This is the Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long-Rate.

Hi, I'm Lois Beckett, a senior reporter at the Guardian based in Los Angeles.

I'm the author of Fifty Shades of White, the Long Fight against racism in romance novels,

which was published in 2019.

In 2017, I was a beat reporter covering the far right and white supremacy in the United

States, so I was going to neo-Nazi rallies and interviewing white nationalists.

And what I heard from readers, a lot of our readers at that time, was that just covering

the fringes, the most explicit fringes of racism in the United States, really distorted

what racism here looks like, how it functions.

And a lot of readers said, we want to hear more about the ways that racism functions every

day in normal life.

And another thing I was thinking about a lot was how much I was covering and interviewing

extremist white men.

And another big point of discussion in 2017 through today is the ways that white women

uphold white supremacy and are really implicated in racism in the US.

And so as I was thinking, how do I write a story that gets at the more normal functions

of racism and that also looks at how women are part of this system?

I was also on Twitter following some of my famous romance authors because I've been a

romance novel reader my whole life.

And I saw that there were big debates going on among romance novelists about racism in

the genre and about racism in this beloved literature that I had always read.

...