Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories (Art of the Story)

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a posthumous collection of short stories by the groundbreaking filmmaker and screenwriter Kathleen Collins. Many of the stories read like sketches or outlines for play or movie scripts and, as such, feature striking imagery and several alternating points of view. The stories portray a wide cast of mostly black women (and men) doing their best to navigate the politics of race and dating during the 1960s. The characters’ experiences of prejudice stand in stark contrast to the melting-pot rhetoric of the day, which insists on racial color blindness. Collins manages to reveal the folly of this rhetoric while also rendering her characters as full human beings whose race is incidental to the rich lives they lead. In Collins’s skillful hands, black women fall in and out of love, study French, canvas for black voter rights in the South, enjoy reading and being alone, and experience great joys and bitter losses. These vivid portraits make for a fascinating look into the little-known but important lives of black female intellectuals.