Writing People of Color
November 4, 2014 8:54 AM   Subscribe

 


I read this a while back and loved it!

By the way - I can't recomment MariNaomi's memoir Kiss and Tell highly enough. I connected to it on so many levels; as a mixed race person, as a "mostly white, but not" person, as a fetishized POC, as a former teen girl, as a former slut, as a confused baby queer with a boyfriend....it's amazing. If you were a teen girl and kissed someone ever, basically, you'll find something in it and be like AHHH I HAVE NEVER HEARD ANYONE EXPRESS THIS BEFORE BUT YES, THIS.
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:10 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


It drives me crazy when a TV show has a scene set in China or Japan or whatnot, and OF COURSE they have to have some "Oriental" music playing over the establishing shot.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 9:11 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


To be fair there's nearly always an accordion playing when they show that establishing shot of Paris with the Eiffel Tower.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:12 AM on November 4, 2014 [6 favorites]


But that's different. I was in Paris once, and accordion music does in fact follow you wherever you go.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 9:16 AM on November 4, 2014 [26 favorites]


And speaking of comics, the fact that Japanese characters always have ninja powers is a bit like having all American characters have cowboy gunslinger powers.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:20 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


You don't have cowboy gunslinger powers? I'm sorry for your loss.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2014 [18 favorites]


And all English people be slick, charismatic bastards...

Actually I'm ok with that.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Besides being good advice, this is a nice list of artists whose work I need to get into. Thanks, r317.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


ps. this is a fantastic post - thanks!
posted by ominous_paws at 9:25 AM on November 4, 2014


In comics, a business trip to Japan is usually enough to turn you into a ninja.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:25 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Related: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the danger of having a single story for somebody.

I really like the labeling of stereotyping as having a single story for people.
posted by entropone at 9:28 AM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]


The trouble I have in my writing is when I want to introduce characters of color, but I don't want to highlight it by specifically saying they are of ___ ethnicity, or their skin is _____ toned because then it's obvious that the characters that aren't given ethnic descriptions are presumed to be Caucasian like me, and I don't want "white" to be seen as the base trait and anything else is a deviation from the norm.

It's challenging for me, one that I mostly avoid by skipping most physical descriptors that can be seen as ethnic signifiers, even if in my head certain characters are assigned certain races.
posted by Think_Long at 9:29 AM on November 4, 2014


Aww, I liked this. Especially the concrete advice to just base characters on real people you know. It's at least a useful starting point.
posted by psoas at 9:31 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I don't want to highlight it by specifically saying they are of ___ ethnicity, or their skin is _____ toned because then it's obvious that the characters that aren't given ethnic descriptions are presumed to be Caucasian like me

If there's anything the outcry over the first Hunger Games movie taught us, it's that even when characters are specifically described as having dark skin, many readers will still assume they're white.
posted by psoas at 9:33 AM on November 4, 2014 [31 favorites]


Hoping this isn't too much of a derail - does anyone have any thoughts on how Jeph Jacques is writing the trans arc on Questionable Content? I was dreading it a bit, as although QC is a daily read JJ's not necessarily the deftest writer of all time. Thus far I don't think there have been any lurching missteps, but perhaps feel a bit like the whole thing has been a bit rug-swept? As in - they've basically not acknowledged that the situation might be in any way tricky for the characters at all. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with this... but this from the first article linked brought the situation to mind:

Also, consider the environment that the PoC is being placed in and what effect that would have both on the PoC and those he or she interacts with in that world. As an example, there are effectively no blacks in NASCAR. A cursory Google search revealed three in the sport’s history. With this in mind, if one were to write a story with a black NASCAR driver, it is crucial that the uniqueness of the situation is at the very least addressed if not explored more deeply.

There might well be a proper post in this, but I don't feel like I'm really the right person to make it - I'd really appreciate all and any thoughts.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:34 AM on November 4, 2014


He put his chocolate-colored hand on hers. His chocolate-colored eyes were like two big pools of chocolate. "What's wrong?" his chocolate voice asked, chocolately.

His voice is actually a rich, velvety chocolate. Her skin is cool and alabaster, which is apparently a stone we are all familiar with.
posted by Think_Long at 9:35 AM on November 4, 2014 [18 favorites]


I can understand why a lot of white writers feel it's just "safer" to "write what they know"--because there's a kind of immediate "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemma for white people writing POC characters. Navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of "you've just written white people and given them ethnic names/descriptors" and "those identifiable not-a-white-person things are just a stereotype!" (or, alternatively, "how dare you, an outsider, address this aspect of our culture") makes for a pretty uncomfortable journey.

No doubt it's salutary, in fact, to struggle through that dilemma, but it does add a whole layer of extra angst to the creative process.
posted by yoink at 9:37 AM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


It is NaNoWriMo — be the change you want to see!
posted by Elementary Penguin at 9:38 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


His skin was swarthy and rough, like a wild bore taint.
posted by Think_Long at 9:38 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


Dear white writers

You don't have to make all of your elderly black characters earthy and wise and gentle

Just once I'd like to see an elderly black character who's kind of a short-sighted jerk

Thank you
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:41 AM on November 4, 2014 [14 favorites]


or, alternatively, "how dare you, an outsider, address this aspect of our culture"

Welcome to Jollofgate.
posted by infini at 9:42 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


This is a challenging question, and I'm not sure what advice I would give other than to have POC read your work (preferably more than one), but it can be done--two of my favorite Asian characters of all time, Claudia Kishi from the Babysitters Club and Park from Eleanor and Park, were written by white authors. And I think that those authors did make mistakes--as the link says, Claudia's appearance is constantly described in cliche orientalist terms, and I'm still not sure why Park has a last name for a first name. But they are so real and human and and bursting with life (okay, I might be hyping Claudia up a bit, but she meant a lot to me as a kid) that I just don't mind those small missteps as much as I would if the characters were obvious two-dimensional inserts meant to increase "diversity."
posted by sunset in snow country at 9:44 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm still not sure why Park has a last name for a first name

Because lots of parents (not only white ones!) choose badly? :)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:46 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


If there's anything the outcry over the first Hunger Games movie taught us, it's that even when characters are specifically described as having dark skin, many readers will still assume they're white

"Olive skin" (which is the phrase in question) is a descriptor that has traditionally been given to people who are unquestionably "white" in American racial mapping: it's the cliche of choice for descriptions of Mediterranean men and women. Google, "Sophia Loren" and "olive skin" for example.
posted by yoink at 9:47 AM on November 4, 2014


Jollofgate: Here's how to think about Jollof rice: it means to West African nations what paella means to the Spanish, what fish and chips means to Brits or what burritos mean to Mexicans.

It's trapdoors, all the way down.
posted by mule98J at 9:47 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Just once I'd like to see an elderly black character who's kind of a short-sighted jerk

And to see him played by Morgan Freeman in the movie version!
posted by yoink at 9:48 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


or what burritos mean to Mexicans

Or what General Tso's Chicken means to Chinese people!
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:50 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


Yoink: I think Rue was the character in question, not Katniss. Stand down.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:52 AM on November 4, 2014 [8 favorites]


If you can’t do this because you don’t have any friends of the particular background, then you probably don’t have the life experience to write that character convincingly. (Also a good moment to seriously reconsider your friend selection process.)
The one thing I hate about professional culture is that it is invariably a White culture. Transitioning further into adulthood my close friend group has become peers from work, not school. Thus my day to day work and personal life is fairly mono-chromatic even though the cast members in my life still have various shades of skin color.

Race has stopped being something I talk about or emotionally deal with.

If I were to write about my life, I'd have to color characters either with cold, aloof academic prose or with feelings and moments borrowed from friends from my childhood. If I were to write what I know, it would display the phenomenon where the darkest Dr. Owale Afolayan might as well be Dr. Joe Smith with a transposed name.

Also, I wish I was popular enough to have a friend selection process.
posted by midmarch snowman at 9:53 AM on November 4, 2014 [8 favorites]


> I'm still not sure why Park has a last name for a first name

Being all white here, but: I thought it was his mom's last name, being handed down a la Harper or MacKenzie.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:54 AM on November 4, 2014


No doubt it's salutary, in fact, to struggle through that dilemma, but it does add a whole layer of extra angst to the creative process.

It's troubling, though, when white writers use the existence of conflicting voices as an excuse not to engage with the issue in their fiction at all: "Damned if you do, damned if you don't -- so I just won't think about it."

The worst is when it's framed as an accusation toward people of color who might object to their choices, rather than toward the history and culture that makes those choices fraught. How dare you have multiple voices, instead of being a monolith? How dare you form different opinions about how people should respond to complicated and painful social problems?

But also, I have just never had the impression that if I write a character of color I'm going to piss a lot of people off. I know how I could piss them off: Resort to stereotypes, cast the only POC in negative roles, etc. But I feel as though it's possible for me to make a good effort to write a well-rounded, well-researched POC, and -- even if I still make mistakes -- not be damned by angry hordes for the imperfections.

I suppose, though, if you're terrified that the flaws in your work will be taken as evidence that you're an irredeemable racist, then that's scary. But I don't think it's a realistic fear if you're mindful. And there are worse things than that anyway. (Like the underrepresentation of all kinds of minorities in entertainment.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:56 AM on November 4, 2014 [12 favorites]


Also, I wish I was popular enough to have a friend selection process.

Yes, this was one of those "pay for your unexpected expense out of your savings" kind of helpful hints. I got my mordant chuckle for the day.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2014 [13 favorites]


Yoink: I think Rue was the character in question, not Katniss. Stand down.

No, Rue is black in both the books and the films. The controversy was over the casting of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss.
posted by yoink at 10:00 AM on November 4, 2014


Thanks. My NaNoWriMo novel has 2 black characters in an all-white town, and though they aren't the main characters, that's central to part of the plot. I haven't decided what to name them yet; they need to be noticeably different because of the importance of racism to the plot, but I don't want to stereotype. Then again, for the time period this takes place, the "La" prefix (Lakeisha, Latonya, etc) really was ubiquitous.

I definitely hesitated writing about this subject matter at all, but I think I'll be okay because I'm not attempting a first-person account of racism.
posted by desjardins at 10:01 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm on mobile so it's not easy to pull links, but there was *definitely* a lot of outcry over Rue being cast as black, despite the book's description.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:02 AM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]


Hoping this isn't too much of a derail - does anyone have any thoughts on how Jeph Jacques is writing the trans arc on Questionable Content? I was dreading it a bit, as although QC is a daily read JJ's not necessarily the deftest writer of all time. Thus far I don't think there have been any lurching missteps, but perhaps feel a bit like the whole thing has been a bit rug-swept?

That's a bit of a derail. But I'll bite.

I think he's taking a pretty good person-first approach. That is, he's writing Claire as a character who is trans, not Trans Claire The Trans Character.
posted by entropone at 10:02 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


If you’re not sure about something, run it by a few of your PoC friends.

Step 1: Know some PoC.
Step 2: Know something about PoC
Step 3: Replace PoC with "People of other genders, class backgrounds, political beliefs, faiths, etc" and get to know things about them until you know lots of stuff
Step 4: Write what you know
Step 5: ?
Profit
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:02 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


I like it when I see an Asian-American character in a story/tv show/movie and they're not portrayed in any particularly "Asian" way. Even if the author just slapped an Asian name on a character to have some color in there, it still comes across as normalizing, that Asian-Americans can exist without being defined by their ethnicity, or having all of their stories be relevant to their ethnicity.

Of course, if the character's ethnicity were relevant to the story, I'd expect to see some understanding and familiarity with their culture, but otherwise I'd like to see the concept of a "regular person" be expanded beyond Caucasians.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 10:03 AM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


Navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of "you've just written white people and given them ethnic names/descriptors" and "those identifiable not-a-white-person things are just a stereotype!" (or, alternatively, "how dare you, an outsider, address this aspect of our culture") makes for a pretty uncomfortable journey.

Yep, this (and the sex version of the same thing) is exactly why I was stuck for hours when I realized I needed to add a second character to my NaNoWriMo this morning.

I managed to skip the entire thing by making the character non-human. Not all genres have that outlet, though and I feel for them.
posted by DU at 10:04 AM on November 4, 2014


The controversy was over the casting of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss.

There was also outrage among less-attentive readers that Rue was played by a black actress. At one point one website was collecting tweets. There were appallingly racist responses by people who managed to miss Collins' very clear description of Rue as brown-skinned.
posted by suelac at 10:04 AM on November 4, 2014 [23 favorites]


Entrepone - that's more than fair and I take your point completely. I'm finding it tricky to tease out exactly what I want to say and may well be overreaching, especially as QC has never really been about Deep Issues. Hm.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:06 AM on November 4, 2014


Thus far I don't think there have been any lurching missteps, but perhaps feel a bit like the whole thing has been a bit rug-swept? As in - they've basically not acknowledged that the situation might be in any way tricky for the characters at all. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with this... but this from the first article linked brought the situation to mind:

Well, the comic where they decided to start dating was only like a month ago. Given Jeph's usual approach to pacing, we can probably expect their first date to wrap sometime around April of 2016, so maybe he can work a mini-arc about the challenges they face sometime between the six weeks after that of Marten telling every other character in the comic how the date went and each of them making witty banter, and the month-long arc where Pintsize gets scabies.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 10:06 AM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]


Dear white writers

You don't have to make all of your elderly black characters earthy and wise and gentle

Just once I'd like to see an elderly black character who's kind of a short-sighted jerk

Thank you


A woman in my past was an elderly black lady who thought she was earthy and wise and gentle, though of course also fierce and powerful and so forth. In actuality, she was a pompous, bullying asshole with less insight into the human condition than can be found in the common hamster. She was a thin-skinned jerkass who liked to "hold court" and issue Grand Pronouncements in an affected deep voice.

What a profoundly irritating person she was. Translating her to fiction was a goddamn hoot.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 10:08 AM on November 4, 2014 [9 favorites]


If there's anything the outcry over the first Hunger Games movie taught us, it's that even when characters are specifically described as having dark skin, many readers will still assume they're white.

Quick side note, but is there anything in the books that suggests President Coin was supposed to be of Asian descent? Because for whatever reason I read her that way but obviously Julianne Moore is white.
posted by phunniemee at 10:09 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


There was also outrage among less-attentive readers that Rue was played by a black actress. At one point one website was collecting tweets. There were appallingly racist responses by people who managed to miss Collins' very clear description of Rue as brown-skinned.

Yeah, if you Google "rue black actress" you can get a good sample, even now.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 10:09 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've actually run across people who claimed to be Hunger Games readers who were -- no joke -- shocked that Thresh was African-American in the movie. I think there's a certain kind of sci-fi reader who 1) is more of a sci-fi skimmer, and 2) assumes that if a book is set in the future, it will be populated entirely by white people, regardless of how the author describes the characters.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:10 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


I can't believe I'm asking, but was Katnis' race ever described in the Hunger Games books?
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:11 AM on November 4, 2014


From the link about Homeland:

1. Islamabad is a beautiful, well-planned city — not a grimy netherworld.

Ugh. I hate it when film and TV does crap like this.

Reminds me of an anecdote, which I'm having trouble sourcing. I remember Eli Roth talking about Hostel, and he explained some jokes which were obvious to him and which he thought would be subversive. Chiefly, he talked about a line in the movie in which a person lures the main characters to the titular hostel in saying that, in Bratislava, the women are all lonely, as all the men had "died in the war". To Roth, this line is hilarious, because this is baloney, designed to play off of the main characters' ignorance. After all, there has not been anything resembling a "war" in Bratislava for a very, very long time - you might as well say the same thing about Paris.

Unfortunately, that joke does not play that way in the movie at all, especially since it still goes on to depict Bratislava as a, yes, grimy netherworld, which it very much is not.

(I still like Hostel II, though.)
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:12 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Reminds me of that guy from this thread. White is just, like, the default, and if you make a character not-white it's obviously because you've got some sort of agenda.
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:13 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


I can't believe I'm asking, but was Katnis' race ever described in the Hunger Games books?

The book The Hunger Games describes Katniss as having black hair, olive skin and gray eyes...
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:14 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


There was also outrage among less-attentive readers that Rue was played by a black actress.

Huh. On Googling around I see I missed that particular internet kerfuffle. People are weird.

Although bringing the Hunger Games books back to the topic of the thread, I always felt a little uneasy about the fact that Collins has the black Rue and Thresh as the people-of-the-land farmer-sector reps, and with Rue's quasi-intuitive understanding of plants and trees etc. It all seems uncomfortably close to the blacks-are-more-earthy-and-"natural"-than-whites trope. But I can also imagine her feeling precisely caught in the Scylla-and-Charybdis problem I described above. There aren't that many characters, in the end, and whichever ones you choose to make POC there's potential for either "oh, sure OF COURSE you made the such-and-such character black!" or for "well, that's just tokenism--what does that have to do with black history, black cultural experience" etc.

I'm not saying "and therefore white authors should never write POC characters." I really mean it when I say that it's salutary to try and think one's way through that particular minefield. But I understand why writers feel nervous--because in the end, in a cultural context where there is just so MUCH that is fucked up about racial politics and interpersonal dynamics and what have you there really never is an "innocent" choice. There is always going to be some basis on which any gesture is open to potential criticism.
posted by yoink at 10:18 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


" Not all motivations are alike just as not all intentions are created equal, and unless there is a reason beyond “I feel like I should,” it might be better to leave the character out until their reason for being in the work is as rich and nuanced as the others."

Really? There needs to be a reason why a character might be non-white?

"Okay, so maybe this isn’t the best tactic, as a person’s background, especially race, can affect so much of their day-to-day living. For example, a half-Japanese person like me, who grew up in a liberal California suburb in the eighties, will have a different perspective on things than an octogenarian Japanese immigrant who moved to Vancouver in her twenties, versus a fourth-generation British-Japanese man who grew up around Koreans, versus an Okinawan teen visiting New York for a month. Background can affect what this person eats for lunch, their views toward religion, politics, war, death, and pretty much everything."

See, this is another thing that I notice. It's not that people write "POC"s in weird ways. It's that people's national and cultural backgrounds and physical features affect their lives. Japanese people and Korean people aren't considered to be different races (though, to be honest, the whole concept of "race" is just wacky) and note how "Okinawan" is treated differently from "Japanese" in that paragraph. Because people from one part of Japan have different cultures and experiences from other parts of Japan. This doesn't just apply to "POC" people but to "white" people as well. You can have characters from different parts of Spain who speak different languages and have different experiences. Maybe a Spanish Gaelic character. People have tons of different things that affect their lives in great ways.

On preview, I also want to say that I agree with El Sabor Asiatico's point:

"I like it when I see an Asian-American character in a story/tv show/movie and they're not portrayed in any particularly "Asian" way. Even if the author just slapped an Asian name on a character to have some color in there, it still comes across as normalizing, that Asian-Americans can exist without being defined by their ethnicity, or having all of their stories be relevant to their ethnicity.

Of course, if the character's ethnicity were relevant to the story, I'd expect to see some understanding and familiarity with their culture, but otherwise I'd like to see the concept of a "regular person" be expanded beyond Caucasians.
"
posted by I-baLL at 10:20 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Here is a question. What about in fantasy?

The last three or four fantasy novels I've written have been in hot, desert kingdoms and the characters (mostly) look Arabic or Persian to my mind's eye. Their skin-color is not super relevant to the stories (besides the intrinsic importance of the setting) but it would feel weird to try and pretend they were white, so I've described them as, basically, Middle Eastern. Is that racist or insensitive? Is it 'good enough' to just write characters in this setting so long as I'm not applying Middle Eastern stereotypes to the characters and their culture? But at the same time, not also just making it 'white culture in the desert' either?

It feels like a lot of this is resolved by just writing an interesting, thoughtful story but is that enough? I honestly don't know.

*and in the case of asking a PoC friend to read my work, I have like maybe two people I would show my writing to and one is my Guyanese-American wife and so far she has had nothing to say about the matter. So maybe I'm beanplating it? Again: I don't know.
posted by Tevin at 10:21 AM on November 4, 2014


Tevin: Same could be said about "white" fantasy... Most of those are various stereotypes of what the author imagines Medieval Europe to have been like... violence, rape, war, misery.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:23 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


> There is always going to be some basis on which any gesture is open to potential criticism

I don't know what I'm talking about, but I thought Shane was done well in (mefi's own!) John Scalzi's Locked In. Very much a "happens to be black" character -- or, I guess, "happens to be multiracial" -- in a way that works well in the book.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:24 AM on November 4, 2014


It all seems uncomfortably close to the blacks-are-more-earthy-and-"natural"-than-whites trope.

That's a trope? I thought blacks were stereotyped as urbanites (specifically poor, inner-city urbanites) who hate nature, or at least don't go hiking or camping. I've seen a few very nature-oriented black characters in recent decades, which I interpreted as attempts to be anti-stereotypical. I didn't know that was also a stereotype.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


At the risk of sounding dumb, can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc? The example in the post of "Maybe just change Dr. McAllister to Dr. Tanaka?" honestly doesn't sound bad to me. I can think of a lot of instances where the person would still read 100% fine and true and there would be no problem. Obviously if you're dealing with certain cultural things then ethnic background can be important, but I don't see any huge awful damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of dilemma here in most situations. Just write what you know, and if you don't know many people of color 1) you should work on that I guess? 2) they're not that different from your friends.
posted by naju at 10:27 AM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


That's a trope? I thought blacks were stereotyped as urbanites (specifically poor, inner-city urbanites) who hate nature, or at least don't go hiking or camping. I've seen a few very nature-oriented black characters in recent decades, which I interpreted as attempts to be anti-stereotypical. I didn't know that was also a stereotype.

It's a variation on a longstanding trope of "black people are more authentic than white people." What exactly that means and how it manifests varies with the setting, but it's a very common fictional trope.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 10:31 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Anyamatopoeia, think African, not modern American. You'll find them in the Noble Savage trope, and also Magical Negro. Old Black people often count also, since they're generationally closer to slaves. Who were intimately acquainted with agriculture.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:35 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


But what if a black Katniss was the elite hunter, killing animals with a weapon as a sharp-shooter?
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:36 AM on November 4, 2014


Specifically in the case of the Hunger Games, it seems Collins dodged the trope at least to the extent that no non-imaginary people complained. Possibly by not overdoing the tropeiness, possibly by the fact that Earthy Rue was counterbalanced by Focused Killing Bastard Thresh?

But the fact that she was not in fact hounded to death by the PC Police might be hopeful evidence that we don't necessarily have to paralyse ourselves into inactivity as writers, and this stuff can be done well.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:37 AM on November 4, 2014


Being all white here, but: I thought it was his mom's last name, being handed down a la Harper or MacKenzie.

That makes sense! Either way, I trust Rainbow Rowell to have had a good reason for it, although I thought it was odd that it was never mentioned. Could have been cut, I guess.

"Not all motivations are alike just as not all intentions are created equal, and unless there is a reason beyond “I feel like I should,” it might be better to leave the character out until their reason for being in the work is as rich and nuanced as the others."

Really? There needs to be a reason why a character might be non-white?


I actually read this as saying that the character should have a reason for being in the work as a whole, not that they should have a reason for being a POC. It's a subtle distinction. But like, if the character's purpose in the work is to be a sidekick to the white main character and to make the writer feel a little less bad about only writing white characters, yuck, leave them out. If his purpose in the work is to be a love interest who draws the main character out of her shell slowly but surely, to have a complicated relationship with his father, to fall in love, to drive his girlfriend north in the middle of the night to escape her abusive stepfather? And if he can accomplish all that while also being Korean? Congratulations, you've created a rich and nuanced character of color.

I'm just gonna leave this link here: Why is Park Korean?
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:38 AM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]


"I actually read this as saying that the character should have a reason for being in the work as a whole, not that they should have a reason for being a POC. "

That is a very helpful distinction.
posted by Tevin at 10:42 AM on November 4, 2014


Eh, I'm not reading that the same way because what precedes that is:

"what is his motivation behind inserting a PoC? Is it in service of the work, out of a feeling of guilt and obligation, or out of a (probably well-intentioned) desire to diversify?"

So the "leave the character out until their reason for being in the work is as rich and nuanced as the others" then begins to mean "don't write POC characters unless they're in there to be an important character." So he's saying that the side characters need to be non-POC. Maybe that's not what he means but that's what he's coming off as saying.
posted by I-baLL at 10:50 AM on November 4, 2014


Just write what you know, and if you don't know many people of color 1) you should work on that I guess? 2) they're not that different from your friends.

1) I live in a highly segregated city and this is hard to do without coming off like Would You Be My Black Friend? I can go literally weeks without talking to a black person beyond pleasantries in passing. (Note: I'm pretty sure it's not me, because I had no problem finding black and Latin@ people to talk to in suburban Chicago. Or Native Americans, when I lived in Montana.)

2) It's definitely true that the black kid in the hoodie is not that different than the white kid in the hoodie, but he is reacted to much differently by everyone around him, which necessarily shapes his experiences in ways that I, as a white woman, can't deeply understand.
posted by desjardins at 10:53 AM on November 4, 2014 [8 favorites]


At the risk of sounding dumb, can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc? The example in the post of "Maybe just change Dr. McAllister to Dr. Tanaka?" honestly doesn't sound bad to me.

I'm not sure about the idea in this piece that a person's background affects their perspective on just about everything. I mean, of course it can, but not all the time. For instance, my view that WI governor Scott Walker is a depraved sleazebag with dead, reptilian, child molester eyes isn't particularly informed by the fact that my parents are Korean.

The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with the idea that a PoC should be written a certain way because of their ethnicity. How is this really different from cruder forms of stereotyping? Is a character being written "incorrectly" if they don't behave according to how someone of their ethnic heritage "should" behave? If I read a novel about a Korean-American guy whose Korean parents didn't want him to become a lawyer, far from griping that they were drawn inauthentically, I'd mail the author twenty bucks in gratitude.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 10:54 AM on November 4, 2014 [9 favorites]


Anyamatopoeia, think African, not modern American. You'll find them in the Noble Savage trope, and also Magical Negro. Old Black people often count also, since they're generationally closer to slaves. Who were intimately acquainted with agriculture.

Yep. Or shades of Caribbean influence, which gets you to an association with herbal medicine pretty easily, even if you don't take the stereotype all the way to voodoo and such.
posted by desuetude at 11:01 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I am a straight white man. Looking back at my plays that have been produced, I have had 6 plays where the leads included a character that was gay, 5 plays where the leads included a person of color, and 6 plays where the leads included a woman.

This wasn't really a deliberate choice on my part -- it's just the way things worked out with the stories that I wanted to tell. But it wasn't without consideration, and, for a while, I deliberately wrote secondary characters in such a way that they could be played by anybody, and said so. But even then, I noticed they were often cast with white men unless I specifically wrote that the casting should be otherwise, and so I do this now when it seems appropriate, which it often does.

I will say this: I have never gotten grief for it, which I think authors are afraid of. Nobody has even questioned my motivations, neither have they suggested that this is something I shouldn't do.

I've never really been congratulated for this either, now that I think about it, so don't do it for that. Actually, I suspect if you do it well enough, it will be somewhat invisible, because it won't seem like an affectation, but rather an essential element of storytelling.

It is important not to overreach, though -- not to assume that you can instinctively write somebody else's experience, or even that you can research it enough to know it. I think Quentin Tarantino gets dinged for this with some frequency. It doesn't seem like people mind that he writes black characters, but it is when he tries to write blackness, as though he were writing about the experience from an insider's perspective, that he stumbles. I felt that way about his Jewish characters in his war movie -- I don't care that he writes Jewish characters, and they were really interesting characters, but, as a Jew, I didn't really need Tarantino to craft a Holocaust revenge movie for me.

So I would offer one last suggestion -- don't be afraid to collaborate. I wish I had done more of this in the past, and it is something I try to do a lot of nowadays. If you are planning to tell a story that is far enough outside your experience, don't just turn to your black or female or gay or whatever friends as research. Look to them as potential co-authors, if they are interested. Every time I have done this, it has made my work better.
posted by maxsparber at 11:01 AM on November 4, 2014 [18 favorites]


Google, "Sophia Loren" and "olive skin" for example.

This has always confused me. What part of an olive has a color anything like Sophia Loren's skin? Does it just mean "Skin tone of people who live in the land of olives?"
posted by straight at 11:04 AM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


2) It's definitely true that the black kid in the hoodie is not that different than the white kid in the hoodie, but he is reacted to much differently by everyone around him, which necessarily shapes his experiences in ways that I, as a white woman, can't deeply understand.

I can get that. At the same time, I wonder if that's also in danger of overthinking in many situations where race isn't a huge intended theme. I was just talking to a friend about how the main (African-American) character in the Walking Dead series of games felt so well-written and nuanced to me - his race didn't define his personality, really, hardly at all. It also wasn't a huge deal with his interactions with the majority of characters. There were subtle, clever things happening with race in the narrative, but you could absolutely miss that completely and still get a lot out of the deep, considered characterization. It's one of the examples I think about often, somehow. They managed to simultaneously make it not be a thing, and kinda a thing but in a small (and impactful for those who are paying attention) way. Not sure what that means for everyone writing PoC characters, but I don't think we all have to aspire to that, necessarily. This might be a problem where overthinking/analyzing race could actually be a detriment.
posted by naju at 11:06 AM on November 4, 2014 [5 favorites]


He put his chocolate-colored hand on hers. His chocolate-colored eyes were like two big pools of chocolate. "What's wrong?" his chocolate voice asked, chocolately.

For once, it was he that melted in her arms.
posted by Kabanos at 11:14 AM on November 4, 2014 [12 favorites]


At the risk of sounding dumb, can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc? The example in the post of "Maybe just change Dr. McAllister to Dr. Tanaka?" honestly doesn't sound bad to me.

It depends, doesn't it? If Dr Tanaka is going to be a background character, just the woman the hero goes to see to get his wounds looked after or something, just changing race like that probably makes little difference, though of course you can still (especially) run straight into cultural stereotypes when dealing with secondary characters. (Or gender stereotypes for that matter: the female doctor that nurses the hero back to life? Clicheeee)

Sometimes you just don't want to bother with all the bagage and history an actually existing black person e.g. might have, like in Doctor Who where the race of the supporting characters is basically random and any "realistic" treatment of their race when e.g. visiting 18th century London is ignored because that's not the story they want to tell.

But in the end there's always the tension between not making characters of colour just "reskinned" white people, having their backgrounds inform their characters and not making them into stereotypes, no matter how well intentioned.

And part of this tension is of course because characters of colour are still more rare than white characters, have that need to be justified in terms of story, can't just be their own characters but are almost always judged in terms of how well they represent their cultures and background.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:22 AM on November 4, 2014


This has always confused me. What part of an olive has a color anything like Sophia Loren's skin?

Remember, it was the fifties and nobody north of Lyon had ever seen an olive, let alone knew what colour it was supposed to be.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:23 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I probably would throw away an olive that was the color of someone "olive-skinned."
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:25 AM on November 4, 2014 [5 favorites]


Olive oil, perhaps?

(not Olive Oyl...)
posted by ominous_paws at 11:26 AM on November 4, 2014


This has always bothered me, but I think maybe olive refers to the tree, rather than the thing we eat?
posted by Braeburn at 11:27 AM on November 4, 2014


White people aren't actually white, black people aren't actually black, and wine-dark sea isn't, really.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:28 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


People from the Mediterranean are all either pale green or purplish-black. I mean, duh. You all must be very sheltered.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:28 AM on November 4, 2014 [14 favorites]


AND SOME OF THEM ARE EVEN STUFFED WITH HABANEROS
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:29 AM on November 4, 2014 [12 favorites]


Katniss had the tawny, swarthy skin of an olive that was about three or four weeks short of full ripeness, or possibly the bark of the olive tree, or maybe when you get canned black olives and you know the part of the inside that's kind of pale and slightly greenish brownish.

"I love you," said Peeta.

posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 11:33 AM on November 4, 2014 [35 favorites]


I'm just gonna leave this link here: Why is Park Korean?

I haven't read Eleanor & Park but this response (yours, not the authors) is actually one of few I've seen praising the portrayal of Koreans in the book.
posted by atoxyl at 11:33 AM on November 4, 2014


This is particularly interesting to me, right now, because this was the year I started making comics. In the first three comic scripts I wrote (one of which I drew myself, one drawn by a friend, a third in progress and being drawn by a different friend) there are no white protagonists. This was absolutely a conscious decision on my part.

I feel like I frequently see the argument that it's wrong, somehow, for authors to make an overt effort to diversify the casts of their stories. That it's tokenism, or insincere, or inauthentic. That it's trying too hard, somehow, if you don't follow your muse down a path where everyone looks like you. To which I say: bullshit.

Maybe it's different for literary fiction, but I write SF. It's supposed to be the literature of the imagination, right? I'm supposed to be coming up with alternate histories and complex magic systems and alien planets, right? If I can do that, but I can't populate those settings with people who aren't exactly like me, then I am not doing a very good job.

When I first started writing original fiction, most of the characters in my stories were white. I thought I had to justify the presence of POC in my fiction, as if the natural state of a fictional character was to be white, and anything else represented a deviation from the norm. Then I realized that was total nonsense, because the world I live in contains people of color, and they should not need to justify their existence to anyone. They exist. They are the heroes of their own stories. They can damn well be the heroes of my stories, too.

If I am creating a fictional world where everyone is white, I am going to need a damn good reason for doing so. "But what's the *point* of making this particular character non-white?" should not be the question. The question should be, "Is there any good reason for setting this story in a homogenous world?" If the answer is no, then your own discomfort is not sufficient reason. Do your research, ask a friend with first-hand knowledge of the culture you're portraying, be prepared to get things wrong, and do better next time.
posted by nonasuch at 11:34 AM on November 4, 2014


Had a quick thrash on Google and it seems to go far back enough as a phrase that maybe it's too much to expect a direct and logical etymology.
Fwiw I totally missed that Katniss was olive-skinned, presumably because her district were miners and the miners round these parts tend to a more pasty white....
posted by ominous_paws at 11:35 AM on November 4, 2014


Kids these days and their no-dictionarin'...

olive
adjective
grayish-green, like an unripe olive: a small figure in olive fatigues.
• (of the complexion) yellowish brown; sallow.


olive-skinned
adjective
(of a person) having yellowish-brown skin: an olive-skinned Italian goddess.

posted by Celsius1414 at 11:35 AM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


You don't need to get into fiction to see white people depicted differently.

And the Shortpacked! webcomic makes a point about cultural 'whitewashing' going wa-a-ay back.

As for the derail about QC's Claire, the comic's wiki states (in its 13th paragraph about her) "Claire's character is the first known transgender character to appear in QC. Jeph revealed that he was nervous about revealing this fact, as he has wanted to include a trans character for years, but wanted to execute it properly." I suspect he has been emboldened (if not directly influenced) by "Validation", a comic with a transgender main character created by a transgender writer (who has written several other comics and co-created the 'Webcomics Factory' hub) and which had a recent storyline about awkwardly starting a relationship that has been put on hold during the protagonist's trip to a Con. But, yes, like everything in QC, this will take a lo-o-o-ng time to develop.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:39 AM on November 4, 2014


Also I know the holidays are around the corner, as today marks my annual I Suddenly Remember Greg Nog's Username Pun. Seems like it comes earlier every year, but at least it waited till after Halloween this time.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:40 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


I really do have a greenish undertone to my skin. I'm not obviously green but when you are playing with makeup you can notice it.
posted by fiercecupcake at 11:43 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


I have some Italian in my family's history. My paternal Grandmother and myself have, and have been identified as having "Olive skin". I tend to hear that description used when discussing people around Italy.
posted by Twain Device at 11:44 AM on November 4, 2014


At the risk of sounding dumb, can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc?

I'm trying to figure this out as well. I can certainly see it being a problem if the book is about white people and the only POC are the ethnic doctor, ethnic bus driver, ethnic teacher, and ethnic shop clerk. POC NPCs, so to speak, just for flavor.

I am trying to exercise all these muscles with my NaNoWriMo novel, in which almost all the humans are Californian but nobody is all-white. I know that I will screw up, and my aim is to at least screw up in not the most common or obvious ways. At some point, as a white writer, I think I am obligated to acknowledge my privilege, the privilege of my white characters, and the lack of privilege of my non-white characters.

And that doesn't need to be a big deal, just I need to keep in mind that those characters are not playing on the Easy level all the time. My cop character (who is Southeast Asian) is going to have a different reaction to a white guy walking down Main Street drunk at midnight than a black guy walking down Main Street drunk at midnight, EVEN THOUGH the white guy isn't even human, he's a monster and he just looks like a white guy because he's not a stupid monster and patriarchy hurts everyone, especially when they get chomped into little bits.

The question should be, "Is there any good reason for setting this story in a homogenous world?"

I was first taught to do this with gender, but over time I have learned to stop and ask why about all the standard settings: Why is this character a man, why is she white, why are they straight, why does he work while she stays home, why is he uneducated, why is she an assistant and not in charge? Sometimes the answer is "because that's what they need to be" and that's okay, as long as the question gets asked. I find it makes my characters better and more interesting to have had that thought exercise about them.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:46 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


A couple of relevant quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin:
"I have received letters that broke my heart, from adolescents of color in this country and in England, telling me that when they realized that Ged and the other Archipelagans in the Earthsea books are not white people, they felt included in the world of literary and movie fantasy for the first time."
and
"I think it is possible that a good many readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, maybe don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being 'colorblind.' Nobody else does."
Gleaned from this great 2006 piece by Pam Noles on Infinite Matrix: "shame", where she writes:
"Le Guin's racial choices in 'A Wizard of Earthsea' mattered because her decision said to the wide white world: You Are Not The Whole Of The Universe. For many fans of genre, no matter where they fell on the spectrum of pale, this was the first time such a truth was made alive for them within the pages of the magical worlds they loved."
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:49 AM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


There was also outrage among less-attentive readers that Rue was played by a black actress. At one point one website was collecting tweets. There were appallingly racist responses by people who managed to miss Collins' very clear description of Rue as brown-skinned.
posted by suelac at 1:04 PM on November 4


Hunger Games Tweets on Tumblr. A sample, in case you don't want to dig through their archive:

"Why does rue have to be black?"

"Why did the producers make all the good characters black?"

"EWW rue is black?"

"...when I found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad"

“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture"

It just goes on like that.

This New Yorker article is a good read - White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games (and also see Little, Blonde, Innocent, and Dead, about our culture’s association of whiteness with innocence).
posted by magstheaxe at 11:55 AM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


oneswellfoop, the perpetrator of the Marysville shooting identified as a member of the Tulalip nation - he was Native American. But yes, it's another interesting note in the discussion of who and how and when somebody gets coded white.
posted by PussKillian at 11:58 AM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]


The suggestion to base the character on someone you know kind of sticks in my craw. I understand why the author mentioned it, but, well, I don't have a hugely diverse friend base.

That being said, I've written a lot of diverse characters into the supporting cast of my fiction. In the NaNo book I wrote two years ago, I figured out midway through writing it that the main character's best friend and that character's older sister were biracial (black/Portuguese), and that another significant character was Chicano. The story is set in a working class New England coastal town, and the population is primarily Italian and Azorean. The MC's BF would be considered a blerd; the other pivotal character's parents are physicists who moved east to work for Raytheon...the biracial female character has more stereotypical interests (she loves graffiti and has a crush on Basquiat, and she also has a slight AAVE/jive accent). All these characters are negotiating their racial identity, and the protagonist is watching them try to figure out who they are, but also dealing with her own protean adolescent identity and staring down her own internalized racism (not that she would call it that). In this year's NaNo project, the second lead is a middle-aged Jewish bisexual man, and there's also a Chinese supporting character.

Of these characters, two of them bear a passing resemblance to people I know in real life. The Chicano character in my first book is inspired by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, the bisexual Jewish guy is very loosely (VERY. LOOSELY.) inspired by someone I met earlier this year, and the biracial siblings are characters I hadn't seen much of in other books. That leaves the Chinese supporting character, who is sort of based on a girl who was kind to me a few years ago, and with whom I lost touch under weird circumstances. Even if we just drifted apart I'd feel weird emailing her a 50,000 word document and saying "does this look accurate to you?" All I've been able to do is read first-person narratives by people from those backgrounds and frame the story so that you're experiencing it through the perspective of an unreliable narrator. I don't want to just hand this to anyone of those backgrounds and say "yeah, so did I get this right or not?" -- it feels weird to me, like another variation on "educate me on racism" to a black person. I just want to be true to these characters and not fuck up.
posted by pxe2000 at 12:03 PM on November 4, 2014


I haven't read Eleanor & Park but this response (yours, not the authors) is actually one of few I've seen praising the portrayal of Koreans in the book.

Holy shit, I had not heard about this. I did some googling and found some reviews that are just making me rage, and I want to take them down point by point but I know that's not what this thread is here for. What I will say is that they seem to largely have been written by young Asian American women, and their main complaint is that Park is portrayed in a fetishized manner. But I think dating and romance are experienced very differently by Asian men and Asian women, and I think they're projecting their own discomfort with being fetishized onto this boy character, when the majority of Asian American boys and men are instead worrying about being emasculated and neutered. I thought it was a very honest portrayal of that aspect of a young Asian American man's life--he was an object of desire, most definitely, but not in a way that waved away the very real concerns that young men like Park have about their desirability.

The thing is, even within a single ethnic group there's infighting and disagreement and argument about whose experiences are the most "authentic." I SO disagree with these reviewers, but they have a right to their own experiences. That's why all you can do is write your characters to the best of your ability.

(They also thought Eleanor's home life was one-dimensional and unbelievable because it was too bleak. Grr. Grrrrrrrrr.)
posted by sunset in snow country at 12:21 PM on November 4, 2014 [7 favorites]


Great article, I admit I always cringe inwardly whenever I see authors include a PoC for "variety." One of my pet peeves is when the fictional world is set in somewhere in Asia but instead of focusing on one culture it ends up combining all of them and ignoring how each one is different.

On the other hand A:tLA/LoK did a amazing job on creating a diverse setting without infringing on the different cultures or glossing over each one.

Reminds me, don't get me started on how some half-white/half-asian characters tend to be just about how "exotic" and "pretty" they look and ignoring all the other problems being biracial in a certain time period say 1900s.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 12:27 PM on November 4, 2014


"I'm still not sure why Park has a last name for a first name"

One Korean friend of mine, adopted by a white family, received her middle name Kim because it was the easiest Korean name to pronounce. So I feel it's pretty easy for well meaning parents to think "Asian -> Park -> Parker -> Park -> America" and call it a day if they don't know both cultures well.

"...can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc? The example in the post of "Maybe just change Dr. McAllister to Dr. Tanaka?" honestly doesn't sound bad to me. "

Yeah it's not a bad thing (in my white opinion, IMWO) Hell, writing is hard, I'm no good at it. Many successful genre novelist have a damned hard time making their main characters seem genuine and fully fleshed out even when the protagonist is a thinly veiled stand in for the author.

When reading this article I immediately thought of Chad Harbach's Art of Fielding. It includes a gay, black, sensitive jock as one of the protagonists, and several other non-white characters, but truth be told I can't remember any point where cultural background of these characters is featured prominently. While others have noted this, I don't know that this is genuinely a bad move. The book would have been much worse if Chad had gone into a semi-illiterate ebonic strewn inner monologue from a black character (See Wardine be Cry, by David Foster Wallace, although I'm not sure Wardine isn't white).

I think being able to create nuanced characters of a different culture and have their culture be an important part of the way they relate to the world is the writing equivalent of the triple Axel.* Sure, everyone wants to do the triple axel, but many people are successful without a strong triple Axle, and if the program doesn't require a triple Axel, it's better to go for the triple Lutz than to try and fall on your face.

*Bad analogy warning. Also I don't know how figure skating works. Or writing.
posted by midmarch snowman at 12:40 PM on November 4, 2014


My wife used to occasionally work with a doctor named Steve Park, who was somehow not Korean despite being named Steve Park. He said he got a lot of Korean patients who were shocked as hell when they saw him.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 12:48 PM on November 4, 2014 [6 favorites]


The suggestion to base the character on someone you know kind of sticks in my craw. I understand why the author mentioned it, but, well, I don't have a hugely diverse friend base.

I don't really know, and I don't mean this as criticizing anyone in particular, but it's possible that white authors not including POC in their works is a symptom rather than the disease. Maybe it's just not possible for white people to write characters of color well when our real lives are so segregated.

It may in fact really be necessary to expand our social circles before we can write characters who are POC but neither stereotypes nor white people with ethnic names.

The most promising alternative, if that's not possible, seems like it would be reading lots of books written by POC, listening carefully to how they portray themselves and the people they know.
posted by straight at 1:09 PM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


> To be fair there's nearly always an accordion playing when they show that establishing shot of Paris with the Eiffel Tower.

I wish I could remember the name of the soft-core porno/action movie I saw way back when (i.e. the '90s) which featured a long stock-footage shot of the Eiffel Tower. Once the camera had finished slowly panning down the length of the entire tower the film helpfully included the subtitle "PARIS, FRANCE".
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:57 PM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


I also think we're in a better place than ever before to get clued in to the perspectives and mannerisms of a wide variety of people different from us. Like, this is one thing Twitter is good for. Even if it's 140 characters at a time, it's still exposure. There are ways to diversify the perspectives you hear from, and I think your writing will improve from it. Now - this shouldn't be your only reason - like, actually follow people because you want to follow them, NOT simply as a writing or race project. I'm just saying the more you're used to hearing the voices of a wide variety of people, the more natural it comes.
posted by naju at 1:58 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


(You have to want to move outside of your cultural comfort zone, though - yes, even on the internet you have comfort zones you need to be aware of, and we all need to fearlessly push against them.)
posted by naju at 2:02 PM on November 4, 2014


What part of an olive has a color anything like Sophia Loren's skin?

I probably would throw away an olive that was the color of someone "olive-skinned."

People from the Mediterranean are all either pale green or purplish-black.


Have none of you ever seen the flesh of a kalamata olive? I weep for your poor deprived tastebuds.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:21 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


Scifi stories set in the far (more than a few generations) future should have very few, if any, white characters in them because -- to paraphrase Bullworth -- everybody will just keep fucking everybody else until we're all the same color. And when that happens, that color will be some shade of brown.

While almost all of the main characters of The Fifth Element were very very white, I appreciated that so many of the minor characters and extras in that movie were visibly multiracial. IMO that added a lot of verisimilitude to the futuristic setting.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:30 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I wish I could remember the name of the soft-core porno/action movie I saw way back when (i.e. the '90s) which featured a long stock-footage shot of the Eiffel Tower. Once the camera had finished slowly panning down the length of the entire tower the film helpfully included the subtitle "PARIS, FRANCE".

No need to find that film in particular: Mission Impossible has an act break where we open on a street in a downpour of rain. Prominent are a Royal Mail postbox, Liverpool Street underground station and a red double-decker bus. After letting us take in this scene for a few seconds, a title helpfully arrives: LONDON.

And that is still at best the second-funniest bit of the movie. 30 minutes earlier Tom Cruise is doing an internet search and the word "JOB" brings up no results. 1996 was a long time ago, but not that long ago. Both employment and porn were online by then, as I recall.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:32 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


There's a great bit in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where in various scenes the cast mention that they're on their way to Venice. Venice this. Venice that. Then we cut to a shot of a city with canals and the word "Venice" fades up.
posted by brundlefly at 3:00 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


A couple of relevant quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin:
"I have received letters that broke my heart, from adolescents of color in this country and in England, telling me that when they realized that Ged and the other Archipelagans in the Earthsea books are not white people, they felt included in the world of literary and movie fantasy for the first time."
This is similar to Octavia Butler's reasoning for writing almost exclusively black women protagonists. From her wiki entry:
Charlie Rose interviewed Octavia Butler in 2000 soon after the award of MacArthur Fellowship. The highlights are probing questions that arise out of Butler's personal life narrative and her interest in becoming not only a writer, but a writer of science fiction. Rose asked, "What then is central to what you want to say about race?" Butler's response was, "Do I want to say something central about race? Aside from, 'Hey we're here!'?"
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:01 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


can someone explain more clearly to me how it's wrong to basically change one of your white characters to a poc?

It depends a great deal on the quality of the writing and characterization, or the importance of the character. If everyone's basically an ill-defined cypher, or we're talking about an inconsequential character with a single line, race swapping is fine. For example, characters in TV pilots are often merely vague sketches waiting to be inhabited, so color-blind casting would usually work fine. (In theory, anyway; in reality it's often the case that unless the character's ethnicity is specified, a white person is cast.)

But for characters with rich and well-developed personalities and backstories, it shouldn't be the case that absolutely nothing indicates ethnicity to the extent that characters can be race swapped with absolutely no changes. If a writer can easily race swap a major character, I'd say that's a failing of poor character development. Ethnicity, skin color, race, orientation, gender -- something's communicated for all of those traits (among others), and if a character has any interaction with other entities that can pick up on those sorts of things, they will affect how she relates to the world and how the world relates to her.
posted by lesli212 at 3:05 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]


If I ever write fiction, I think I'll come up with the basic plot and the roles/archetypes for the characters first, then randomly assign genders, races, LGBTQ status, etc., and then let my background research into people with those characteristics inform the details of how various interactions and plot points play out.

That way there's no stereotyping in what roles (e.g., the leader, the antagonist, the supportive spouse, the parent, the comic relief, etc.) a certain type of person can be in but they also still aren't all just interchangeable people whose names and skin colors could be swapped without making a difference.

Do y'all think that would work?
posted by Jacqueline at 3:16 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm so glad that other people had problems with "run it by a few of your PoC friends". I'm an anxious introvert. I only have a few friends. Having a few PoC friends would probably double the number of friends I had. Yes, there may be troubling underlying social or personal issues as to why all my friends are white, but that is how it is. It implies that if I wanted to write well I'd have to entirely conquer my social anxiety first.

Also, when I read "base your character, closely or loosely, on a real person. Consult with them as you write it." I immediately had the thought - "what if you're writing a supervillain? Serial murderer? Or just nasty antagonist?"

I am nitpicking though - this was a really great piece, and to be reccomended.
posted by Vortisaur at 3:34 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


Remember, too, that characters can be mixed — identity is increasingly about entwining multiple ethnic and racial backgrounds.

Yes! I'm so glad this was included. I don't know why there are so few mixed characters (biracial or frankly multicultural in virtually any way), and why out of all the storylines that are about family or even identity, that's such a rare one. It's less rare in novels but TV and movies still seem pretty loathe to even touch on it. Even when the character/character's family is cast to be multi-racial (which ime is rare enough), it's usually just something that's never mentioned at all. Which is fine in a lot of contexts, but imo becomes tiresome when the show is otherwise going on and on about family relationships and the like and focusing a lot of development on them, because it obviously matters in terms of family dynamics if your relatives are at home in different cultures/races/identities/etc than you are or than each other.

Aside from a teeny tiny whisper of a storyline in The Fosters, the only show I can think of off the top of my head (my personal obsession is with television) that has gone into this with any depth lately is (oddly!) the supernatural action/soap The Originals, which of course uses a supernatural metaphor for being mixed but otherwise at least takes it seriously (also, the characters body-jump, so the lead family is literally not cast all to be one race, at least most of the time. Actually, as an aside, Sonja Sohn (Kima from the Wire) is playing the mother right now and absolutely killing it). It's a spinoff and they had all kinds of WILDLY offensive things going on with this same storyline back on the mothership (they've since mitigated this pretty well imo), but I appreciate that the show is apparently committed to not dropping the issue and committed to putting it pretty much front-and-center. Of course there are older shows/movies/miniseries that explore it, too, but there are only so many times you can sit around watching low-budget and/or bizarre period pieces, like Queen or Imitation of Life or something, lol.

If there's anything the outcry over the first Hunger Games movie taught us, it's that even when characters are specifically described as having dark skin, many readers will still assume they're white.

Yeah, it's really bizarre and frustrating. The first novel I wrote after college that I thought was actually any good and that I was sending out queries for and stuff had most of the main characters as POC in my mind's eye, and I described the characters in accordance with that, imo pretty clearly, and yet NOBODY who read that draft realized that was the case, it soon became obvious that people kept assuming that all the characters were white. What's weird, I guess, is that, save for one person, everyone who read my draft isn't white either. After a while, I actually asked a couple people who read it why they were assuming the characters were white, because I couldn't figure out why it was even confusing or how to fix it, but once I asked, it was like scales fell from their eyes and they were like, "Oooooh OK, that makes so much sense!" I actually ended up not changing anything to do with that after all because I felt like there wasn't a way to make it clear that they weren't white without plastering them with stereotypes or even literally just saying THIS CHARACTER IS BLACK or something else just ridiculously blunt, which I thought would be worse than just leaving it "unclear." Some of the fault was probably in my writing, but I really did feel like that was clearly/straightforwardly described and was surprised that everyone was defaulting to the characters being white unless *explicitly* told different. (Of course that novel is forgotten on an old hard drive now so it doesn't matter other than the learning experience it was for me).

Names can be a way of sort of signposting race or ethnicity, but if the characters have names that could even *vaguely* plausibly also be given to/used by a white person, ime the character is going to still be read as white. If your story is set in the West and race isn't somehow intrinsic to the premise (especially if you're writing a thriller or fantasy that's heavy on action and light on backstory, or any story that has characters from more than just a couple different cultures or races in it), I think it's actually really tough to convey that the characters aren't white unless you get incredibly heavy-handed about it or maybe if you're extremely skilled, because you're having to push back against apparently a really deeply entrenched assumption that white = default.

1. Islamabad is a beautiful, well-planned city — not a grimy netherworld.

They also do this in the show "Arrow," where the lead is now in Hong Kong part of the time. According to the show, that city is built only out of flimsy bamboo shacks. HONG KONG ffs.

The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with the idea that a PoC should be written a certain way because of their ethnicity. How is this really different from cruder forms of stereotyping?

A lot of your experiences and issues that have (lifelong) salience for you are dictated by where you're slotted into the social fabric. It's like it says in the article, choosing to make all your characters [societal "default" characteristic/white] is a specific choice, too. In that case, you're choosing to write a specifically [societal "default" characteristic/white] story. There's no way to not make a choice.

I think that slapping some kind of "ethnic" name or "ethnic" backstory or whatever onto a character that's otherwise whitewashed is pretty pointless. I mean come on, it's not like race is all anybody thinks about but it's obviously going to have an impact on how you're treated/how others perceive you and therefore how you perceive the world. If the character is basically just a plot device and her POV isn't part of the story (like in the doctor example above), then the name is pretty much all that matters, but if the character has a POV part of writing is to make the POV actually make sense in terms of the character's place in her society in general and make the character three-dimensional.

My paternal Grandmother and myself have, and have been identified as having "Olive skin". I tend to hear that description used when discussing people around Italy.

I think that, in writing, it usually means ethnically/racially "ambiguous" or possibly exotic-but-in-a-hot-way. In fiction, I've mostly heard it in the context of characters who are thinking of passing or who are passing or for characters who are basically sex objects. The actual race/ethnicity of the character being described as "olive skinned" seems like it can be basically anything, though. Just off the top of my head, I can think of times I've read about characters who are black or Jewish or Indian or Italian or Persian described that way. The only common denominator seems to be that it's a way of describing characters who are *just* a smidge "exotic," usually presented in a *slightly* "dangerous" and often sexy way.

Irl I think it's got a more neutral/general meaning, though. I hear people use it about themselves irl all the time as just a neutral descriptor, mostly to talk about really mundane things like what color clothes or makeup look good on them.
posted by rue72 at 4:37 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


assumes that if a book is set in the future, it will be populated entirely by white people,
Or as I like to call it, the Firefly principle!

rue72, I'm very interested to see how blackish will pursue the storyline of the wife, Rainbow, being biracial--so far it's been touched upon a bit, in terms of how her husband sees her privilege or authenticity, in a way that I thought had potential to open up some interesting tensions.
posted by TwoStride at 4:44 PM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]


I don't know why there are so few mixed characters (biracial or frankly multicultural in virtually any way), and why out of all the storylines that are about family or even identity, that's such a rare one.

I haven't had cable in a while so I can't attest to any knowledge of the show beyond just having seen previews a couple of years ago, but Sullivan & Son is about an Irish & Korean family and was co-created by the lead actor (whose background is exactly that). Amazingly, Wikipedia tells me it's already three seasons in! Granted, it's a TBS sitcom so I don't know if it's all that deep, but there ya go.
posted by psoas at 5:09 PM on November 4, 2014


Following some discussion on 'strong female protagonists' I've started counting how many female main characters we have for british comedy panel shows or movies like Galaxy Guardians.

If we actually have two women in the primary cast, then they can develop interesting characterizations beyond 'fun-killing shrew' or 'omnicompetent fighter chick with no real characterization'.

Similarly, with two+ PoC (or queer folk, old folk, etc.), we can get real characterization beyond 'token asian woman with chopsticks in her hair' or 'token black human officer crewing the spaceship'.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:52 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


stereotypes of what the author imagines Medieval Europe to have been like... violence, rape, war, misery

Those are stereotypes of what Medieval Europe was like? What's the real story?
posted by juiceCake at 7:48 PM on November 4, 2014


If someone happens to have a different skin color but is effectively culturally white, that might not be so difficult to write. But you can have all the best intentions in the world and it won't mean that you know how to write a character who grew up in another culture. I have never, not once, not even one goddamn time in my entire life, seen my own culture represented accurately in English-language fiction, and it is one of the more visible cultures globally speaking, so I can only assume it is worse for everyone else.

Writing a character from a different culture, even one you think you are familiar with, seems like a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. What makes you think you're good enough? Writers out there, your writing-other-ethnicities privileges are revoked as far as I'm concerned. You, personally, may have what it takes, but the continual failures of those who have gone before you should produce an abundance of caution. You've got POC friends to consult with? You've read books, learned languages? Other people have done that too, and still failed to understand. What makes you special?

You want to see a particular ethnic group represented in fiction? Support writers/artists/whatever who actually come from that background. Anybody else is automatically suspect in my mind. I know that sounds hyperbo... uh, extreme, but as time passes I'm less and less inclined to be patient with the unbelievable level of ignorance about other societies displayed by well-meaning (mostly white) writers. It's not your story to tell, and I'm not convinced that you know how to tell it. Give the pen to your POC friend and have them write the whole damn thing if it's so important to you.
posted by hyperbolic at 8:31 PM on November 4, 2014


I assume all characters in novels are male, half-Chilean/half-Ashkenazi Jews, who spent their childhood in the US after their parents fled the brutal dictatorship in their home country, and who went on to study architecture and work as web developers, unless specifically told otherwise.
Doesn't everybody?
posted by signal at 5:54 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


Some years back, I stumbled across a blog post ranting about orientalism in China Mieville's The City and the City.

I don't have the link right now, but basically the argument was that because Mieville had mixed up a bunch of different central european languages to get the roots for the different languages spoken in Beszel and Ul Quoma, he was guilty of orientalizing the setting.

I wasn't able to get the blogger to offer a clear solution that would have worked. The problem seemed to be that Mieville was mixing different languages.
posted by lodurr at 6:19 AM on November 5, 2014


Anybody else is automatically suspect in my mind. I know that sounds hyperbo... uh, extreme, but as time passes I'm less and less inclined to be patient with the unbelievable level of ignorance about other societies displayed by well-meaning (mostly white) writers. It's not your story to tell, and I'm not convinced that you know how to tell it. Give the pen to your POC friend and have them write the whole damn thing if it's so important to you.

Yes, it does seem extreme, and unhelpful. Basically the consequence of this kind of position is White Planet Syndrome: Every significant character in every book looks like the members of the author's social circle, which serves in turn to reinforce the marked categories.

As for 'whose story it is to tell' -- well, yes, actually it kind of is the author's story. It's theirs to tell -- and it's their responsibility to tell it well. What you're basically saying is that if they try to do that, they're "suspect."
posted by lodurr at 6:22 AM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]


JuiceCake: Those are stereotypes of what Medieval Europe was like? What's the real story?

More "boredom."
posted by lodurr at 6:24 AM on November 5, 2014


Those are stereotypes of what Medieval Europe was like?

Yes, they feature sturdy nordic peasants setting down to their meals of meat and potatoes.

What's the real story?

Fewer potatoes, more people of colour.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:12 AM on November 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Fewer potatoes, more people of colour.

and the latter in so many ways! e.g., 'sturdy nordic peasants' would have been the equivalent of a colour, if you were, say, from the region around napoli.
posted by lodurr at 4:53 AM on November 7, 2014


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