http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DycCCGk1fJ4

I’d watch the video, because this is what brought up the question for me but whatever.

Basically, color-blindness in writing, so far as I have heard it, is when you make a character and then add on the race or what have you. You have the character in mind, their personality, the things they like, their flaws and whatever and then the race is just a sort of aside.

The girl in the video brings up the point that when you write like this, you leave out important aspects of the character. If you write just an ordinary character but decide they should be a minority, you leave out the social and economic factors when dealing with the character’s race/ethnicity.

However, a lot of the books that I’ve read that have ignored “color-blindness” end up making a sort of token character and border on the offensive, instead of making just an ordinary character they go for the stereotypes of a certain ethnicity/group of people.

I want to know what you guys think on the faults and merits of using either methods of writing a character that is a minority.

If you’re writing historical fiction, than research the time and write accordingly. If you are writing fantasy, it only matters if you’re culture cares.

I think the video raises some very valid points. You can’t be truly colorblind in writing set in the modern day because things like race and ethnicity by definition mean your character has a particular background and a particular real-world history. And this goes for European characters as much as it does for African, Australian, Asian, etc. characters.

Interestingly, I’ve been thinking about race a bit because I realized relatively recently that I’ve always pictured the main character from my, well, never-going-to-actually-be-finished magnum opus as being non-white. This isn’t out of any particular agenda or whatever, it’s simply that it makes the most sense. She’s not human, after all. She’s from a… sub-species of humanity, living secretly among humans. This group is much, much smaller than ordinary humans, so it only seems reasonable to me that there would be substantially less variation in appearance, resulting in the majority of them having “average” characteristics for a human (which, contrary to what we might think based on living in countries where Europeans are a majority, I took to mean darkish skin and darkish hair). But if she isn’t “white”, how would that affect her, even if she isn’t actually another ethnicity (as she’s not actually human)?

It’s an interesting question, and a different spin on the whole issue than most things I read/see about it. If she isn’t actually any ethnicity, and therefore doesn’t look precisely like any in particular (and she would appear distinctively non-European, African, or Asian), how would that change people’s perceptions of her? What ethnicity would they assume she was? And how would that affect their reactions to her? I’m not sure of the answers to all of those questions, but I’ve at least thought about them a lot.

I just had to read a book for a review I was writing, and one of the things that made me headdesk pretty hard was how the author seemed to think, “Oooh! I need to make this ‘modern’ and ‘inclusive’! Better toss in some token people of color!” She did not play to stereotypes of the cultures, she just did not give the characters much depth beyond the color of their skin (although in all fairness, none of the characters had much depth, it’s just that the token ones were disgracefully obvious). What was the point? I felt like we were collecting trading cards and had to have one of each group to complete the set.

I think that when writing a person who is a minority, it is important to remember your character is a person first and their ethnicity second (that actually goes for other strong personal identifiers such as religion or gender, too). If the characters have depth, they will not feel like token attempts at inclusiveness. Unfortunately, I have read too many authors who need to, rather as Emil 1.4021 mentioned, get on a soapbox. Their characters are not African-American or Chicano/Latino or Chinese because that is how the character is, but because the author is trying to hit the reader with a mallet about a message and, when the writer himself is not even entirely clear about the message but is just following the trend of inclusion, the ham-handed attempt at equality is actually rather demeaning to both the character and the reader.

It’d also be a good idea, at least for a setting in the US or someplace with a similar ‘salad’ history or whatever it’s supposed to be called, to take into account the history of a character. An black Californian who ended up in the States by way of immigrant parents from France,say, in the seventies, (and go further and say they’d been bouncing around Europe and had never been slaves, or at least not most of them), and he wasn’t born until late eighties and lives in an urban center (but not in the areas like Orange County or Valencia) will likely have a very different worldview, and a different concept of his race, than someone born in the seventies or eighties in the deep South.

My family is white, but my mom grew up in the sixties in LA county. When she went to a balanced elementary/middle school, race wasn’t considered a big deal—there were lots of Hispanic and black students and white students didn’t have much of a majority, and the student hierarchy was based on skill and talent. They also used to have a ‘patsy day” I think it was called, where twice a year anyone who had an argument with anyone else would all meet at the park and beat each other up. Apparently, after she left, a friend called said the media had called it a race riot, but really it had just be a free-for-all (this is all 3rd hand of course). It wasn’t until she moved to a predominantly white and wealthier community where student hierarchy was based on your family and history and parent’s standing in the world that something resembling institutionalized racism was in place, and it took her by surprise.

Anyway, the whole point is people don’t always have the obvious history based on their race, and their own view of the world is going to be colored (oops) by how other people interpret their color (now it’s intentional). Having lived in California all my life and not really having been alive all that long, I had to be told, explicitly, that in the deep South, slavery is only a few generations away. And, yeah, duh, but while I knew the dates, they didn’t really hang in a framework for me. So that old lady down the street could tell her great-grandma’s stories about slavery, maybe even from great-grandma’s knee. And so the girl who grows up down the street from old Mrs. Posey* will have a different idea of, and place a different worth on, her race, than Michael Girardo** of San Fernando, CA.

Did quick google search for 1) former slave surnames and 2) popular names in ’85 and French surnames, so no claims as to accuracy.

Also, this is the reason I don’t feel comfortable writing from the perspective of a person of color, though I have several secondary characters, even though my only story where this comes in takes place in the midwest. Does that make it worse? (It was just NaNo, if that helps)