How not to be condescending when depicting other groups of people?

Yes it is possible - if you are one of them.

Of course it's possible. In general.

But it may not be possible for every author to manage it. Depends on your knowledge, and your ability to use available information to inform your imagination. You need to get inside your characters' heads; if you can't do that, I don't think it'll be a realistic portrayal.

Morwen Edhelwen said:

This question suddenly came to me when reading Google Books. Is it possible to write about, say a homeless or "working class" person without being patronising

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Yes, of course it is. Primarily by not doing this:

Morwen Edhelwen said:

... suggesting that with hard work and being patient, a person can mostly rise to the top, and that luck has no role in it) or portraying people of "lower socioeconomic status" accurately and without stereotypes or condescension....

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It sounds to me as if you're so wrapped up in labels that you're forgetting that you're writing about people, whether real or imagined. If you stop thinking of Joe as 'Joe The Homeless Guy' and just as 'Joe', or of Judy as 'Judy The Poor Girl' and just as 'Judy', you'll avoid most of the problem.

But if you can't get past the labels, your writing won't, either.

And hopefully you will also work out why your original question was quite offensive...

You're right. It was the quote marks that got my back up. But you can see that so obviously it was just bad phrasing.

No problem.

I agree with Terie, social status isn't the be-all-and-end-all of personal identity.

I grew up in working-class, on a council estate, my first job was in a pub where I was paid £3.20 ph. I now have a degree and work for the NHS. I'm proud of my background - though I don't know what class I am anymore.

No class maybe?.

I think there is a better way of saying 'homeless person' though. Sounds a bit generic to me.

Morwen Edhelwen said:

Thanks. This is an issue for me, because of the fact that (a) the protagonist is Alaska Native (I'm Chinese ethnically) b) I don't want to come off as presumptous by assuming I know all about what life is like for 13 year old girls, or that their personalities are all like mine
(I was 13 five years ago) or that they would all have my same attitude to life

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You're still thinking in labels.

It's really good that you want not to be presumptuous, but the result is that you're focusing on the wrong things.

Here's what you do: write your book about your 13-year-old character. Just write it without worrying about all these external things. Once it's done, put on your cultural sensitivity hat, and make a pass through the manuscript. Then try to find a beta reader who's of the same ethnicity as your character and ask for their honest assessment of your portrayal of the character.

But while you're writing the first draft, you really need to get past these labels. They're doing you a huge disservice, because they make you sound the very opposite of what you're trying to sound.

Terie said:

Yes, of course it is. Primarily by not doing this:



It sounds to me as if you're so wrapped up in labels that you're forgetting that you're writing about people, whether real or imagined. If you stop thinking of Joe as 'Joe The Homeless Guy' and just as 'Joe', or of Judy as 'Judy The Poor Girl' and just as 'Judy', you'll avoid most of the problem.

But if you can't get past the labels, your writing won't, either.

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Exactly. Write about people, not labels.

Yeah, what everyone is saying. You have to get out of the mindset you're in right now. My latest story is about how the relationship between Mike and Kyle formed. And that's the stand point I wrote from. If I had written from the stand point of two gay guys getting together,I would be very worried about the same things you are. But I'm not.

Mike and Kyle aren't representing gay men. They are telling their story. Your charcters aren't representing poor people, they are telling their story. Develope your characters as people and you don't have to worry about stereotyping and being condesending.

The things you need to worry about are getting the the mechanics of the father's profession down, and what the pay scale is for such a job. Make sure you know about the setting you're writing it in and have a good grasp of what things cost, against what the father makes. If you don't all ready know those things, that is.

mirandashell said:

You're right. It was the quote marks that got my back up. But you can see that so obviously it was just bad phrasing.

No problem.

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Or maybe you can't....

Having read the rest of the thread, I have to agree with everyone else.

Stop thinking in labels. Stop worrying about being PC or not PC and think about your character. Get to know her. Write her as she is and not as a representation of a whole people. She's a person in her own right, not a set of values.


Otherwise she will be a flat MC, no realness to her and it won't matter how hard you try to be 'nice', it won't work.

Morwen Edhelwen said:

I'll try and get rid of the "Alexa The Alaskan Fisherman's Daughter" thing and focus more on Alexa (the actual protagonist).

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Just don't entitle your book, "The Alaskan Fisherman's Daughter." Please, I'm begging you.

Phaeal said:

Just don't entitle your book, "The Alaskan Fisherman's Daughter." Please, I'm begging you.

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Fer real. What is it with that trend?

I would underline the advice about getting some input from people (not just one) who are in the group you're writing about. Don't find just one Aleut girl who's supposed to speak for all Alaskan Native people. If you are really serious about not wanting to misrepresent or condescend to the people you are writing about, you'll take the effort to get to know some of them.

Otherwise you are treating them like elves or Martians; fictional people.

Morwen Edhelwen said:

Do you mean it isn't if you're not? Does that mean that if you aren't from India, for example, you can't write from the perspective of an Indian?

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The Red Badge of Courage

Steven Crane 1894

"although Crane was born after the war, and had not at the time experienced battle firsthand, the novel is known for its realism."

I'm going to say the same thing as everyone else, but put in a different way .

The mistake you're making is fixating on the differences between you and the other person. You're taking whatever is most different between you, and making that a disproportionate part of who they are. That is going to be patronizing whether you present it in a positive or negative light.

Pay more attention to the similarities. Try to imagine yourself in the character's situation and figure out how you would respond to it. Think of different people you know with different personalities and/or value systems, and imagine them in the situation and how they'd respond to it.

People are people. There's a heck of a lot more similarities between any two human beings than there are differences. People have different values, different personalities, different reactions to things, different backgrounds -- and yet, humans manage to be more similar than different.

Our brains are wired to look for differences. Survival-wise, it's more important to be able to see what's different in an environment or situation than what's the same ( is that a poisonous mushroom or one that's safe to eat? Or, a difference that indicates a large predator may be near) .

Sometimes we need to be consciously aware of this bias, and compensate by focusing specifically on the similarities.

Personally, label issues aside, I don't know how a Horatio Alger story will play these days.

Take the homeless guy. Please.

Anyway, what you don't do is tell the reader that someone who is homeless can stop being homeless through hard work and determination. Even if it's true, and it almost always is, you don't tell the reader this. That's preaching, and authorial intrusion. You simply write a story showing a homeless person working his way out of his situation.

There are innumerable cases of this happening, and you use those to make yours ring true.

With the thirteen year old girl, just write it. You've known thirteen year old girls, haven't you. Research will show you the special circumstances of an Aleut girl.

Same deal here. Patronizing is something you say. Patronizing is your opinion. This has no place in a story. This is her story, not yours, so you just show her going through life, facing struggles, and overcoming them.

My real problem with your post is that, well, just what is it about such a girl from such a background that you could patronize, even if you wanted to? There's nothing wrong with being poor, and class is a character trait, not a seven digit bank account.

Look, it's true that not every thirteen year old has the same personality as yours, or the same attitudes as yours, but this is a fictional girl, and you can give her whatever personality you want her to have, whatever attitudes you want her to have, and whatever they are, they'll be correct, as long as some girl, somewhere, has them.

Though I wouldn't for a second assume that the daughter of a commercial fisherman is poor. Most of the commercial fishermen I've known make a hell of a lot more money than I do.

Just a quick addendum.

There is nothing so patronizing as assuming that the answer you think you see to someone else's problem would work for them. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe they already tried that and it didn't work. Maybe there were things getting in the way of trying that you didn't know about.

Or, maybe it would work. But as a general rule of thumb: the more obvious the solution looks to you, the more likely there is to be something you're missing. (Because the more obvious an actual, working solution is, the more likely someone will have been to already take it.) And, the more obvious a solution seems to be to you, the dumber/more stubborn you are assuming the other person to be by not already having done it.

Assuming that you have the answer to a situation you've never been in is patronizing even if you are correct. In order to not be patronizing, you need to consider the possibility that you might be wrong, that the other person knows something you don't.

People do miss obvious solutions to problems. People do reject solutions that are right in front of them. But your starting assumption should be that the reason they act in a way that seems counter-productive to you is that there are factors you don't know about. You should start from a position of being willing to learn. And the more you learn, the more likely you are to have a viable answer.

LindaJeanne said:

Just a quick addendum.

There is nothing so patronizing as assuming that the answer you think you see to someone else's problem would work for them. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe they already tried that and it didn't work. Maybe there were things getting in the way of trying that you didn't know about.

Or, maybe it would work. But as a general rule of thumb: the more obvious the solution looks to you, the more likely there is to be something you're missing. (Because the more obvious an actual, working solution is, the more likely someone will have been to already take it.) And, the more obvious a solution seems to be to you, the dumber/more stubborn you are assuming the other person to be by not already having done it.

Assuming that you have the answer to a situation you've never been in is patronizing even if you are correct. In order to not be patronizing, you need to consider the possibility that you might be wrong, that the other person knows something you don't.

People do miss obvious solutions to problems. People do reject solutions that are right in front of them. But your starting assumption should be that the reason they act in a way that seems counter-productive to you is that there are factors you don't know about. You should start from a position of being willing to learn. And the more you learn, the more likely you are to have a viable answer.

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Right. Having a character succeed because she is a hard worker, because she doesn't rely on luck, and because she has a good moral heading can be a compelling story.

Using a stock poor girl character (who you do not personally identify with) in a fictional narrative to take the role of "anyone" to show that "anyone" can succeed through hard work is not only patronizing "poors" by telling them what their experiences are and should be, but it's patronizing your reader by moralizing at them.

Most narratives today have themes, messages, and a moral framework, but it's usually more fashionable to have character and story come first.

Jamesaritchie said:

Though I wouldn't for a second assume that the daughter of a commercial fisherman is poor. Most of the commercial fishermen I've known make a hell of a lot more money than I do.

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Yeah, I'm genuinely curious about this one, too. Have you done a lot of research on this aspect? If so, I'll take your word for it. But my father-in-law was a commercial fisherman, and it provided a nice middle-to-upper-middle-class lifestyle for his family, even though the work itself was very tough.