Although I adored Black romantic films, I knew that the fantasy of a happy ending in Black romance was simply that, a fantasy. Consequently, the romantic desires, boundaries, and expectations that I formed as a teenager erased Black men as viable romantic heroes in my young imagination. It could be full of heartbreak, sorrow, and rage, and ultimately, emotional turmoil caused by a Black man who was not yet ready to be a husband or a father. Because I did not actively seek out Black or interracial romance novels until my mid-20s, I missed out on authors like Sandra Kitt, Donna Hill, Brenda Jackson, and Beverly Jenkins during that crucial time of my life when I was learning, through personal experience, that Black love could be messy. I was introduced to romance fiction through Nora Roberts, Sandra Brown, and Jennifer Crusie, and I later developed a love of British “chick-lit” through reading titles from Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes.
My literary world at the time was populated by white authors. I was invested in seeing Black women succeed at love and life because it meant that I could too. While I was aware of the stereotypes that depicted Black women as undesirable in popular media, I was actively seeking out television shows and films that countered those images. As a 17-year-old Black girl in 2002 watching this film, however, I was simply infatuated with its depictions of Black womanhood.Ĭoming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant I was surrounded by Black culture on television and in movies. Looking at the film now, 20 years later, Brown Sugar, when read closely, is an interesting study of Black sexual politics in its depictions of the relationships among the main and secondary characters.
Both Sidney and Dre find love with other people before they both realize that their happy ending is with each other. This friends-to-lovers story is complicated by a series of missed opportunities, mixed signals, and a refusal to confront complex emotions. In the film, Latham portrays Sidney, a successful editor of a hip-hop magazine, who develops romantic feelings for her best friend, Dre, played by Taye Diggs. I started reading romance novels around the same time that Sanaa Latham was asking, “When did you fall in love with hip hop?” in the 2002 film Brown Sugar.
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