I've been puzzling it out for a while now, but didn't come to an answer. My book is set in a diverse city (currently torn between Chicago and Baltimore, just to give you an idea), so in my mind a lot of the characters are not-white.
I'm pretty confident with my ability to work in the descriptions of the main cast, that won't be a big problem. But I realize that a lot of my bit players (some of the characters' colleagues, people on the street/in the bar the cast frequents/among the supernatural folk they meet) will be non-white too, and this is where I'm hitting a wall. I'm not really a "write a paragraph for every minor character that comes on stage" sort of writer, so it means a sentence at best for description, sometimes just one or two words. I don't want to reference race directly every time (if I choose Baltimore 63% of people in the city will be black, and that's enough times describing someone as "black" to feel repetitive), yet if I don't it will be assumed the characters are white.
How do you solve this dilemma?
I'm pretty confident with my ability to work in the descriptions of the main cast, that won't be a big problem. But I realize that a lot of my bit players (some of the characters' colleagues, people on the street/in the bar the cast frequents/among the supernatural folk they meet) will be non-white too, and this is where I'm hitting a wall. I'm not really a "write a paragraph for every minor character that comes on stage" sort of writer, so it means a sentence at best for description, sometimes just one or two words. I don't want to reference race directly every time (if I choose Baltimore 63% of people in the city will be black, and that's enough times describing someone as "black" to feel repetitive), yet if I don't it will be assumed the characters are white.
How do you solve this dilemma?