The tale of romance racism and the fight against it [...] goes back at least to 1980 and the first wave of what the New York Times's Ray Walters labeled “ethnic” romance novels. While Walters named one editor responsible for this wave, it was two Black editors and their vision for Americanizing mass-market romance fiction over the 1980s that was to change the form, theretofore dominated by the British/Canadian Harlequin Mills & Boon novels and their American imitators. Their vision embraced what they considered a more accurate representation of a post- Civil Rights era United States that was also grappling with the feminist movement's demands and with the sexual revolution. So, while Kimberlé Crenshaw would articulate the necessity to understand the combined pressures of these historical demands and political terrains in her now-widely used theory of intersectionality at the end of the 1980s, Vivian Stephens (at Dell and then Harlequin) and Veronica Mixon (at Doubleday) were operating on that principle at the start of that decade in the most unexpected of places—the popular romance novel genre (Crenshaw, 1989). Thanks to their bold intervention, American romance began to include stories of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) protagonists written by BIPOC Americans.
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This article fleshes out Stephens's and Mixon's role in altering American romance and surfaces how their editorial vision, visible in the novels they chose and developed for publication, drew on broader political currents in the U.S. in the 1980s. Along with overturning the whitewashing of romance fiction's lineage, it establishes how Black political thought via Black creators influenced the genre (and who gets a HEA or “happy ever after”) and how the current anti-racist movement in the industry is the latest step in a long tradition of diversifying American mass-market romance, one rooted in the 1980s.
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After looking at how some early Black romance novels edited by Stephens and Mixon reflect those late 1970s and early 1980s socio-political conversations and policy, this essay finally speculates on why this diversification of the genre (in terms of characters' ethnicity as well as opportunities for BIPOC creators) lost momentum. My data set for outlining this history comprises personal interviews with both editors, the small body of scholarship on them, a wide-ranging archive of magazine articles, news stories, and podcast interviews, and select 1980s' Black contemporary category romance novels.
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the gap in representation in the genre that these novels were bridging was about gender, race, and class, with the earlier exclusion of the last two resulting in the erasure of a specific habitus. The “first five” address this absence of Black middle- class life, introducing characters with economically strong and socially sophisticated backgrounds (by hegemonic white standards, of course) (Dandridge, 2022). They are well-educated, well-traveled, have comfortable or even wealthy economic backgrounds, and are rising professionals in fields like academia, media, and law.
These portraits capture the reality that after Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the Black middle class grew by 30% into the 1970s in what would later be termed a “black bourgeoisie boom,” a group that “symbolize[s] gains made during the civil rights era” (Ellis 14).
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While both protagonists in each couple in the “first five” are invested in their professions, the heroines' careers, echoing Stephens's and Mixon's own trajectories and time, are a major component of their lives and identity.
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Mixon has also framed the distinctive feature of American romance (as opposed to the Canadian-British Harlequin Mills & Boon) as being about the American ambition to work. It is possible that her own desire to work in an office setting (rather than doing service-based work common in an earlier generation of African Americans, such as post-office employee, nurse, etc) influenced the portraits of heroines in her portfolio (or her preference in manuscript selection). She also recalls working in publishing at a time (1974–1988) when more Black people were entering the industry (Moody-Freeman, 2021). The books she brought into print reflect this socio- economic shift, centering the lives of the Black middle and upper class in the 1980s.
Each of the “first five” heroines show the authors' and editors' awareness that the new American woman wanted to make something of herself outside the confines of the domestic narrative as well as the American race narrative.
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what we see in “first five” novels is a fusion of the heroines' personal and professional desires in a universe that allows them to have it all—Black economic peers as faithful mates, who also support the centrality of the heroines' professions to their socio- economic identity while also acknowledging their capacities to care for others.
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Simultaneously, the “first five” bring up another related problematic ideology, one imposed on women in general but with a particular resonance for a Black female character—Puritanical criticism of her sexual self. As noted earlier, if the ideology of domesticity insisted on the Madonna/whore dichotomy for all women, Black women were interpellated by it in even more repressive ways as part of the legacy of enslavement and sexual assault.
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The “first five” novels appear in the shadow of this discourse, with its expectations of “sexual saintliness” (Lee, 2010, 4) but instead of conforming to it through some version of celibacy or closed-door/off-page sex scenes, the heroines show a heightened level of sexuality, especially in Stephens's Dell Candlelight Ecstasy and Harlequin books. In effect, the novels show female sexual subjectivity that goes beyond the prevailing ideas of chaste middle-class Black ladies or deviant ones.
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they offer a snapshot of Black beauty standards in the early 1980s, after the heyday of “Black is Beautiful” had turned into a blended aesthetic that showed a white beauty standard regaining ground even as natural Black hair maintained a presence.
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