Guernica: You were a foot soldier in the [Black Panthers] Party in a way that no one else has written about. And yet, you still decided to make Virgin Soul a novel.
Judy Juanita: I think the best answer for that is that I like to play with the facts. I love the facts of what happened, but I thought there were some deeper truths I wanted to get at. For one thing, I made my main character, Geniece, dark-skinned. I’m not dark-skinned, and the reason I did that was because I wanted to explore what it felt like to be on one end of the spectrum before the movement started—dark skin was a negative—and then to be on the other end after the movement had begun: black is beautiful. Part of the ethos of the time that black is beautiful was a repudiation of skin prejudice.
Guernica: The difference between “dark” and “high yellow” changed people in terms of their politics. Can you talk about that?
Judy Juanita: Part of the ethos of the time that black is beautiful was a repudiation of skin prejudice. It was a repudiation of the white standard that black wasn’t beautiful, or that being African was a negative. So, for a time then—and I tried to show that in the book—if a woman was dark-skinned she was considered a queen, was considered beautiful, an object of desire, as opposed to an object of revulsion. I felt very special and very pretty—very singled out for the first time. All of a sudden I come into a new world where being brown-skinned and having full lips was considered beautiful. That was very different from the way I perceived it growing up. It was political. I think it gave such an inner sense of worth in a society that had been hostile to black worth. It just was immeasurable how it made people feel for a time. And because of that feeling, people were able to explore other things like history; they were able to confront oppression. More here.