “We were so bad about returning all the library books we borrowed,” he remembers, “that the Washington, D.C. public library would send a truck around once a year or so to take back their books. They never cut off our borrowing, however.”

Books were also a way for Nat to communicate with his father, who was an alcoholic. “Often the only way to spend time with him was to talk about books,” Nat recalls. “Recommending new books to each other was how we bonded.”

Shannon too took refuge in reading as a youngster. “Books carried me through a lot of lonely times,” she remembers.  “So, when I was looking at colleges and saw UMass’s 26-floor DuBois Library, I knew I was going to go to school in Amherst! Once there, I got a job at the library, which then opened doors for me at Amherst Books.”

Bookselling was a natural fit for Nat because it allowed him to continue surrounding himself with books and connecting with people through book recommendations. “In other sorts of retail, you don’t learn anything meaningful about the person who’s buying, say, tissues,” he notes. “But a person reveals a lot about themselves by the books they choose.”

Shannon is on the same page (pun intended). “What I love most about bookselling,” she says, “is the idea that reading, which helped me when I was lonely, could also be the thing that connects me to others.”

Lean times

Thriving as an indie bookstore is never a given in these times of fierce competition and consumer focus on the digital. Nat attributes Amherst Books’ success to strong customer service, a uniquely curated book selection, and a robust reading and book launch roster.

Shannon ascribes their progress to two components. “First and foremost, we have stayed true to our core, book-loving selves,” she says. “We constantly remember what brought us to reading and then do our best to translate that to our community.” Secondly, she and Nat know their community well. “This allows us to reflect the community back to itself by way of a carefully chosen collection.”

To supplement their revenue, Amherst Books now carries certain non-book items, including literary tote bags, postcards, and book-themed T-shirts. “We’re giving people an alternative to online shopping,” says Shannon. “An alternative that allows direct interaction with products and the chance to socialize with staff and other visitors.”

Going local

Shannon and Nat are personally committed to a vision of sustainability that promotes growing roots and being part of the local community. How lucky for readers and authors alike that this shared value produced Amherst Books.

Shirley Reva Vernick is the author of The Blood Lie, Remembering Dippy, and The Black Butterfly. Her work has garnered innumerable awards and recognition, some of which include: the American Library Association Best Fiction Books for Young Readers List, Simon Wiesenthal Once Upon A World Book Award, Dolly Gray Literature Award from the Council for Exceptional Children, Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction. Fitzroy Books is proud to publish Ripped Away in 2022.

My path to racial healing…

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If my path to racial healing is any indication, we have a long way to go as a country. In March, Pact Press published my debut essay collection Your Black Friend Has Something to Say. In June—within two days of one another—as I mourned the loss of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation, I received an email from a friend from high school and a text from a friend from college who had both read my book and found themselves in it. One was a bystander to a microaggression I wrote about in my book, the other the perpetrator of a microaggression I wrote about in my book. I didn’t know I needed to hear from friends I went to high school and college with in the aftermath of my book coming out, but turns out I did. They wanted to take responsibility for the role they had played in the microaggressions I had suffered. Their words were thoughtful, considerate, and kind. I started crying and couldn’t stop. It wasn’t the apology that did it, I don’t think; it was the recognition that what had happened to me was wrong. That visibility, that validation, was enough. I thought the path to racial healing was one I’d have to walk alone. I was wrong. It’s imperative that my white friends walk it with me.

This is a tender time for Black people. We are mourning and marching at the same time. Our emotional labor is at an all-time high. Our personal trauma, our generational trauma is being triggered. Over the years I’ve come to know my own racial trauma rather well. It’s like I broke my leg but it didn’t heal correctly. Now the bones need to be reset so they can mend properly, and it hurts like hell—it’s a very painful process—but it’s what’s needed, it’s what’s necessary, in order for me to walk again. In fact, I don’t know which is worse: the initial breaking of the bones when the trauma first took place or the re-breaking of the bones when the trauma is treated. I realize, in writing my book, I gave my friends a tool to treat my trauma and they’re using it. Our country needs to do the same. Black people know what needs to be done. We have the tools. It’s up to white people to use them. But in order to heal we have to be heard—which is why healing hasn’t happened yet. Not everyone wants to hear what we have to say. Too many white people dismiss or deny our trauma—the acts of horror committed against us every day. They don’t want to take responsibility for their role in it. Then there are those who are too complacent to care. I’m grateful I have friends who do care, because when it comes to racial healing, the truth is, my trauma is their trauma too; my healing is their healing too. If more people knew that, understood that, then maybe we as a country could do the work we need to do, and we could all be set free.

Melva Graham is a writer, actress, and part-time activist. Your Black Friend Has Something To Say, published by Pact Press (an imprint of Regal House Publishing) in the spring of 2020, is her debut essay collection.

Rebecca Baggett:

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The Nostalgia for Things Lost & A Tenderness for the World in Which We Find Ourselves

Winner of the 2020 Terry J. Cox Poetry Award

Rebecca Baggett

In December of 2019, I retired from the University of Georgia after over thirty years as an academic advisor.  In that time, I worked at three different universities, sometimes advising students in pre-professional programs, but primarily with liberal arts majors in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences—students studying languages, literature, theatre and film, religion, anthropology, women’s studies, history, resulting in conversations that animated and enriched my life and my writing.  My last months were spent in hours of discussion with students and colleagues and concluded with a farewell gathering that included former and current colleagues, administrators, and a variety of faculty across the departments for which I advised. 

I retreated to my “book fort” for the winter, almost literally hibernating with a stack of novels and poetry collections, and emerged only occasionally to poke a pen around a legal pad or go online to submit individual poems and my full-length manuscript.  As an introvert in recovery from years of professional talking, I gave myself full license to sleep, read, nap, read, and catch up on a few Netflix series. 

I began to wake as spring and Covid-19 arrived in Georgia and by mid-March found myself in full-on isolation with my husband, a retired high school teacher.  Our church shifted from in-person to Zoom to YouTube, as our bishop (wisely) tightened restrictions on gatherings, weeks earlier than Georgia’s governor.  Our city closed down large gatherings, then schools, bars, restaurants, again, long before the state at large. My book group and poetry group, “dinner women” and former colleagues withdrew to our homes, and our only “in real life” contact was with our pregnant daughter and her husband, who also isolated as much as possible.  Soon after our grandson’s St. Patrick’s Day birth, our son-in-law had to return to work, so we spent weeks helping our daughter with our newborn grandson.  It was both a mercy and a gift to immerse ourselves in the immediacy of an infant’s needs and to know that between us we could provide Christopher everything he needed – food, clean diapers, the occasional bath, constant human contact, the sound of our voices, our adoration. 

Like all of us, I felt no such calm when I looked into the larger world and tried as much as possible not to imagine what horrors might loom, what this pandemic could mean for people I love and for so much of what I value in our world.  I didn’t think often about my manuscript, circling through the round of competitions, or whether it would ever be published.  When I did remember, I assumed the slim chance of publication had probably shrunk to next-to-none.

What a joyful shock to receive Jaynie’s email telling me that The Woman Who Lives Without Money had won the Terry J. Cox Poetry Award.   What a gift to receive that news at a point when I could easily imagine no publisher having the courage or the financial foundation to continue to print books.  And it is an equal gift to realize that Regal House Publishing shares my conviction that a life in the arts is, in some sense, a life of companionship and service.  Like every writer I have ever known, I struggle with the tension between creation — a focus on the work itself — and the pull toward publication – sometimes warring impulses. The reality is that only a fraction of artistic work will ever receive recognition, that few of us – whatever our medium – will be able to live on an income from our art alone, that many far more talented writers than I will give up, ground under by the necessity of earning a living, by despair, by lack of an audience, by inability to live in uncertainty.  Which is, of course, where we all live now.

In this unfolding world, perhaps we will learn that what seems most ephemeral (poems, stories, music, dance, theatre) and most fragile (the shell of my grandson’s skull beneath my cupped hand, the bloodroot petals unfolding in my spring garden, our ability to shelter those we love from harm, our desire to shelter those we do not know at all) are the essence of what it means to be human.  I believe that in this moment there is nothing more worth doing than creating art and midwifing it into the world.  I hope that readers find in The Woman Who Lives Without Money not only a nostalgia for things lost but tenderness for the world in which we live now and for whatever is coming next.

Rebecca Bagget is the author of poems, essays, and stories, published in numerous journals and anthologies, as well as four chapbooks, two of which (God Puts on the Body of a Deer, from Main Street Rag, and Thalassa, from Finishing Line Press) remain in print.  She is a retired academic advisor from the University of Georgia and she has been a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Steven Mayfield: “It’s Hard to Make Up Stuff that Good”

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Writers are always advised to write what they know. I don’t disagree, but think that it’s how you come to know about something that matters. I once took a class from Roger Welsch, the renowned folklorist. He advised us not sell ourselves short on what we knew, recalling a previous student flummoxed by her lack of worldly experiences upon which to draw. Dr. Welsch gave her an assignment. “Think of something about your family that you find interesting.” The girl came back with the following tale: Her grandmother and grandfather lived in a small Nebraska town where everyone knew each other. It was in a time when people talked over the back fence and hung their laundry on a clothesline. Every week the girl’s grandmother washed her husband’s pajamas and hung them on the line. When they were dry, she neatly folded them and placed the PJs in a dresser drawer where they remained until the next week when she removed the clean, unworn pajamas, rewashed them, and again hung them on the line. Why did she do this?

“Well,” the girl told Dr. Welsch, “my grandpa slept in the nude and my grandma didn’t want anyone to know.”

“It’s hard to make up stuff that good,” Dr. Welsch told his student.

So, she did have something to write about, even though it wasn’t drawn from her own experience. She’s not alone. Frank Herbert created the world of Dune, J.R.R. Tolkien the inhabitants of Middle-Earth, J.K Rowling the wizard’s school at Hogwarts. My next book, Treasure of the Blue Whale, describes a town and a time period that I never knew. Don’t blame me for such presumptuousness. Blame Alastair MacClean. When I was a teenager, I loved books by MacClean, the Scottish schoolteacher who wrote The Guns of Navarone and other adventures. His tales of mountain-climbing commandos, nuclear submarines, and double agents were concocted without actual experiences. He did not learn about such people and things by scaling Matterhorn, doing battle with Blofeld, or splitting an atom. He went to the library. Afterward, he didn’t write what he knew; he knew what he wrote.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA at sunset.

A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I picked up my wife from an appointment in Pac Heights. When I pulled up to the curb, she was waiting alongside a very old man. “This is Zane,” she told me. “We’re giving him a ride.”

Zane got in the car and introduced himself. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. “In exchange, you will get a really good story.”

Zane was 90 years old and Nisei—born in America—the son of a Scotch-Irish mother and a father who was Issei—born in Japan. He’d gone to high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1942 just a few months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not long thereafter, Zane and his parents were shipped off to an internment camp in Utah. He spent a year there before being allowed to enlist in the Army.

“I moved to New York City after the war,” he told us. “I lived there for twenty-six years. I was a dance instructor.” He offered to give my wife and I free lessons. He said the rumba was easiest and we’d start there.

Zane’s home was in an assisted living facility not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The sidewalk fronting the building was steep and we offered to help him to the door. “I can make it,” he assured us. “Have you heard of Michael Jackson? He did the moon walk. I can do the moon walk, too.”

And then he did.

“He was interesting,” I said to my wife as we drove home. I was already planning the book I would write, one currently in progress.

“Yes he was,” she replied, “he was very sweet. And his story…can you believe it? Why, you just can’t make up stuff that good.”

Steven is the past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications that have appeared in Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of the Cabin Literary Center. He is the author of Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eddie Hoffer Finalist.

Karol Hoeffner: The Book Cover Reveal

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Early on a bright January morning, I opened my computer to an email from my Regal House editor announcing that the interior and exterior proofs of my book were attached and ready for viewing.  Getting a book published is a little like giving birth. And seeing the cover is like holding your baby in your own arms for the very first time.

In other words, it’s a really big deal.

I peered at the tiny pdf attachment of my book cover, which was literally no bigger than my thumbnail.  All I could tell from the image on my phone, was that the cover was very, very blue.

And I was shocked.

My book had a blue cover.

I think I literally recoiled.  How could this have happened?  How could the artist paint my book cover blue?  Okay, water is involved in the story. Lots of water. Knee Deep takes place in New Orleans, which is literally surrounded by water: Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Borgne to the east, wetlands to the east and west, and the Mississippi River to the south.

That was not the problem. 

The problem was I am not a blue person.

There are no blue rooms in my house.

No blue dresses in my closet.

And really, there is no blue food in my fridge, except for blueberries and one could argue their blueness borders on blackish purple.

And yet there it was.  A book with a decidedly blue color.

I rushed up the stairs to my daughter’s bedroom.  I wanted to open up the pdf and see the cover with her, not only because she has been a cheerleader for Knee Deep from its beginning, but because she was in the house and my husband had already gone to work. Having recently moved home to finish her master’s degree while working full-time and already sleep-deprived, she was cocooned in her blanket, sleeping like a baby.  A really good mother would let her sleep in a little longer.

Instead, I climbed into the bed beside her and woke her up. 

And together,  we opened up the pdf to a full screen.

And yes, the cover was blue.  There was no mistake about that.

And yet…

…I fell immediately in love.

With my cover.

When I saw the image of Camille reaching out across the waters I knew instinctively what my friend, fellow screenwriter and Regal House author, Mary Kuryla would later say: “It’s an alarming image because of the rising water pushing at the title, and her little tender boat, but it’s also darkly beautiful. She does not seem in peril in the image, but rather charged with coping with these rising waters.”

I may not be a blue person.

But I do have a blue metal roof on my home that ripples like ocean waves.

And my front yard is an overgrown oasis of blue flowers sprinkled amidst the rambling white roses.

While I do not own a blue dress, I have been known to buy a blue blouse or two.

And I do eat blueberries for breakfast almost every single morning.

And now I have a blue book.

Which I cannot wait for you to see.

And to read. Pre-orders are available now.

Acknowledgement:  The cover for Knee Deep was designed by the immensely talented C.B. Royal  who also designed a number of Regal’s other covers as well – such as Banana Republic, Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization, Grape!, Zip, or Micrology.

Karol Hoeffner is the Chair of Screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She has fourteen film credits including several Danielle Steel adaptations, a television mini-series Harem, movies-of-the-week based on true stories – TheMaking of a Hollywood Madam and Miss America:  Behind the Crown. Among her other credits are the original movies, Voices from Within and Burning Rage. She has penned two young adult novels, All You’ve Got, and Surf Ed.

Ill-Fated Lovers: Writing About Socioeconomics and Race

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Writing Bliss presented several challenges which I would divide into two categories: the literary and the personal.

Portraying the impediments to Danielle and Connor’s relationship—the central plot of Bliss—was challenging primarily because those impediments are societal, as opposed to interpersonal or circumstantial. It would be one thing if they were merely too stubborn or prideful to admit their feelings, if they only misunderstood each other (which, for much of the novel, they do), or if they were from rival families, he a Montague, she a Capulet. But it is their socioeconomic and racial differences that threaten the love between them, and capturing the implications of these differences was thorny. Societal constructs are both omnipresent, all-powerful and insidious, and rarely discussed in everyday life, much less between two individuals from completely different backgrounds, like Danielle and Connor.

Connor, raised amid affluence and ease in a predominantly white community, has never reflected much on the luxuries of his race, which are apparent to Danielle, raised amid poverty and strife in a predominantly black community. More, she cannot comprehend why someone would forgo the opportunities wealth has offered him, as Connor attempts to do in the beginning of the novel. A rec center employee devoted to the needs of underserved children, she knows that luxury and opportunity are rare and precious blessings, and falling in love with someone who doesn’t understand this feels to her like a betrayal of her community. They are each caught between two worlds—their own and their lover’s—worlds their love can reveal but perhaps never reconcile. Perhaps.

Bliss also presented a personal challenge, because years of examining these characters’ worldviews had a powerful, if disquieting, effect on my own. I am the child of middle class parents who fostered roughly seventy kids. I attended public high school in northern Minnesota, then private college at St. John’s University (MN). I grew up believing I was capable of grasping a wide array of viewpoints. So, when I conceived of the basic premise behind Bliss back in 2014, at the tail end of a brief correctional career in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I felt that my experience—in particular, the year and a half I spent as a guard at the Ramsey County Juvenile Detention Center—offered me unique insights into urban poverty and relations between law enforcement and communities of color. However, the more I explored Danielle and Connor’s lives and the more confident I was in their motives and natures, the more I asked the obvious question: What right do I, a white man in 2020 America, have to write a love story featuring a black woman?

To this I have no answer. I can only take solace in the equally obvious fact that I am no authority, not on America, its merits or ills, not on race, womanhood, or love; rather, my time with Bliss has further convinced me that the realm of fiction is not for authorities. It is for the uncertain, those with more questions than answers, those who wish to understand the things they know they never will.

Fredrick Soukup received a philosophy degree from St. John’s University (Minnesota) in 2010. Excerpts from his works have been published in Fluent Magazine and Sou’wester. His debut novel, Bliss, will be released March 2, 2020 by Regal House Publishing. He lives in Saint Paul with his brilliant wife, Ashley.