Help! Need Quotes

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

So I vaguely remember LKH saying something about how black people couldn't become vampires due to some sort of bizarre difference in blood. Does anyone know the quotes and book it comes from?

Thanks.

Comments

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

I thought that was Stephenie Meyer?

[calenture.livejournal.com]

Twilight has at least one black vampire, so it's not her.

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

No, in Meyer's world, no matter what skin color you are you will immediately become white when turned into a Meyerpyre. How this explains the token black vamp in the movie, I'm not sure. My guess is that the people in charge of the film added him to try and show that the already terribly racist books, aren't really racist at all.

[alphafem.livejournal.com]

You are right, there is something about no black vampires in one of the Anita Blake books. I'm sorry I don't remember which one, but if it helps you narrow your search down, I stopped reading them after Obsidian Butterfly, so it has to be in one of the first 8 (?) of the series.

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I think it was in the early books, and it was some sort of random passing comment where Anita shows off her super-vampire knowledge by telling someone how African Americans couldn't become vampires.

[frabjously.livejournal.com]

o.O

I have never heard about this and I've been following LKH wtfery for a while now. It doesn't really seem like LKH's brand of crazy (since she's all about the "not quite white bread"), but I'd be interested in a source wherever it's from.

[putana.livejournal.com]

omgwtfpolarbears?! It must have just been in passing as I can't really remember it.

[pd-singer.livejournal.com]

Check the fight scene at the end of CS re MOAD servants.

[telaryn.livejournal.com]

I remember it too - it wasn't that they *couldn't* - it was just really rare. She described the black vampire's skin as "ashy".

[wonderbink.livejournal.com]

As I recall, yeah, it wasn't that black vampires were impossible, it was something about how the same genetic glitch that leads to sickle-cell anemia (but also protects against malaria in recessive form) made people resistant to contracting vampirism. (I have to admit, I thought that was a pretty clever detail.)

But I'm afraid I don't recall which book it was from, since they all get to be a bit of a blur to me.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

It was pretty early on, but the people who say it's just very rare are right. There was some reason that black people almost never get it. The real reason is that LKH isn't attracted to black men and the books are all about what she thinks is hawt. It's amazing to me that she can write about major American cities and rarely have anyone in her books who aren't white.

[pearkiwi.livejournal.com]

Chapter 45, CS.

"He was also one of the few Black vampires I'd ever seen. Some people theorized that the same genetics that made many people of African descent immune to malaria also made them less likely to become vampires. He stood there looking at me, with his dark skin still somehow strangely pale, like chocolate ivory. His eyes were golden yellow, and the moment I looked into them, the words not human came to mind."

I think there's a mention an earlier book, too.

[sekaigo.livejournal.com]

his dark skin still somehow strangely pale, like chocolate ivory

.....

[mitrian.livejournal.com]

It's on page 304 in the hardcover.

And the genetics she likely means here would be sickle-cell anemia.

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the quote :)

'Chocolate ivory,' is one of the more bizarre terms she has come up with to describe, 'really light skinned black person.' But at least she let go of her former favorite 'coffee with lots of cream.'

[vlredreign.livejournal.com]

I thought that there was a black female vamp in Seraphina's kiss...well, it was one of the rotting ones that freaked Jason out in Bloody Bones.

And the thing about people of African descent being immune to malaria...guess my dad missed that memo. And I guess LKH forgot about the horse pills they gave to ALL service members that were in-country in Vietnam. *shakes head*

[poor-toms-acold.livejournal.com]

Both the rotting vamps were white - one was blonde and one was brunette.

[tehuti.livejournal.com]

People of African descent aren't immune to malaria, but they do have a higher resistance to it. It's fairly well established in medicine, IIRC.

[chaosbunny.livejournal.com]

there was - her name was Kissa. She was sort of attached to the big, scary guy under Seraphina who made me think of Lurch. Jean Claude knew from his time in France.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Like other people said, it's not that they couldn't, and the books did have some black vampires in the beginning -- Buzz, the bouncer of Guilty Pleasures, Nikolaos had a black vampire as one of her minions (but he was unnamed), Yasmeen in Circus of the Damned, Kissa in Bloody Bones...eh, I got the feeling she was some other ethnicity, I'm not sure. It seems weird to include characters like these and then to turn around and say no! they're very rare, but then...I call into question everything put in the books post-Narcissus, as this is where the "murder victim zombies will go on a homicidal rampage to kill their killers!" cropped up and series canon (what little there was, anyway) got thrown out the window.

So it's entirely possible that LKH just forgot that she wrote these other characters that were black by the time she got to CS. It's happened before, like she forgot that Asher smoked.

Either way, I'd put a big question mark over this and take it with a very big pinch of salt. It's entirely possible that a later book will totally contradict this.

[chaosbunny.livejournal.com]

Oooh, or like when she forgot, apparently, that whatshername, uh, Richard's second in command, was a lesbian? She's raped and tortured in one book, has her therapist girlfriend to comfort her...then a few books later, she's joking with Anita about how she isn't attracted to women?

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

I always have a bit of... intense recoil when authors do Fun With Sickle Cell plot points. It's apparently very difficult to put that across without making it sound like some sort of inherent to black folk defect, instead of an over-generations response to a parasite that does not affect only black people. (Or even a majority of us.) And somehow it never comes up that Mediterraneans and South Asians from the western part of the subcontinent also have a high incidence of this. It's "the black disease" or something. (Forgive me, I'm extremely sensitive on this -- for starters, I've several times ridden to work on subways defaced with Stormfront propaganda stickers citing this as a reason against interracial marriage.)

It's always done as this "see how awesome being black is, you have this immunity to this terrible magical thing" but it never, ever sits right with me.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

(Yeah, I did not describe the sickle cell Mendelian thing well there AT ALL. At work; trying to keep it short... :-D)

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Yes.

It's clearly a gossamer-sheer cover for LKH's wish not to write black characters; I can imagine people doing something smart with the "sickle cell protects against vampires as well as malaria" thing, but LKH hasn't done it.

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

Well, that means that Anita never has to have sex with a black vampire. Just like how Merry has sex with the black character who isn't black like a black person, but the actual color black with caucasoid features.

The racism in her books is so freaking gross.