Colored Television (a GMA Book Club Pick)

Any time someone takes front stage to illuminate an underrepresented group (in this case mixed race Blacks) I hope and pray that it’s handled with deep consideration and care. Nope. Disappointingly, this author continues with tropes that mixed race Blacks are conflicted, wayward, coveting, unscrupulous, vapid, etc. Even goes so far to refer to the vast and varying collective as “mulattos” - and she means it. Super sad how fiction writers (and apparently instructors) have trended towards passing their real lives off as “fiction” by altering a few details here and there. Whatever happened to the craft of building new ideas, new characters, new worlds? Instead we get a thinly veiled re-telling of a not-so-interesting vaguely bi-racial woman’s entanglement with Kenya Barris. Add to that the out dated ideas of: Black women “hot combing” their hair to look presentable and the inaccurate nods to Black culture “Can We Talk” by Tevin Campbell was released in the NINETIES. The narrator’s tendency to give every character the same accent didn’t help either. I suffered through this one. So detached and singular- should have been a memoir.