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The Black community is filled with lots of cultures and subcultures that run across all 50 states. And most Black people don’t even know how diverse Black culture is. And that’s by design. Most mainstream media platforms won’t show the diversity of thought in the Black community because they want to keep Black people in a psychological ghetto. So they only focus on the streets, the “hood”, and “thug life” the parts of the Black community most white racists want the world to see, not the entire Black community.

Because the White Supremacists who control the media only want Black people to see one narrative about Black life, most of our stories don’t get presented in mainstream media. The black authors they have on their platforms only tell the stories that fit their narratives. That’s why independent Black writers like myself are important. We can give readers an objective viewpoint of life and show them the larger world of the actual Black community. There are so many stories about the Black experience that don’t get told, and that keeps brothers and sisters from knowing the truth about who we really are.

Ever since I was a teenager I wanted to tell those stories to the world. Growing up during the golden age of Black media in the mid 1980s I saw the work that men like Bill Cosby, Spike Lee and Robert Townsend and many others were doing in film and TV to redefine the Black image. And in 1990 when I was 17 years old I wanted to build on the great work of those men by writing positive stories about Black people.

I saw the narrative for Black media changing for the worse with NWA’s Straight Outta Compton in 1990. And the “hood” movie trend taking us back to the stereotypes of the 1970s. Back then I knew how important Black writers were to the Black community. And why we needed to keep telling those stories that showed people that the Black community and the Black experience just wasn’t just limited to the ghetto. The world needed Black writers who would not only represent the diversity in our communities, but represent the diversity of thought in those communities.

Looking to build on the work of men like Bill Cosby, I put my fingers to the keyboard and started getting serious about writing positive Black stories when I graduated college in 1994. As I did research for each of my stories I always thought about writing stories about those parts of the Black community the publishing industry and Hollywood wouldn’t tell stories about. Stories about Black owned businesses and corporations like A Recipe For Success. Stories about the struggles of Black actresses in Hollywood like All About Marilyn. Stories about Black teenage girls in Beverly Hills like All About Nikki and Black girls in Black sororities like The Thetas. And stories about the Black people in the Subculture like in the books of the Spinsterella Trilogy.

And as I wrote those stories about the parts of the Black community no one talked about I also wrote stories with Black characters in the fantasy genre. Growing up watching science fiction like Star Trek and Star Wars and Fantasy like Hercules, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Xena, it always irked me how there were rarely any stories with Black characters in the lead or fantasy stories that came from a Black perspective. So I decided to tell stories about descendants of the Egyptian gods with the Isis series, explore the supernatural in The Temptation of John Haynes and wrote a story about a Black vampire in Eternal Night.

Over the last two decades I’ve been writing I wanted to give readers a richer picture of Black culture and Black life in the stories I wrote. And I’ve seen how a stories I’ve written have transform people’s lives all over the world. Many people who have read my stories have had their perspective of the Black community completely changed. As they read my work they saw a completely different picture of Black life than what’s presented in mainstream media.

What really means a lot to me is how my stories are having an influence on the younger generation. From what I’ve heard from many parents their kids are starting to see the world from a Black perspective first. And they’re imagining themselves in a world that’s bigger than the ghetto. That’s the impact a Black writer can have on a person’s life.

The books Black writers write give readers a picture of a larger Black world. And the experiences in those stories give them a better understanding of what it means to be Black. What we feed our mind shapes how we see the world. Every positive story about the Black experience opens up people’s imaginations and teaches them Black people need to take their power by putting themselves first and not seek out the validation of someone White. The greatest thing readers learn from independent Black writers like myself is we don’t need to be second in their stories. We can be number one in our own.

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