By Sandra Kitt

Penguin Books, USA New york Paperback: $5.99 When W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the "challenge of the color line" in his historic 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folks, the scholar meditated on the schism between communities of color and the Anglo power structure. Today, near the start of another millennium, we seem just as obsessed by racial issues, although today's concerns are in some ways more ambiguous than what DuBois and his contemporaries faced in segregated America.

In recent years, numerous nonfiction titles have tackled racial issues from a variety of perspectives and themes, including those written by African American. Such intellectually challenging and often controversial writings reflect not only the myriad views that abound on the subject of race, they also measure the deep intensity such issues continue to hold for us.

One fiction writer who relishes tackling social issues in her highly stylized writing is Sandra Kitt. A genre writer, Kitt has established a niche in the very competitive field of romance novels. One generation ago, such stories featuring African American heroines and heroes were virtually unheard of. Now Kitt is part of a thriving legion of writers of color who have found readers -- and more importantly, publishers -- willing to look at love in parameters other than blond hair and blue eyes. However, once she mastered the essentials of this genre -- pacing, conflict, resolution -- Kitt says she looked for more challenge as a writer. Her next book, which was just submitted to the publisher in January, is called Between Friends.

Her eighteenth novel, this upcoming book is one she describes as, "a very layered look at the experiences of a biracial adult." Previous titles include: Suddenly, a novel touching on the impact of pediatric AIDS in the African American community; and The Color of Love, the story of the interracial attraction between a white male cop and a Black female book designer. In her current novel, Significant Others, she sketches perceptions of love, identity and color in a provocative way.

"I've always been intrigued on a subconscious level about people in my own family or among my friends who could pass as white yet who clearly identified as African American," Kitt said. "So I wanted to bring this issue out of the closet while trying to be fair to all perspectives."

In her fictionalized account, Kitt has been true to the subtle, and often contradictory, identity questions raised within a community when a person of ambiguous identity enters it. Her heroine, Patricia Gilbert, is a high school counselor in an integrated setting. Patricia, with her full red hair and fair skin, is an African American woman proud of her identity but often forced to account for it. She encounters a newly relocated biracial student, Kent Baxter, whose move from his mother's home in Colorado to his father's fast-paced lifestyle in New York is impelled by the boy's desire to be closer to his African American father.

The boy's father, Morgan Baxter, is a successful CEO who becomes the perfect romantic foil for Patricia. The drama surrounding their smoldering resentment, then attraction, and finally, love for each other is deftly handled.

Patricia Gilbert is an unlikely heroine in many respects. Attractive but not devastatingly beautiful, she describes herself as she thinks others see her -- with a pale thin face, beige glasses, and a lot of red hair. As a counselor at a high school with a diverse student body, Patricia has the perfect setting in which to reflect upon her own racial ambiguities. Culturally African American, with the physical appearance of an Anglo woman, she must frequently negotiate the terms of her identity with both white and Black communities.

Morgan Baxter has an air about him that is first described as chiseled, precise, and masculine. Yet despite his very defined ethnic looks, Morgan has ambiguities of his own. The divorced father of a biracial teen, lie struggles with single parenthood and the impact of his mixed marriage on current relationships. Precisely because Kitt has built in so many complexities for her characters around issues of race and love, she skillfully exposes her readers to varied perspectives that they might not otherwise consider. Political and social nuances are woven into the story without strident polemics. As Morgan and Patricia move from personal conflict to sexual nirvana, all issues fall away, subdued by their romantic encounters in powerfully written passages.

In 1995 Dr. Naomi Zack edited a book titled American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, which spurred a multifaceted discourse about the true meaning of race and ethnicity within societies which are increasingly less able to define these distinctions by sight or family history alone. In fact, Zack particularly takes issue with "mixed race" labels because, for her, the naming alone reinforces troublesome and inaccurate perceptions about identity.

"The term `mixed race' seems self-contradictory once it becomes clear that the term `race' always con notes purity," she wrote in her book. "Not only do racial populations need to have common traits to qualify as racial but when race is taken seriously, racial mixture is viewed as a problem. And that problem of mixed race which is a contradiction in terms and a contradiction in the facts of racial identity, leads to unavoidable trouble."

Many facets of this kind of "trouble" have been quite eloquently rendered in a number of personal memoirs appearing in recent years, lending quite a bit of humanity to the lives of people perched precariously on the cutting edge of the color line. For example, James McBride's The Color of Water chronicles his Jewish mother's silent travails -- including a punishing silence from her rabbi father after her decision to marry an African American and have his children.

Earlier works also investigate the particular brand of loss, pain, and ostracism that children who are the result of such unions sometimes endure. Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's family memoir. The Sweeter the juice, examines the way her family splintered along pigmentation lines. The book revealed a family of many hues in which some members separated from their African American selves by deciding to "pass" into the Anglo world. in a particularly moving coda, Haizlip describes the reunion of her mother, Margaret, with her long-lost sister (Haizlip's aunt), Grace, who "passed" into the white world decades earlier. Their bittersweet encounters celebrate family yet reveal a father insurmountable chasm between the two women ingrained with social custom and political expediency.

In his memoir, Life on the Color Line, author Dr. Gregory Howard Williams, in an odd reversal of the "passing" paradigm, grew up believing that he was white only to later discover his African American parentage. Williams's poignant accounts of the confusion and ostracism he encountered on both sides of the color question also illustrate the general ambivalence society experiences about these issues.

So although recent nonfiction works have begun to probe the sexual politics of race, fiction writers have largely ignored the subject. Kitt deserves high marks for creating a novel that treats with authenticity and evenhandedness from the inside out about how African Americans can sometimes react to the many colors of their identity. Dr. Meta G. Carstarphen is at the Department Of Journalism at the University of North Texas.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates