"Pioneers Are Taking Black Chick Lit Into Middle Age" exclaims the New York Times in the headline of an article that begins with this sampling of the "pioneering" authors' literary themes:
Consider Marilyn Grimes, a wildly hormonal mother of three in a stale marriage, hiding in a toilet stall and weighing her options. Watch Barbara Bentley ponder having a fling because her Pratesi sheets and Jimmy Choo shoes can't compensate for a cheating husband. And check out preppie Aisha Branch McCovney, lolling in bed for three days with her dream man, although she's engaged to the scion of an old-money family.In other words, "black chick lit" has matured into middle age precisely because authors are creating "wildly hormonal" female characters who are so determined to have sex outside of marriage that they engage in "Desperate Housewives"-style tactics.
That's the Times' condescending view of black women in a nutshell. The women have reached equality with whites in the newspaper's eyes because their literary heroines reflect the morality of Carrie Bradshaw & Co.
I must have missed the part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech where he said something about having a dream of a day when all of God's children, black women and white women, would hold hands with one another's husbands, naked.
