I know that you are busy, and I apologize for taking up your time. I need some advice please if you are willing to offer it. I am new to writing and therefore I am quite unknowledgeable about most things. The most important thing to me is not to sell a ton of books, but to be respectful to anyone who is willing to invest their time into reading my story. My book is based on a dream I had over two years ago and I have been working on it ever since. It is a post-apocalyptic world with a Utopian city that has been around for only a few hundred years. The creator of the city is a white man who is still alive. Every other living person in the city is created in a lab which, even though diverse, has strict standards about infants being born with only the accepted eye pigmentation (i.e. no solid white iris, must have color), health requirements, etc. Families consist of a father-type, mother-type, and two children. Since the lab decides what each child should look like and their future job, life partner, etc. they determine everything about the child through genetic sequencing. The children the couple receive are not guaranteed to look like them or even be genetically related. My protagonist was born without pigmentation in his eyes, deemed unacceptable and was scheduled to be terminated, when one of the lab supervisors took pity and asked his wife, a scavenger by trade, to rescue the child from the dumpster he was sent down to for incineration. When he is older, I describe his skin tone as much darker than his wife’s milky tone. In my dream, he was a young black man. His wife is white. At the age of eighteen he learns of his initial fate and is driven to stop any more infants like him from being destroyed. I am a white man. Aside from the 1% Benin and Togo that Ancestry DNA lists, I am all European. I would not want any young reader to be upset that a white man is writing a series of books with protagonists of varied pigmentations. I also feel, though, that there are already so many white protagonists and that many children are not given heroes that they can more identify with on a personal level. As a reader, I enjoy female protagonists (Divergent, Hunger Games). I would love to have more diversity in characters. I think that’s part of why I dream of people who do not represent me by my skin tone, which is odd since most people dream of themselves. So, my question is, do you feel it is acceptable for someone to write about people who do not represent their own skin color, or should I stay with the same old story? I foolishly never thought about it before, but with the world currently trying to heal, the last thing I would ever want to do is to cause more pain. Thank you for your time and any response that you might give.