"White people only want to read about themselves."

I haven't been published yet but I have heard exactly what you described. I also wrote about the tendency to have a Biracial character as the character of color in a story instead of a Black person. Thus the character is Black but not "too" Black,a very common trope in movies as well. That raised quite a few hackles and wasn't my intention. But I stand by it all the same. There are people in this world,although Blacks have been here just as long as Whites,who cannot process or understand a book about POC. We're viewed as the other,even though they listen to our music,idolize our athletes,and probably work with Blacks every day. But that's music and athletics. Literature demands that you get to know a character and relate to him/her in a human capacity. If the character is of another race,some people simply can't imagine such a thing and that is a racist mindset.


But there is also drama from within the Black community. I mentioned my teen-age cousins as an example in another post. They flat out said they don't want to read a story about a Biracial or light skinned girl. At all. I explained to them that a light skinned person is still Black and that a biracial girl is no less human than they are. They didn't want to hear it and I got my feelings singed but good. They feel that as this is the dominant view of Black beauty in our culture and the mainstream,they are tired of it. No matter how compelling the story,they won't read it. The fact that they feel they can't relate to a character who looks different from them is a colorist mindset. They even questioned me for writing about a dark skinned girl because I am brown skinned. They wondered if I could understand the issues my dark skinned sisters face. If they question me,a Black woman,they would give a writer of any other race HELL.

There is a myth that Blacks don't read. Well,we do read but it's only urban fiction and erotica which translates into they only want sex and violence. It's super hard to get a multicultural book in any genre published. The belief that white readers won't give a book by a POC author is very entrenched. The equally wrong belief is that Blacks won't read it. Look at the whitewashing of book covers and how easy it is for a white author to write about people of color,get published,receive accolades,etc. But books by POC dealing with the very same subject get nada.

Certain readers need a cypher,a stand in for themselves when they read about a character of color. If they read the story told from a minority POV,it's too raw and intense for them. They don't understand this alien culture without a guide. They don't like the way folks of their race behaved back in the day and require a good white person to identify with. You've mentioned "The Help" before and this is a prime example of that. The reason for the visceral hatred for that book is that it's been written already. Dozens of times by Black authors and stories told by Black domestic servants who actually lived in that time. But those stories were from an entirely Black POV and told the real. The rapes,harassment and other things that some just cannot handle. I remember one story where a former slave wrote that she didn't love or want her baby,the product of a rape by an employer and she abandoned her. The employer found the baby and forced her to keep her. She stated that for the rest of her life,she hated her daughter because she was a reminder of that rape and half white. The daughter told how she tried to earn her mother's love but she finally accepted her mother would never love her or see her as anything other than the product of a rape. Can you imagine that getting made into a movie? A book topping the Bestseller list?

KS wrote the Disneyfied version of a very raw time frame and it pisses people off that she gets all the attention.The movie makes Black folks blood pressure go to astronomical levels. Same thing happened with "The Secret Life Of Bees". We write our own stories and history and can't get anywhere. But a white author can and that is what pisses people off.

To answer your question,I wouldn't compromise at all. If I present a book with a multicultural cast and it's good enough for an agent to take on,once it reaches that level-excuse my language-I ain't changing shit. If that gets me labeled difficult,so be it. I don't know anything about self publishing but if I am presented with the scenario you describe,I will certainly pursue it.



"Waiting To Exhale" was a huge hit and proved that an audience existed for such books. The movie was a hit. We all had such high hopes. But here we are,years later and the only representation of Blacks in literature is as mammies,hoochie mamas, and thugs. It makes my soul holler,sometimes. But change has to come and POC authors have to help make that happen. I am pleased to see so many agents asking for multicultural fiction. The next hurdle is the publishing and editorial level. We have to be willing to go hard for our books as well. It's a process that we shouldn't have to do but that's reality.

That may be true for some readers, but there are a lot of people--more of them in fact--who are different.

Write true.

I was just reading about Guyana

There was an interesting book I read called NutureShock that discussed how some parents discourage their preschoolers from pointing out differences in people's skin tones, thinking the kids are being offensive. In fact, the kids are learning, "Hey, not everyone in the world looks like I do." (And they'll continue to have these mind-blowing revelations when they discover that neither does everyone like what they like, think like they think, or act like they act.) Basically, the gist of the chapter was to talk openly and honestly with your child about how the world has all kinds of people, not assume that your child will somehow make this major milestone simply because you bought action figures with various skin tones.

If a reader refuses to read a good book simply because the protagonist doesn't look/think/act exactly like them, I wonder if they ever made this milestone.

I think this is an area where YA is making inroads. I can think of more POC in the YA novels I've read in the past few years than in the adult fiction.

Literary fiction especially tends to be all one color, and like Aruna said, if it's not white it tends to focus on a certain community in an almost fetishistic way.

ETA: The 2011 National Book Award went to a literary novel about African-Americans, Jesmyn Ward's SALVAGE THE BONES. However, the family it's about is desperately poor. Why does literary fiction about POC tend to focus almost exclusively on poverty?

aruna said:

No, I'm not being provocative. That's what my agent at the time told me quite bluntly, and my editor of the time hinted at. The specific instructions were to make sure that in a multi-racial couple, at least one of the pair was white, or at the very least half-white or from a white background; preferably the male.

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From a commercial point of view, I think your agent is probably correct.

How many hit TV shows feature a cast of POC characters?

There are black shows specifically aimed at black audiences, but I don't think that's what you're talking about. There are always exceptions, but I think as a general rule your agent, unfortunately, is not far off the mark.

Would I do this? Well, yes, but that's because I write books meant primarily to entertain people. If I were writing something personally meaningful to me, then no, I don't think I would.

But then again, a meaningful book that never sees the light of day is meaningful only to the author. I think if an editor insisted you change all your characters from black to white, that would be a non starter. But how central is the exact race mix in one of your your MCs to the story?

It really is a tough call.

I agree about YA making a lot of progress in this area. But that's probably because it's one of the few genres/sectors in publishing that is doing very well.

Publishers are willing to take more chances. Also, teenagers and young adults are
obviously, as a group, more progressive than the older adult fiction crowd.

I read things like this and begin to wonder how much attention the people who have read my novel so far have paid to it. I didn't set out to write a book in which nearly everyone was a person of color, or bi-racial at the very least, but it's what came from the story's set-up. When you're dealing with a condition that blocks melanin, then it only makes sense that those with a naturally higher level of melanin in their skin would have the highest survival rate. So my book is populated with very few fair-skinned people at all. So far, no one in an agent or editorial capacity has mentioned it.

I'm white (I think the official shade is "pasty"), and I don't want anyone to think that I decided to write something like this because it made it more "trendy" or because there's some political statement buried in the text that doesn't exist. For the world I created, it's what made sense - and that's what should matter.

The MC, which I actually went back and redescribed because when I point-blank asked someone who had read the book how they pictured her, showed me a blue-eyed blonde white girl, isn't white. (She's Asian, and so fair-skinned, but still... not white.)

I don't understand the mindset that there has to be a "reason" for a main character to something other than male and white or female and white. I'd always seen this girl as Asian, so isn't that a good enough reason?

It beats me why people would want to read about folks from their own culture -- their peers. Hmmm....very odd. And yeah, this is racism.

Kitty27 said:

They even questioned me for writing about a dark skinned girl because I am brown skinned. They wondered if I could understand the issues my dark skinned sisters face. If they question me,a Black woman,they would give a writer of any other race HELL.

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I think this is actually a huge problem, because then people who aren't of a certain race feel unable to properly represent people who aren't exactly like them - which leads to continued white washing.

People don't want to be offensive, and I think a lot of people do want to read and write about other races, but they feel hemmed in because they don't want to offend the very people they're trying to include. I know, at the very least, that I feel cautious about it because I don't want to be offensive.

But I'm kind of soft hearted.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimage...t-are-black-covers-segregated-in-book-stores/ is an interesting blog post on it.

Lauren Haney's books come to mind, excellent historical mysteries set in Nubia. The caveat: the protagonist is Egyptian, and for some reason, lots of people don't think of ancient Egyptians as people of color. (they were)

I would love to read a non-"literary" story set in Guyana, or Jamaica, or Chad...and not starring missionaries or tourists! What you were told makes me sad.

MeretSeger said:

or some reason, lots of people don't think of ancient Egyptians as people of color. (they were)

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It depends on the social class. The ruling Egyptian (Ptolemaic) class was from a Greek bloodline, and they also valued paler shades of skin as a sign of divinity. That's one of the current speculations as to why Cleopatra was so popular with the masses; her mother was likely Nubian.

Mardigras said:

It beats me why people would want to read about folks from their own culture -- their peers. Hmmm....very odd. And yeah, this is racism.

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Mardigras, this is a place for discussion. Writing one liners such as this one takes away from the honest conversation we're having.

Personally, I'm not convinced on the whole "Oh, White people don't want to read about Black/Asian/Insert-Other-Ethnicity-Here people!" I think this is an excuse and a symptom of a play-it-safe attitude. It's also an insult to readers, relying on the assumption that white people are incapable of connecting with non-white characters and the mere presence of a dark-skinnned person on the page/screen will so confuse the narrow white mind that they'll be completely unable to follow the story.

Whilst it might be true of older generations, who aren't very good at dealing with The Other in general, I certainly don't think it's true of my generation. Growing up in the nineties in Whitesville, one of the most popular programs on TV was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It was a show about Black people, with an all-Black cast, so in theory it should have "only appealed to Black audiences". And yet it was vastly popular. To the White people I grew up with, it didn't matter that the characters were Black. It mattered that they were funny and interesting and entertaining and were relatable on a human level. It wasn't a "Black show", it was just a hilarious show that we loved.

The excuse holds even less water in a genre like SF or Fantasy, where readers will happily relate to aliens, elves, telepaths, wizards, orcs, dragons and werewolves. And you want to say they'll be totally put off by a non-White MC? Please. That's beyond ridiculous.

What I think this boils down to is an unwillingness to take risks and a desire to stick with the nice, safe, well-worn status quo. It based on the crippling fear that no one will buy the book because it has *le gasp!* a Black person on the cover! Well, readers see Black people every day, and brown people and Asian people and all sorts of other people, and somehow manage not to spaz out about it (except for a very few).

I think as a society we've come a long way in accepting and celebrating racial (and other) diversity. Maybe it's different here in the UK to what it is in America, I don't know. But we've certainly come a loooooong way from even fifty or sixty years ago in terms of racial acceptance and wiping out discrimination. That said, I think there's a long way still to go. Part of the continuing problem is that the stories of non-White people and communities are not being told - we are not celebrating our diversity or exploring the different cultures and histories. You can't achieve true equality by erasing differences, only by embracing and celebrating them. This is why whitewashing stories and insisting on Whites in the cast is a step backwards.

To me the biggest hurdle is not that White audiences can't connect with non-White characters; it's that they're not used to the idea. The publishing industry mollycoddles and protects White readers by carefully only presenting them with nice, white books and pretending that those "other" books don't exist. Or publishers/editors classify books with non-White characters as "niche interest" or "urban fiction" or whatever. This is reflective of the assumption that the standard audience member is a straight White male, so anyone else needs a specail genre of their own (which is why there's such a thing as Women's Fiction, but not Men's) If we could stop assuming this, and instead assume that readers who like spy novels probably won't care whether that spy is black, white, purple, seven foot tall with grey stripes or orange, then we'd get on a lot better and the race of the characters WOULDN'T MATTER. The story would matter. The quality of writing would matter. The melanin content of the skin of the protagonist would not.

If publishers come in with the attitude that "only Black people will read this book because it's written by a Black person and there aren't any white people in the cast" then they will label and market it accordingly. Then it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. If they simply decided that people in general will be interested in this story about other human beings, then those books would get shelved in the General Interest or Contemporary Fiction shelf instead of in the back under Urban Fiction.

The system creates the bias and perpetuates it. Change the system, and the bias will start to shift.

Well, long post is long. Perhaps I'm being naive - race dynamics in the UK are not what they are in the US. It's probably different here.

Aruna, I was saddened when I read your post. I really wanted to say no! that isn't true and give you a list of books to prove it.

Unfortunately, the more I think about it, I can see this IS a problem. The only media I could think with all POC, was a few movies and TV shows. Tyler Perry comes to mind. I enjoy Tyler Perry, but I admit I always feel like I am crashing a party when I watch them. Like I wasn't invited because all the characters are POC, and I'm not. It's ridiculous of me, of course.

I do love the Number One Ladies Detective Agency, though. Part of the reason I love it is because it is set in Africa, a place I don't know much about. I enjoy learning about new places and cultures

So while, I admit that this is a problem, I hope that it is changing.

Cyia said:

It depends on the social class. The ruling Egyptian (Ptolemaic) class was from a Greek bloodline, and they also valued paler shades of skin as a sign of divinity. That's one of the current speculations as to why Cleopatra was so popular with the masses; her mother was likely Nubian.

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The Macedonian dynasty only ruled after 332 BC. Before that, with the exception of the brief Persian invasion, it was all Egyptians and some Nubians.

Paler skin was not exactly a sign of divinity. When you see yellow paint on female statues, it is probably to represent them as gold to identify them with Hathor, but you don't see that on the male representations. If it was a universal sign of divinity, the males would be represented pale as well. The Egyptians were actually remarkably color-blind (but not culture-blind)

Thanks for mentioning the shelving issue, Psychomacologist. This may sound dumb on my part, but I was working my way around the books at Walmart and suddenly realized I was in a section with all black couples on the covers. I was in the back of the store! Why weren't these shelved with the other romances? I guess they thought it would be okay, because they were under a sign that said "Recommended Reading"...

Cyia said:

It depends on the social class. The ruling Egyptian (Ptolemaic) class was from a Greek bloodline, and they also valued paler shades of skin as a sign of divinity. That's one of the current speculations as to why Cleopatra was so popular with the masses; her mother was likely Nubian.

Click to expand...

MeretSeger said:

The Macedonian dynasty only ruled after 332 BC. Before that, with the exception of the brief Persian invasion, it was all Egyptians and some Nubians.

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Yeah, I was going to say, I don't really think of the Ptolemaic dynasty as "ancient" Egypt.

As a white gal (for the most part) I have a shelf full of African-American romances in amongst the rest. But I don't think this is typical and I had to go out of my way to find them in the non-fic/AA shelf, next to the non-fic/sexuality/gay shelf where my books appear.

MeretSeger said:

Thanks for mentioning the shelving issue, Psychomacologist. This may sound dumb on my part, but I was working my way around the books at Walmart and suddenly realized I was in a section with all black couples on the covers. I was in the back of the store! Why weren't these shelved with the other romances? I guess they thought it would be okay, because they were under a sign that said "Recommended Reading"...

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See, this is the dumb thing, isn't it? Surely romance is just romance. But by shelving the "Black romance" away from the "normal romance" you are just saying "Oh, no, White people, you won't be interested in this. It's got Blacks in it. Go back to the front of the store where the nice White romance books are." And it's further saying that normal, general interest romance = romance about White people, whilst romance about Black people = special, niche interest.

That's pretty racist, let's be honest.

veinglory said:

As a white gal (for the most part) I have a shelf full of African-American romances in amongst the rest. But I don't think this is typical and I had to go out of my way to find them in the non-fic/AA shelf, next to the non-fic/sexuality/gay shelf where my books appear.

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See, this is interesting. I wonder if "Black romance" was just shelved right alongside the "White romance" instead of in a specail section at the back, would more White people just pick it up because, hey, they like romance? I think yes, personally. I think this shelving of "Black" books away from the "normal, general interest" books is a big part of the problem.

I don't agree that YA is particularly more diverse than adult fiction. Yeah, there are some notable YA books that make a Big Honkin' Deal out of featuring real live PoC (and the occasional hot gay boy for the delectation of female readers). But rarely do they seem to be much more than check boxes on a diversity check list.

Literary fiction is at least as diverse as YA, and so is adult SF&F for that matter. Which may not be saying much -- yeah, it's an awfully pale field with a few spots of color no matter which genre you're looking at. But a lot of YA authors and readers are climbing the same hill Octavia Butler has been standing at the top of for years and think they're oh so progressive.

I don't think it's true in general that white people only want to read about white people. But I think covers and genre labels are more powerful than we think. Hence all the "whitewashing" cover incidents in recent years (usually occurring in that bastion of diversity, YA). Most people will read any book with any kind of character, but not if the cover image is someone who looks very different from themselves.

I think it's worth mentioning (and kitty touched on it) that it's not just catering to white readers. Black woman are notorious for self segregation. In the US we're the group least likely to date or marry out of our race. Black women feel an immnse responsibility to their race in a way that hails back to Jim Crowe.

But how that relates to reading trends: many black women won't pick up books with a white people on the cover. For a while I even felt that hesitation. I was raised with all black dolls, books with black characters. We watched black movies and black TV shows. We listened to black artists. My step dad bought from black business owners and my mother was disappointed I decided against going to a historically black college.

So there is a subset of African Americans (often educated, middle class) that make a very real effort to enrich themselves with products and creations of other black people. And while I agree the urban fiction section ultimately does us a disservice, I can imagine motivation behind the concept that isn't necessarily "white people don't want black books mixed with their white books."