All tagged interracial relationships

Jim Crow is Always Watching!

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”

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The Hardest Topic to Write About (Racism)

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.

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Why Do I Write Romance Novels?

Sara Stratton
love story, being an author

People often ask me why I write romance novels, rather than some other genre. Well, I didn’t plan it that way. But it seems that no matter what I set out to write about, it ends up a romance of one kind or another. By “romance,” I mean a love relationship between two persons—of whatever ages … or even of the same sex.

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Why Write About Interracial Relationships?

Sara Stratton
being an author

In most of my novels, I bring in interracial relationships. Why? First of all, my marriage is such a relationship. I am a white man who is married to a Latina. For young people today, that’s no big deal. But for the older generations, who are the majority and who politically are in control, it still is a big deal—whether they will admit it or not.

            It is hard for a young person today to grasp the idea of going to jail for marrying a person of another race. But until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, over half of the states—and at one time two-thirds of the states—made what was called “miscegenation” a crime, punishable by imprisonment. (See: Loving v. Virginia.) That is, if a white person married a person who was legally non-white, the two parties were subject to criminal punishment and their marriage was not recognized—similar to the situation today for same-sex relationships in some states.

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WRITING INSPIRATION FOR LITTLE ALICE LANDERGIN

Sara Stratton
love story

Suffering from “shell shock,” as they called PTSD in World War I, Billy had gone to New Mexico and married into a Navajo Indian tribe. In 1947, when he died in an automobile accident, he left two Indian granddaughters, Alice and Harriet Landergin. What if Julia went to Gallup next to the Navajo Reservation and brought the two little girls home, to raise as her own?

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