RETRACTION: The original version of this editorial introduction has been retracted. I apologize to readers and contributors, and take full responsibility for the misguidedness of centering the editorial difficulties of a white Christian woman in an issue devoted to racial justice.
Samara Anne Cahill
Editorial Introduction by Samara Anne Cahill
Editorial Introduction: Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment
Cite: Cahill, Samara Anne. 2021. “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment (Editorial Introduction),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2)
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Ahmaud Arbery (February 23, 2020)
Breonna Taylor (March 13, 2020)
George Floyd (May 25, 2020)
Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Yong Ae Yue (March 16, 20210
Adam Toledo (March 29, 2021)
Daunte Wright (April 11, 2021)
Ma’Khia Bryant (April 20, 2021)
All deaths from the COVID pandemic
Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a meditation on “the wake as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.”1 The wake is the legacy of the ships of the Middle Passage, but also the emotional and creative response of members of the Black diaspora to that legacy. Sharpe’s witnessing raises issues of continuing systemic racism, the violence that continues to be visited upon Black bodies and Black lives, and the weight of history on the present.
This special issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” was prompted by the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, and the recognition that a journal dedicated to the study of religion and the Enlightenment has a duty to give a platform to those living in the wake. History—and the imbrication of history and the present—cannot be ignored, and that is why the New York Times’ 1619 Project is so crucial as a corrective to mythologies of the national identity of the United States. That perspective is also why removing Confederate statues and those of other enslavers from public places of honor is not about destroying history, but about choosing how we understand, transmit, and teach histories.2 There are many responses to the legacies of slavery. There is, for instance, the “community choir” of Ibram X. Kendi’s and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 as a landmark of public scholarship.3 There is the anger of watching the differential treatment of Black and white bodies by the police and by White House security on January 6, 2021. There is Amanda Gorman’s hopeful performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration on January 20. History is crucial not simply for social justice, but for a collective moral imagination.4
Yet part of answering Eugenia Zuroski’s call to undercut the imperialism of “academic intellectual authority” by answering the question “where do you know from” is admitting the limitations of one’s perspective.5 If the US nation has a race problem, so, too, does religion, and particularly US Christianity. The historical Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew; yet Christ is often depicted as a white man on Crucifixes, paintings, even in stained glass windows.6 Clearly, US Christianity must confront its own racist traditions.
This issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” begins with two contributions that examine the complex relationship between Christianity, particularly evangelism, and historical race relations. Erica Johnson Edwards explores the role of Catholic priests in the Haitian Revolution and attends to the asymmetrical media portrayal of Haitian Catholicism and vodou. The Haitian Revolution is a particularly important touchstone for thinking about race and the Enlightenment, though for centuries it has been subject to silencing or misrepresentation through racist tropes.7
Next, Victoria Ramirez Gentry discusses the consequences of the long history of white Christianity for contemporary US evangelicals as well as for eighteenth-century Black believers such as Phillis Wheatley (Wheatley Peters after her marriage) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.8 In fact, Wheatley Peters has come to the forefront of eighteenth-century studies this year, particularly amidst calls to decolonize the leading eighteenth-century conference, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), which was held April 7-11, 2021 (virtually, due to the COVID pandemic). Wheatley Peters is the inspiration behind Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ tour-de-force poetry collection The Age of Phillis (2020). Several contributors see Wheatley Peters as the primary touchstone for decentering white eighteenth-century studies not just as a matter of greater inclusiveness on the syllabus, but also as a formal and structural intervention for decolonizing the curriculum. Phillis Wheatley Peters comes to represent Black joy and survival but also what it means to live in the wake of slavery. Formally rigorous while also formally experimental, the fragmented collage of The Age of Phillis registers the labor, beauty, and suffering of Black lives in the wake of the Middle Passage. It also registers the failures of white Christianity to acknowledge that mourning or to acknowledge the full range of emotions that the wake calls forth. Indeed, Laura Stevens’s recent article about abolitionist rhetoric brought into sharp relief exactly what is excluded when righteous anger is occluded in favor of appeals to compassion or, worse, of imposing a particular kind of “happiness” onto the already oppressed. As Stevens points out in her study of William Warburton’s 1766 sermon, sensibility and compassion have featured centrally in studies of the intersection of “histories of emotion” and abolitionist rhetoric; what has received less attention are the “less gentle passions.” This lack of attention is perhaps because, if “pity invites action, outrage demands it.”9 Stevens’ is a searing argument about the limits and historical failures of white compassion and moral outrage.
Witnessing a full range of emotions is part of social justice. If there is mourning and anger, there is also community and creative production. Some writers have focused on Afrofuturism as a temporal projection of optimism and freedom in response to historical oppression, as J. Ereck Jarvis observes—in his contribution to this issue’s Woman of Colour roundtable—of Brigitte Fielder’s recent and forthcoming work on “Black futurity.”10 Black hope, celebration, and beauty survive in the wake, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us in “The Great Fire”—the special issue of Vanity Fair that he edited and which featured on its cover a picture of Breonna Taylor in a flowing blue gown.11 As Coates powerfully declares, “To plunder a people of everything, you must plunder their humanity first.” Resistance to dehumanization includes the celebration of beauty and creativity—this is not frivolous: to create is to be human, to assert oneself to be human. There is, as Lindsey Stewart argues, a “politics” of Black joy.12 Tamika Palmer, Breonna Taylor’s mother, celebrated her daughter’s life as one full of humor, family, and joy, of singing the blues, stalling out a motorcycle, and making chili.13
But emotions and imagination are not the only human activities that need to be expanded: conceptual and institutional infrastructures must also be questioned, diversified, and radically re-visioned. If, as Edna Bonhomme has argued, it is “through the thinking of the Enlightenment that science, the asylum, and prisons unveil their violent foundations,” and if the “radical and hopeful potential produced by Black literary and artistic traditions” offers a response to this history of dehumanization, then talking back to the Enlightenment is part of looking toward a more just future.14 This issue includes three roundtables addressing exactly this dynamic of reading the past and the possible in terms of each other. The first roundtable, “Talking Back to the Enlightenment,” centers the perspectives of a group of students, all women of color, studying eighteenth-century literature in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Talking back is not only a rejection of received authority, it is also the human call for recognition. Thus the “Talking Back” roundtable examines the stakes of naming or failing to name (Noury); the influence of expanding the canon to include alternate texts and perspectives (Mindy Lin); the role of imagination in addressing the elisions of the historical record and school curriculum (Jasmine Nevarez); and the freedom and restrictions offered by Christian rhetoric to eighteenth-century writers of color such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano (Jessica Valenzuela).
Our second roundtable, on Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis, addresses many of the same concerns as the “Talking Back” roundtable while focusing on how one text may be able to make a ground-shifting contribution to anti-racist eighteenth-century studies. Sam Plasencia examines the importance of “Black joy” and “critical fabulation” in a way that situates The Age of Phillis not just in the context of the eighteenth-century literature classroom but also at the cutting-edge of twenty-first-century archival interventions. Plasencia and Jenny Factor further analyze Jeffers’s profound intertwining of form and content to register the atemporal symmetries of Black diasporic experience. David Mazella considers the consequences of form at the levels of both the individual text and the publishing industry, leading to a consideration of the ethics of anthologization. Finally, JoEllen DeLucia addresses the racist hierarchies and discourses of the Enlightenment and the continuation of those historical influences at the curricular level. What happens, DeLucia asks, when we study “The Age of Phillis” rather than “The Age of the Augustans,” for instance? How do we think and feel differently in those physical (classroom) and intellectual spaces?
Our final roundtable is devoted to the pedagogical concerns raised by the novel The Woman of Colour (1808), which has become, in the last decade, one of the most important texts for discussing the intersection of race and gender in the decolonized eighteenth-century studies curriculum. Kerry Sinanan both introduces and concludes the roundtable, providing crucial bookends that situate the discussion of this influential text in relation both to geopolitical events such as the Haitian Revolution and to the intimate and individual impacts of slavery on mother and child. Rebecca Anne Barr considers the importance of decolonizing the romance genre, particularly the need to question the “generic consolation of regency romance” in light of the “theological ultimatum” offered by Olivia Fairfield, heroine of The Woman of Colour. J. Ereck Jarvis considers the question of bodies in the classroom—how does a white instructor talk about the racist legacies of the Enlightenment? Jarvis see Olivia as a figure of “Christian futurity” who is also a figure of “Black futurity” and hope. Mariam Wassif weaves together Critical Race Theory and romance conventions to argue that Olivia’s “Romantic subjectivity” actually “breaches imperial boundaries … even as it foregrounds the uneasiness of these transatlantic crossings.” Both Wassif and Misty Krueger highlight Olivia’s experience and legacy as a cosmopolitan transatlantic traveler. Krueger highlights the value of The Woman of Colour in making eighteenth-century syllabi less white while attending to the “racial disparity in women’s transatlantic travels.15
This acknowledgement of “racial disparity”—particularly in the realm of pleasurable consumption—is what caused The Woman of Colour to become a point of comparison for several commentators on the Netflix miniseries Bridgerton, the first adaptation-installment of Julia Quinn’s bestselling 8-part series of Regency romance novels. Why did Bridgerton ignore Haiti, for instance, as Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall and Marlene L. Daut ask?16 This occlusion is particularly noticeable since the Haitian Revolution would have happened within the living memory of most people in Regency London. And why, despite its brief acknowledgement of slavery, did Bridgerton otherwise ignore the structural racism of eighteenth-century London (and the British Empire) and the consequences of colonialism?17 Why is the main love interest in Bridgerton—Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, played by actor of color Rége-Jean Page—presented as symbolic eye-candy for heroine Daphne Bridgerton during a tea shop scene? The Duke becomes what Mira Assaf Kafantaris observes is an “image of the delectable Black man consuming the loots of transatlantic slavery and colonial plunder.”18 Commentators including Kafantaris, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan pointed out the inappropriateness of having a white woman—someone who benefits from the products of empire such as tea, china, muslin, and sugar on a daily basis—sexually objectifying a man of color during a time when Black enslaved people would have been the laborers who produced the sugar they were consuming.19 Daphne’s objectifying gaze becomes even more disturbing in retrospect after she sexually assaults the Duke. Sidney Mintz influentially examined the role of sugar in the formation of the modern world, but perhaps the modern romance novel even more so raises questions about the ethics of pleasure and consumption.20 The seemingly frivolous and ephemeral may in fact reinforce the power dynamics between and within the colony and the metropole, the enslaver and the enslaved, those who are considered human and those who are considered consumable.21 Ongoing problems of structural racism have plagued the romance publishing industry, conventional romance narratives, and even the romance industry’s flagship organization, the Romance Writers of America.22
Our issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” concludes with two reviews of the statue of the feminist political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft recently installed at Newington Green. The statue raised controversy because its appearance—a slender, naked woman in chrome emerges from a whirling wave—seemed to suggest that a certain kind of female body represented feminism and that a woman’s body was the best way of commemorating Wollstonecraft’s intellectual influence. Representation matters and, as Rebekah Andrews and Miriam Al Jamil remind us, the art historical tradition of the female nude comes freighted with gendered asymmetries of the gaze (Al Jamil) and of the beauty standards (Andrews) that Wollstonecraft rejected and that continue to burden women even amid the frenzy of the modern urban world.
To conclude, I offer my deepest thanks to all those who responded to the February 28, 2021 Facebook query about the scholarly consensus regarding capitalizing “Black” and “white.” Contributors included Margaret Doody, John Drabinski, Jennifer James, Amanda Louise Johnson, Shelby Johnson, David Latané, James Rovira, Jonah Siegel, Kerry Sinanan, and Miriam Wallace.23 While capitalizing “Black” is becoming widely accepted, there are valid reasons for capitalizing or not capitalizing “white.” On the one hand, not capitalizing “white” runs the risk of erasing whiteness as a historical phenomenon; on the other hand, capitalizing “white” runs the risk of validating white supremacist usage.24 Having weighed various arguments, the editorial team of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment adopted the convention of capitalizing “Black” but not “white.” We thank all contributors for their labor, generosity, and thoughtful engagement.
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The editorial staff of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment mourn with all those who have lost loved ones from the COVID pandemic and from racist violence against Black, Asian, Indigenous and all peoples of color in the United States.
ENDNOTES
[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.
[2] For the purposes of this editorial I am bracketing criticisms of the 1619 Project, but they include: (1) the 1619 Project’s chronological slippages are pedagogically dangerous—Len Gutkin, “‘Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth’: Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/bad-history-and-worse-social-science-have-replaced-truth?fbclid=IwAR1E0R8hDWRA1ZzaQAmtkdb9d0kQfhtFQhxradFD_AS53iesqQgyAcJwA9Y; (2) by focusing too much on race and slavery and by allowing journalists to bypass historians, the 1619 Project ignores the influence of class (and cross-racial class solidarity among workers) in the formation of the US—see a number of articles on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), but particularly the anthology The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews, edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman (Oak Park, Michigan: Mehring Books, 2021); (3) the 1619 Project threatens to replace one “consensus history” with another—William Hogeland, “Against the Consensus Approach to History: How not to learn about the American past,” The New Republic, January 25, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/160995/consensus-approach-history?fbclid=IwAR2ZsNUQAGoEENswp7ekjcnZVdyvc-M76CyNC59xtpVscZl8UwI5s9cmQTU. A stark contrast to these informed critiques, the justly scorned 1776 Report was released on January 18, 2021. The Biden administration soon disbanded the 1776 Commission (January 20, 2021).
[3] Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, eds., Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (New York: One World, 2021), xv.
[4] Alongside In the Wake a number of poetry collections have addressed the creative quest of crafting a Black diasporic identity within the occlusions and fragmentations of the archive and the dehumanization of slavery. These writers have chosen poetic expression to instantiate fragmentation, hybridity, the weight of the past on the present, and the pained relationship to water (a cleansing, purifying element while also being the ocean grave of so many enslaved ancestors transported on the Middle Passage). See M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2017); and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2020). A number of contributors to this issue discuss creative responses such as those mentioned above in terms of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation.” See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2 (2008), 1-14. For a useful online introduction to Zong!, see Jenny Davidson, “Trauma and representation: NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!” YouTube, February 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3uOjbOC8zQ.
[5] Eugenia Zuroski, “‘Where Do You Know From?’: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom,” MAI, no. 5, “Feminist Pedagogies,” January 27, 2020, https://maifeminism.com/where-do-you-know-from-an-exercise-in-placing-ourselves-together-in-the-classroom/. For further resources on challenging racism in the long eighteenth century, particularly during the Romantic period, see the work of Zuroski, Manu Samriti Chander and other members of the Bigger 6 Collective who seek to “challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism,” see https://bigger6romantix.squarespace.com/.
[6] For a helpful capsule history of how Jesus has increasingly been portrayed as blue-eyed and blond, see Anna Swartwood House, “The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European,” The Conversation, July 17, 2020, https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-how-jesus-came-to-resemble-a-white-european-142130. See also Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
[7] On the historical silencing of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History [1995], with a new forward by Hazel V. Carby (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015); on racist tropes of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, such as “monstrous hybridity,” the “Tropical Temptress,” the “Tragic Mulatto/a,” and the “Colored Historian,” see Marlene L. Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 8 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); for a case study of Haitian Revolutionary Baron de Vastey and the politics of Black memory see Marlene L. Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, The New Urban Atlantic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
[8] “White Christianity” does not refer to all white Christians, some of whom may—as Gentry observes—practice anti-racist Christianity, but rather to the imbrication of American Christianity with white supremacism. See Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). “White Christianity” is, of course, certainly not limited to the United States. For a study of Christian racialization in early modern England, see Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
[9] Laura M. Stevens, “‘Their Own Happiness’: The Ownership of Enslaved Africans’ Emotions in William Warburton’s SPG Sermon,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 54, no. 2 (2021): 285-305, 294-5.
[10] See also, Brigitte Fielder, “18th-century African American Literature and Community” (lecture, “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the long 18thc: An Online Teach-in”, UTSA Department of English and Mills College Center for Faculty Excellence, Zoom, August 6, 2020).
[11] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Coates on Vanity Fair’s September Issue, The Great Fire,” Vanity Fair, September 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter.
[12] Lindsey Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2021).
[13] Coates, “The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, In The Words Of Her Mother,” Vanity Fair, September 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/breonna-taylor?itm_content=footer-recirc .
[14] Edna Bonhomme, “When Black Humanity Is Denied,” Public Books, January 18, 2021, https://www.publicbooks.org/when-black-humanity-is-denied/. Bonhomme’s article is a multi-volume review of three important recent books on the dehumanization of the Black community in scientific discourse, the asylum, and the prison: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020).
[15] See also Misty Krueger, ed., Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2021).
[16] Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “On Studios and Patterns of Erasure” in “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021. On Bridgerton’s “Caribbean Problem” see Marlene Daut, “Why Did Bridgerton Erase Haiti?” Avidly, January 19, 2021, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2021/01/19/why-did-bridgerton-erase-haiti/?utm_source=pocket-newtab.
[17] On Bridgerton’s occlusion of the racial and economic dynamics of its historical setting—the events occur in 1813, between the abolishing of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolishing of slavery in 1833, see Patricia A. Matthew, “Shondaland’s Regency: On ‘Bridgerton,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 26, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shondalands-regency-bridgerton/ and Nina Metz, “Where did all that ‘Bridgerton’ money come from, and how do we feel about that?” Chicago Tribune, January 7, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-mov-bridgerton-conversations-about-wealth-0108-20210107-zs3ozfivefdizmj57ogpfyxjbe-story.html. On the “Black elite,” see Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Black Ton: From Bridgerton to Love & Hip-Hop,” Medium, January 3, 2021, https://tressiemcphd.medium.com/the-black-ton-from-bridgerton-to-love-hip-hop-15a7d27b8de7.
[18] Mira Assaf Kafantaris, “Sugar and Consumption” in “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021.
[19] “Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable, by Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan,” Medium, January 9, 2021.
[20]. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
[21] On Bridgerton’s problematic depiction of race, class, sexual violence, and consent, see Aja Romano, “Netflix’s new Regency drama Bridgerton is as shallow as the aristocrats it skewers,” Vox, December 21, 2020, https://www.vox.com/22178125/bridgerton-netflix-review-regency-romance. For a discussion of how the producers glossed over the rape of a man of color by a white woman, see Eric Langberg, “‘Bridgerton’ is a swoon-worthy delight…with reservations, Medium, December 23, 2020, https://medium.com/everythings-interesting/bridgerton-is-a-swoon-worthy-delight-with-reservations-59051872aef5; Claudia Willen, “‘Bridgerton’ fans are criticizing showrunners for including a controversial rape scene and failing to address the lack of consent,” Insider, December 29, 2020, https://www.insider.com/bridgerton-rape-scene-criticism-julia-quinn-2020-12; Mernine Ameris, “‘Bridgerton Review: The Duke of Hastings Was My Early Valentine … and First Love is Hard,” Medium, January 28, 2021, https://mernineameris.medium.com/bridgerton-review-the-duke-of-hastings-was-my-early-valentine-and-first-love-is-hard-b64af3507a07; and PBJ, “Daphne Bridgerton raped her husband and why it’s important to not romanticize it,” An Injustice!, December 27, 2020, https://aninjusticemag.com/daphne-bridgerton-raped-her-husband-and-why-its-important-to-not-romanticize-it-638d8cbbd4ec.
[22] For the argument that “the version of history taught by romance novels has made it far easier for white supremacist arguments to be accepted by otherwise intelligent, well-read people,” see Elizabeth Kingston, “Romanticizing White Supremacy,” Elizabeth Kingston, April 2018, https://www.elizabethkingstonbooks.com/single-post/2018/04/15/romanticizing-white-supremacy. Kingston’s related article “Reclaiming Historical Romances,” appeared in the December 2018 issue of Romance Writers Report. For an analysis of the ongoing problem of racism in the Romance Writers of America (RWA) organization, particularly the suspension of Chinese American novelist and lawyer Courtney Milan from the RWA’s board in December 2019, see Mikki Kendall, “The Romance Writers of America racism row matters because the gatekeepers are watching,” Think, January 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/romance-writers-america-racism-row-matters-because-gatekeepers-are-watching-ncna1109151, and Constance Grady, “Bad Romance,” Vox, June 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/6/17/21178881/racism-books-romance-writers-of-america-scandal-novels-publishing.
[23] “Copy-editing question,” February 28, 2021, Facebook.
[24] See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. For a consideration of what is at stake in capitalizing “white” (not to do so threatens to reproduce whiteness as “unraced individuality”), see Nell Irvin Painter, “Opinion: Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/why-white-should-be-capitalized/. For the argument that not capitalizing “white” is “an anti-Black act which frames “Whiteness” as both neutral and standard,” see Ann Thúy Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton, “Recognizing Race in Language: Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ and ‘White,’” Center for the Study of Social Policy, March 23, 2020, https://cssp.org/2020/03/recognizing-race-in-language-why-we-capitalize-black-and-white/.
