{"id":519,"date":"2009-12-03T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T11:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/a-letter-about-milk-money.html"},"modified":"2009-12-03T11:01:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-03T11:01:00","slug":"letter-about-milk-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/letter-about-milk-money\/","title":{"rendered":"A Letter About Milk Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_l0Jv-SLk81k\/SxebDjjh6HI\/AAAAAAAADGY\/WcIk3-aO5s0\/s1600-h\/milk+money.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 400px;\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_l0Jv-SLk81k\/SxebDjjh6HI\/AAAAAAAADGY\/WcIk3-aO5s0\/s400\/milk+money.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5410963962695116914\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I recently received a letter from a reader regarding my novel, <u>Milk Money<\/u>. The reader made the following comment in her letter:<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>I would have enjoyed the story more if you hadn&#8217;t continually commented to the color of people&#8217;s skin as though it was an oddity. I don&#8217;t see that in books about Caucasians.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Here was my response to this reader:<\/p>\n<p><em>If you read a lot of books written by African-American authors, I\u2019ve noticed we do tend to mention skin color more. Why? I suppose skin color is more of an \u201cissue\u201d with us, a way of life. Our skin color comes into play more often than with Caucasian characters simply because we are Black, living in America, and there are things that may happen to us (Blacks) that might not necessarily happen to Caucasians, because of the color of our skin. I know skin color has been a HUGE factor in my life \u2013 I lived in an all-white area and I felt ostracized a lot of the time because of my skin color. So, I guess I\u2019m saying that with most Blacks, we\u2019re probably going to mention skin color more frequently when we\u2019re writing about African-American characters. I hope my explanation helps! <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Do any of you read novels written by African-Americans? If so, do you think we mention the color of people&#8217;s skin more than Caucasians? <em>I know when I do it, it&#8217;s not intentional, that&#8217;s just the way that I write!<\/em> I also notice we use food as adjectives to describe people&#8217;s skin: mocha-colored, chocolate, toffee, caramel-colored, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Feel free to share your thoughts!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Chesapeake-Weddings-Romancing-America-Cecelia\/dp\/1602608024\/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&#038;s=books&#038;qid=1253149065&#038;sr=8-2\">~Cecelia Dowdy~<\/a><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently received a letter from a reader regarding my novel, Milk Money. The reader made the following comment in her letter: I would have enjoyed the story more if you hadn&#8217;t continually commented to the color of people&#8217;s skin as though it was an oddity. I don&#8217;t see that in books about Caucasians. Here [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,28,35,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-african-american-novels","category-barbour-publishing","category-cecelia-dowdys-books","category-milk-money"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paovYP-8n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}