Would appreciate your thoughts on writing about people I do not closely represent, please.

jjhoward

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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.
 

Snitchcat

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In general, as to a white writer writing POC: due diligence (e.g., lots of research, lots and lots of it), sensitivity readers, asking questions (as you've done here) about nuances, etc. There's a lot to unpack in this. Studying the existing threads in this sub-forum should answer many of your questions.

Also, it might be an idea to look up #ownvoices and see if the story you want to tell would be better left to the POC to tell. However, considering the nature of the story you're telling, it doesn't seem like #ownvoices. But, IMO, you'd need to consider the impact, scars, and PTSD of racism, etc.

Another term you should be aware of is "cultural appropriation" -- not that this is something you might do consciously; it might be more a subconscious action. Still, something to be aware of. Search through this POC sub-forum for more information on cultural appropriation.

You can also look in the Historical Writing sub-forum for a thread about appropriating another people's history (i.e., don't).

Good luck!
 
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MaeZe

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That's quite a task you are undertaking: designing the whole population and making it diverse.

But it sounds like a fantastic story if you can pull it off.

It sounds like you are designing how people look. That leaves all the baggage out about different ethnicities. You're essentially describing rejection based on appearance. And that is an important recurring theme in fiction and in real life. It's symbolic, but I don't see that you are going to misrepresent an ethnicity.

If readers believe they recognize an ethnicity and don't like how you portrayed the cultural aspects you might get some flak. That's not always predictable and I wouldn't write with that worry in mind. Write the story you want to write. If you get negative feedback you can deal with it at that time.

I'm female and there are male characters in my novel. I listen to males in my critique group when they say things like, "guys wouldn't do that". But I'm pretty sure all men might not like how some men are portrayed in romance novels. Then there are men who write romance and create excellent novels.

Write it. Get feedback. Decide if you want to change something or not. You have two years into this book. Keep going.
 

ChaseJxyz

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I am not cisgender, straight, or of a binary gender yet I have characters who are in my works because the world isn't made up of people only like me. But queer people aren't a hivemind, there are ultimately going to be people who don't like how I write my queer characters, just like how there will be white people who don't like how you write your white characters, or people of color who don't like how you portray your PoC. It's impossible to make something that doesn't upset someone in someway and that's something you'll have to accept.

However, that's not free reign to do what you want. Things end up being racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic unintentionally because a writer might use a harmful trope or stereotype without thinking about it, or they mirror something harmful in the real world without thinking ho that affects things. The reason why defund the police is a thing is because of a very long history of police forces in America being created to capture runaway slaves, there's a reason why things are the way they are today even if it's not immediately obvious. When you worldbuild, you should think about these things, including how they reflect our reality.

You say that everyone is designed and the world is diverse: why is that? Did the overseer want to create a world without racism or the concept of ethnicities? Do people of certain features tend to end up in certain roles in society? Is there marketing or media? What types of people are portrayed as beautiful? How much of the old world do people know about? It's possible to make a "perfect" world without racism but there's probably going to be "othering" in other ways.

Even if none of it makes it into your book, do some what-if scenarios. Would a child of a certain skin tone or hair type see role models that look like them? Are certain hair styles not considered "professional"? Do kids that don't look like their parents get bullied by kids who do? How much do they know about other societies? Asking yourself how people of different types would love in this world can help you figure this stuff out.
 

jjhoward

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You say that everyone is designed and the world is diverse: why is that? Did the overseer want to create a world without racism or the concept of ethnicities? Do people of certain features tend to end up in certain roles in society? Is there marketing or media? What types of people are portrayed as beautiful? How much of the old world do people know about? It's possible to make a "perfect" world without racism but there's probably going to be "othering" in other ways.

Jacob watched the world collapsing around him, destroying most of the planet and felt the need to change it. When the opportunity came to rebuild part of the midwest, he took it, building a massive dome over what used to be Sioux City, Iowa. He recreates his mentor's two businesses, one being a lab, as a way to continue the work they had been doing before his mentor's death during a storm, and as a way to show nature that he could do things better. He takes his deceased mentor's name, Edward Maxis.

He sees this new world as a chance to change things that he felt needed to be changed: racism being one of them. He figures that the randomization of ethnicities within each family unit will help to diffuse that ticking timebomb that was a major problem before the world changed. Everyone, aside from the elite Council and Edward, lives in basic robins-egg blue apartments and live very basic, boring lives. Living in his new "bubble", the now Edward Maxis does not think about the world still going on outside of the walls of his city. He never feels the need to leave the city's protection, which is mostly driven by fear of everything he saw in his younger years.

He challenges his lab techs to find ways to modify the human species, creating immunities to disease, enhancing basic abilities of each new citizen to perform their prechosen career, etc. When he learns that the techs have become obsessed with trying mutations that he believes are beyond acceptable, he cancels the program and sets a series of rules that require each new child to fit into a certain design. Some of them do not obey and continue to try new mutations in their hopes of improving the human race. Thus a series of children with eyes so light blue that they appear white are deemed unacceptable because that eye color is not pre-approved. They also have a slight iridescent effect to their skin which has not been approved, essentially re-creating a form of prejudice that he is blind to. Nihil58217 is one of those children.

There are no surnames. Each citizen's name ends with an I.D. number. A lab supervisor, Nobelium, who was one of the techs responsible for creating unapproved citizens and the designer of Nihil's DNA, does not want his creation destroyed and contacts his wife, Laoidheach, a scavenger, to locate the infant in the incinerator dumpsters just outside of the city's walls.

Jobs are organized for predesigned citizens and they wear jumpers according to their job. I.E. scavengers wear brown, security guards/military wear gray, lab techs wear white, maintenance wears orange, and so on. Nihil and Laoidheach are both scavengers and wear special gear and armor when leaving the city to do their jobs. They both have darker skin and tightly curled hair. Nobelium is white with blonde hair. Nihil's sibling is Asian in some features.

Scavengers are the most inclined to leave the city, looking for old technology including some items that Edward desperately needs from his old lab. The rest of the citizens are not allowed to go past the first circle of the Void, which is a mile deep circumference around the city walls. This allows for basic trade with outland merchants who come to the area during certain celebrations. Other than scavengers, only the Elite 1% are allowed to leave the city, if they choose to. Since they have everything they need, there is little reason for them to take any chances in the old world. Those on the outside are struggling to survive the extreme climates, earthquakes, and each other, so they do not have a lot of time to worry about how someone looks. They do take notice when a citizen of the dome is out in the open and many try to kill them or befriend them as everyone wants to live in the city in some capacity.

Skin color plays a very small part in the overall story, aside from the iridescence and the light blue eye color. I still felt that the reader would want to create the Protagonist and other characters clearly in their minds though. This, and so much more not listed, came from a series of nightly dreams over about a 2-month span. (All of my stories come from dreams and nightmares oddly enough). I wanted to keep everything as close to the original dream set, if possible. At the same time, I do not want to hurt anyone, aside from my book's characters. I intended to describe Nihil has merely having a darker skin-tone than his wife, Saoirse, but lighter than his mother's. And I mentioned his hair. I wasn't sure if that would cause any problems. I know that Veronica Roth got a huge amount of flack when she released Carve the Mark because she had two different types of people in it. Thank you, all of you, for your advice. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it.
 
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ChaseJxyz

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I'm sure you might have seen this in the news, face-detecting software cannot ID people of color. This is not a new thing, this has been happening for as long as face-detecting software has existed, and that's because the programmers who make this software give the algorithms white and light-skinned faces to "train" the AI on what is or isn't a face. So when you give it the face of someone who's darker skinned, it doesn't know what to do. The algorithm is a piece of software, it in itself cannot be racist, but because it is made by imperfect humans it was given flawed data to work off of. So for your society, there has to be a data bank of genetic material to work off of to create these new humans. Is that bank truly representative of all sorts of people? If it's not, and the techs are making people of certain skin colors from scratch, are they forgetting the other things that "naturally" come with race, such as nose, lips or eyes?

It's important to remember that what your world does or what your characters do is not reflective of you personally. Everyone who has adapted Hannibal Lecter stories aren't actually cannibals or murderers. A society that says that it is not racist can still be in ways that are invisible to everyone but your reader, as your reader lives in a world where racism is very real. With Carve the Mark it seems the problem with her book was that the two types of people were "colonists" and "savages," who had a culture reflective of North Africa, which is a big "yikes!" Saying colonists are all good and natives are all bad is not good, but neither is "the natives are better because they're IN TOUCH WITH NATURE" is also not good, either (the "noble savage" trope). People are complex! It's not good to distill a whole group into one thing.

But the fact that you're asking these questions and thinking about it is a good sign. It's a lot more than many do. I'm sure people here would be happy to help you out.
 

jjhoward

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Wow! Excellent points! Thank you for helping me to open my eyes. I had a feeling that it was best to ask for help here, and I am very glad I did and that you all offered helpful and very insightful responses.