The importance of color in a story?

ErezMA said:

I don't think that's sexism. I think sexism is the belief that certain sexes have to be skilled in certain actions or are expected to. "You can play basketball? But you're a girl! Why aren't you in the kitchen" is different to me than, "You're really a girl? Your World of Warcraft handle is "Bloodslayer69" made me think you were a guy."

Maybe I'm being nit-picky, but you just seemed conditioned to today's day and age. As we all are. After all, if I've seen dogs being given food every time a bell sounded, I'm going to think that there will be some Iams next time the bell rings.

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Yes, we are conditioned.

Conditioned to a sexist culture and society.

And your Warcraft example would be somewhat sexist, I would think? (Why couldn't it be a girl? Because you have expectations of guys having such an aggressive, "manly" user name. You wouldn't expect a girl to have that user name.)

There are such things as benevolent sexism, unintended sexism, and internalized sexism (and racism, etc)...

This sort of topic really reminds me of how, even when stories are set in the so-called real world, writers are always world building. They're creating a version of "reality" as they've experienced it in their lives, or even as they think it "ought" to be. This is not always done consciously.

When I was a kid, most fantasy and SF worlds were set in quasi-European cultures where all the "regular" characters were white (and there was never a gay or lesbian person to be found). Sometimes there were darker-skinned "exotics," who fit certain tropes that ring stereotype alarms now. Most of the SF I read as a kid seemed to be operating on the premise that most people of color went extinct in the future or something, since the space ship crews, space stations, and human colonies ended up being pretty western in terms of culture and having an ethnic makeup similar to a late-20th-century gated community.

I'm ashamed to say I didn't notice that a lot of the time, even though I'd had playmates who were black before my family moved to a very white part of Southern CA.

And the "real world" most kid's books were set in were white suburbia or in historical settings that focused on white, straight, able-bodied people. There were exceptions, of course, and some were popular. But if the story was just going to be about "generic" issues, like first love, fitting into a new school, parents getting divorced, or even just having an adventure of some kind, the major characters were nearly always white.

This is the world building that's emblazoned in many of our minds as the normal default, even as adults who should know better.

But there's another reason, imo, to have more diversity in books. This is the argument that gets a lot of backs up. I think all kids should get the chance to learn that people like them can be interesting and important enough to be the heroes of stories. And all kids who just so happen to be the race and culture that's currently the perceived default in our society maybe should get the opportunity to relate to and identify with other human experiences too.

Rachelgrant6 said:

Personally I don't think you should force a diversity of race if it is not necessary. Other people earlier made the case that in TV shows people are of the same race because that's just the way it is and it is realistic. Sometimes it's necessary to have that diversity if it is a side effect of your setting. Without this diversity, the setting would lose meaning and character. So you as a writer need to make the decision whether or not race adds or detracts from the setting. Don't place an ethnic person in the story if it doesn't fit. Then you are not doing yourself or that culture justice.

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So having POC is is "forcing diversity"?

There should always be a reason for why a POC exist? Newsflash: POC exist...because they just do, lol.

Can't a POC just happen to be POC?

I agree that it depends on the setting, but there are stories and settings where it doesn't really matter if a person is POC or female, etc.

The problem is...if it's not "necessary", then wouldn't some writers just automatically "default" to white, straight guys?

MacAllister said:

Yeah. Probably better to just completely avoid making a thing about having white people in your stories at all, really, to avoid pissing readers off.

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Exactly. Because no matter how careful you are, someone won't like the way you handled it. You don't want to be accused of "reverse racism" if someone thinks you portrayed a white character unrealistically.

And anyway, no one should force white characters into stories unless there's a really good reason for them to be there. White people are actually pretty rare if you look at the population of our world, even with so much land in the high northern latitudes, so what are the odds a fantasy world would have more white people? Writers just put white people in their stories to make a political statement.

About the realism thing:

When someone says its good to have diversity because diversity is realistic, I don't think they're saying stories must be realistic.

I think they're saying, like... it's weird that we have all these stories about straight white dudes when most people are not straight white dudes.

Like, this is not some massive coincidence. This is an ingrained cultural habit, and it's not going to change until we start holding ourselves accountable.

ErezMA said:

I have an action-based YA WIP that I should really be working on. (I'm on the editing portion.) I've recently been discussing with my fiancee about the plot, characters, etc. and I'm in a sudden realization then when I imagine the characters in my head, I haven't created any of the main characters, in my head, as a POC. Now I have a couple of supporting characters of color - some that I definitely see as major characters for the next novel should I have the chance at a sequel, but I tell myself that I need to hold on. I haven't even published the first book yet.

Now I haven't described any character's skin tone at all, so I'm sure the reader can create their own characters from what they do, but the way we discussed this, we imagined we were casting actors for a movie based on my novel. Eventually, I felt some concerns that it may be criticized for being "too white." Then there's a logistic realism issue. My story is based in Philadelphia suburbs. It's not Wyoming. It's quite a diverse area. My fiancee told me not to worry about it, and that I shouldn't focus on race in the construction of my characters.

Granted, while I'm technically a PoC, I haven't faced the issue of race in the same capacity of many others, so I could benefit from another point of view. I appreciate your responses. Thank you.

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I have a question. When you make a character, do you automatically "cast" them as white? So if you want them to be POC, you change them later?

Or do you leave race undecided, then decide on race when it comes up?

Anyway-- I don't think you should worry about whether or not people will criticize you. You're going to get criticized no matter what. That's just how it is.

I had an all-white cast once. I didn't even notice until after the fact. It felt weird forcing my characters to change, so I didn't. I left them alone. I did, however, stop making all my characters white by default in the future.

The important thing (imo) is to be mindful.

Yes, exactly. Even then, it's not necessarily a huge issue if you don't address the ingrained culture. I think it's the responsible thing to do, but the story should come first and not every story is or should be a great vehicle for doing that.

The difference comes in what you-as-author are aware of and how you show that in the text itself, as well as, crucially, the subtext. There's some self-analysis happens here, both of yourself and your narrative. Part of the writer toolbox.

We all indulge certain tropes that, together with others, can create boxes around PoC or female characters, or any other type of character. Most of these are, when you pick them apart, narrative wobbles. It's not the wobbles that are offensive on their own, it's the pattern and the way that pattern shows how you've constructed the world. Even then, a lot of it is subconscious and we all do it. It's just you have to look at your meta-narrative and think "how am I doing this? What patterns and tropes am I relying on more than others?" It's a very hard thing to do, but a very important thing to do. Nobody's ever going to be perfect at it, which is why I get titchy when critics pile on, because I think it just creates a chilling effect.

At the same time, we're responsible for what we write--it's a critic's job to dig into the text and find out what the text is saying. If you have a text full of straight, white dudes and all of them are very obviously straight and their dudeness is constantly put in the role of a heroic trait you've created, possibly subconsciously, a pattern that amplifies that ingrained sexism. It's not that you have the dude, it's how you use the dude.


ETA: I was mostly responding to Viridian's first post, but absolutely yes you're going to get criticized because that's what happens and the best (possibly only) policy is to basically shut up and take it/ignore it. Maybe you did create an unfortunate pattern, but every story has these. There has yet to be a perfect feminist story, or perfect racially-cast story. There won't be. It's OK for there to be cultural discussion around that. Your author persona has patterns, too. If everything you make is a sausage-fest (lookin' at you, Sandler), then that says something different than if you have one story that's a bit sausagey but a bunch of others that mostly aren't (to stay visual, look at Whedon: the guy generally writes women well, I'd say. Every so often, he blops. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, sometimes it's just 'wow, this isn't Whedon's best work.' Different pattern).

So true regarding the inevitability of criticism, Viridian and VeryBigBeard!

No one's perfect, and it's just human nature. It's ok to have an all-white cast or an all-male (main) cast. It's just something to be mindful of the habit, like Viridian said earlier.

Just be aware that POC can just exist, just like white people can just exist. Just like white characters don't always need a reason for existing, so do POC characters.

Viridian said:

About the realism thing:

When someone says its good to have diversity because diversity is realistic, I don't think they're saying stories must be realistic.

I think they're saying, like... it's weird that we have all these stories about straight white dudes when most people are not straight white dudes.

Like, this is not some massive coincidence. This is an ingrained cultural habit, and it's not going to change until we start holding ourselves accountable.

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This puts it very well. It's not that some stories are all or mostly white, male, straight etc. It's that so many are. It makes me wonder what the attraction is to these monochromatic worlds for storytelling.

Some say it's history, because Europe and North America used to be "homogeneous." This isn't necessarily true.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-humans-more-genetically-diverse-than-moderns/

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34809804?SThisFB

So yes, realism really doesn't justify the exclusion of variety in many real-world historical settings, let alone made-up worlds. The "diversity isn't realistic outside of the modern world" claim as been debunked so many times in diversity threads here and elsewhere that I'm baffled when the same arguments come up again, and again and again. Fortunately, there is a near-endless supply of popular science and scholarly articles like the ones linked above to do so, but the endless need for repetition does get tiresome. This really does reinforce the idea that we're always world building, even if we're writing in the so-called real world.

But then the people who don't want to write or read diversity shift the posts to "so you're telling me my stories HAVE to be realistic?" position.

A fellow writer said (on a different forum than AW, though it's come up here too, I think) that they hate this "PC-ness" and concern about diversity because they read and write speculative fiction to "escape" from the problems of the real world. They're being honest, at least, about their motivations for writing very white, straight settings. But I find it a bit sad that some people regard PoC and LGBTQ people (maybe even women) as a "problem" they want to escape from.

Tastes are what they are, and trying to force someone to like stories and settings that aren't their thing isn't going to work. But one reason I try to put more diversity into my settings than I was once "comfortable" with as my own default is because I hope the next generation of readers in my preferred genres will be comfortable with a higher baseline diversity default. We internalize the norms that we encounter, I think.

ErezMA said:

But to your question, how far should I have to specify their race? Now I have a character named Oscar I left as Caucasion, most likely assumed, but should I state it or would it be seen as redundant? I have a minor character as Eduardo Rivera. I wrote him as Hispanic, but should I specify that? Non-Hispanics aren't usually named Eduardo, to my knowledge.

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I personally like it when the skin tone/race of white characters is mentioned too. When race is only mentioned with regards to POC, it can reinforce the idea that white is the default.

I don't think it needs to be explicitly stated what race a character is if it's clear through other clues. In your example, I think most readers would assume Eduardo Rivera is Hispanic, so it wouldn't need to be outright stated in the text.

ErezMA said:

You do make a good point and maybe I'm worrying a bit much. Did Harry Potter get a lot of flack for not having a lot of minorities? (If this actually happened, please let me know. That'd be quite interesting news to hear.)

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Here you go.

ErezMA said:

So how do your propose you go about it? Let's say my main character had a best friend and his name was Mike. Let's say I envisioned him as a black person. How would you want me to mention it? Should I outright say that? Should I bring in some back-story about how my main character berated some bullies who were teasing him because of the color of his skin?

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It really depends on whose pov, the narrative style, and so on. But I try to find a way to introduce a PoC character's skin color or other racially distinguishing features when they're introduced. For that matter, I try to mention the skin color and racially descriptive features of white characters when they're introduced too.

ErezMA said:

So how do your propose you go about it? Let's say my main character had a best friend and his name was Mike. Let's say I envisioned him as a black person. How would you want me to mention it? Should I outright say that? Should I bring in some back-story about how my main character berated some bullies who were teasing him because of the color of his skin?

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Roxxsmom said:

It really depends on whose pov, the narrative style, and so on. But I try to find a way to introduce a PoC character's skin color or other racially distinguishing features when they're introduced. For that matter, I try to mention the skin color and racially descriptive features of white characters when they're introduced too.

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I agree with Roxxsmom. Describing skin colour isn't that different to describing any other aspect of someone's appearance, and it's fine to outright state a character's race. Backstory or descriptions of racist encounters aren't required unless you feel they're part of the story.

ErezMA said:

So how do your propose you go about it? Let's say my main character had a best friend and his name was Mike. Let's say I envisioned him as a black person. How would you want me to mention it? Should I outright say that? Should I bring in some back-story about how my main character berated some bullies who were teasing him because of the color of his skin?

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Stating a character's blackness through cues such as skin color, facial features, or hair texture is just fine and in fact encouraged, as long as you approach your word choices carefully (ie lay off the chocolate similes). Also consider social cues: maybe they can't meet up with the protagonist because they have a lengthy hair appointment to get their braids redone. Maybe they're reluctant to ride in a car with a pot-smoking white friend because they're afraid they'll get in a dangerous confrontation with the cops. Maybe they've swung by the drugstore to get a new tube of mascara and get visibly annoyed the makeup section rarely carries foundation in their skin tone.

Overt, violent anti-blackness is all too common but it's the covert forms that are more pervasive and just as poisonous as they accumulate over time.

Descriptions I remember from Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonsinger" included the following two (paraphrased):

Sebel was a brown man. (Might have been all the travelling he did, but he didn't strike me as white by default.)

Piemur had tight black curls. Definitely not associated with white kids.

Not blatantly obvious, in fact rather subtle. These descriptions were slipped in once, maybe twice via the MC's POV and added to the narrative. But I found they never focused on ethnicity per se.

If I recall correctly, the other Pern books also used this technique.

Btw: In the States I would be a POC, but here, whites are the "POC". It's quite amusing sometimes. Won't hijack the thread. If I remember, will post a few stories I have about this role reversal.

ErezMA said:

Do people actually write out, "Chocolate smiles?" I could totally understand if a character chatted up a POC and in the midst of later sexual intercourse called him her "chocolate Adonis" or something, but really? Chocolate smiles?

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Similes