It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Been watching this whole Racist Hunger Games fiasco* with some fascination, since the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic I'm actively trying to sell has a black protagonist and almost no white characters at all. And, because everything is always all about me, suddenly I started wondering where the hell I picked up the habit of diversifying characters in speculative fiction.

I really shouldn't have. I am white, living in a community that is so overwhelmingly white it glows in the dark, and thanks to our broken world I could comfortably blunder through life without ever considering other races. I could easily assume all the people in books look like me. I'd like to say I lost such a habit because of my own innate sense of fairness, or even the obsessive-compulsive tendencies that make me leery of generalizations, but the truth is that I changed for two external reasons. One was a number of books by excellent authors (Daja from Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series was an eye-opener, as was the entire cast of Nancy Farmer's The Ear, The Eye, And The Arm. I wish I'd had more access/presence of mind to seek out authors of color, but it was a start).

The other was Lando Calrissian.

See, I read a lot of the Star Wars Expanded Universe as a kid. Books have unlimited special effects and casting budgets, so the number of characters in the Star Wars universe increased exponentially. And since I was an obsessive-compulsive little kid, I realized that Lando Calrissian was probably not the only black human in that universe. Naturally, there had to be others.**

So I, in my pragmatic kid way, simply started randomly designating some humans in the Expanded Universe--both good and evil--as black. Or other races that weren't my own. It turned into a habit, one that I carried over into other books, although some didn't let me do that as well. (Star Wars is easy because you can assume a lot of diversity among humans who are spread across the galaxy. It's harder to diversify characters in tiny isolated fantasy kingdoms that are obviously Europe in disguise, but not impossible.) And from there, it carried over into my writing.

The Hunger Games Tweets may be discouraging, but I think it's definitely possible to get rid of that default-to-White mentality. Come on, everyone, let's extrapolate from Lando. He can't be the only dark-skinned human in the universe, right?


*Thanks to childthursday for the link!

**This was before the prequels added any, remember.

Comments

[daiq.livejournal.com]

I remember reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Quartet and loving the way characters were physically described (although i did always imagine Ged as being bright red for some reason)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

See? Well-placed YA fiction gives kids the idea that characters don't have to be white!

(I also often wondered why fantasy people even HAD the same races as this world. I had a lot of fun coming up with phenotypes in the OGYAFE's alternate world that would look completely unplaceable in our own .)

[stilettoaday.livejournal.com]

Oh i agree with you, as a kid i just thought authors were an unimaginative bunch and thats why MY space travel series (written and illustrated by me, age 5) had a blue sun and a planet that was a triangular prism in shape!

And i did like Sherri S Tepper's The True Game books with their 5 limbed native animals (although the relationship between Peter and the necromancer made me feel odd as a 10ish year old when i first read them, and then on subsequent rereadings as i got older i realised it was peadophilic).

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I had a lot of fun coming up with phenotypes in the OGYAFE's alternate world that would look completely unplaceable in our own.

In Conan the Barbarian, Thulsa Doom's appearance bugged me until I watched the commentary and the director said that they were trying to make him look like a member of some race that's no longer around on the earth, and that's why he's a black dude with long straight hair and blue eyes.

Then I thought it was pretty cool.

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm a bit lucky in that respect--I'm white, and I grew up in (and still live in) a racist part of the country, but I wasn't cloistered in Whitetown and my parents raised me to see people, not race. Even still, I'm likewise surprised at the diversity of races that keep popping up in my characters. In fact, I think currently most of my white characters are secondary characters.

Okay, I take that back, in one fanfic I have a lot of white characters, but I'm working with canon restraints in that story. Outside of those restraints, my tendency to put all sorts of races in comes right back.

I guess I just happen to like variety in my characters. 8| Kinda disgusting to see things like the Hunger Games remarks pop up.

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

I'm reading China Mieville's Embassytown right now, and I am always really pleased with how diverse-feeling his works are.

I couldn't tell you if he's actually described more than one or two characters, but the names of folks are very non-specific as to race, and when you're dealing with aliens, that kinda throws in that extra level of not-whitebread.

...and yet, they're all basically white-ish in my head. I need to get over that. Old habits die hard.

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

I've kind of wondered about the same thing. This: "I am White, living in a community that is so overwhelmingly White it glows in the dark, and thanks to our broken world I could comfortably blunder through life without ever considering other races." applies to me as well, or at least in the area I grew up in. I was fortunate enough to go to a college with a fairly diverse population, but I'm pretty sure I started creating characters with a wide variety of skin tones when I was about 10.

(It just occurred to me, since I spent the weekend hanging out with her - Sharyn November edits young adult and teen fiction. Do you want me to ask her if she knows anyone looking for something like OGYAFE?)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I would love that! Thanks!

Either you were an enlightened ten-year-old on your own, or you read the same sorts of books I did. Gotta love those authors who open our tiny minds.

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

I didn't get around to reading the Circle of Magic books until recently, though. I'm trying to think about what else I would have read around that time that would have had characters of color in them... I suppose some of the Tortall books did.

Email me a summary and I'll see what I can do. (Alternately, email me the manuscript, I'll read it and write a summary and then see what I can do. But I only say that because Non-Eurocentric Fantasy Epics! They are rare! And you write well! And grabby hands want to read!)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* Well, I already have a few synopses of various lengths (GOD THOSE WERE HARD TO WRITE), some with spoilers because I figure I'm selling this to an agent. But I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED ABOUT A MANUSCRIPT. I could totally email the manuscript to you just for beta-reading purposes! Do I send it to the address on your Facebook page? And does your compy support .docx, or would you prefer another file type?

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, REALLY? Eeee! (Oh, man, good things really do come to those who ask.)

Yes, the email address on my facebook page is the right one, and yes, my compy is friends with .docx. I figure we can discuss what kind of commentary you're looking for and how you'd like it delivered via email?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Roger that!

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

It's not necessarily YA-oriented, but when I read the "Wheel of Time" books in high school one of the things that impressed me was how thoroughly the author had mixed racial and ethnic traits, especially with the Borderlanders having mixed Asian and European traits, such that it would be impossible to represent them accurately on in a film adaptation. Skin colour was approached the same way, though most of the groups appearing in the setting were fair-skinned, due to it being a temperate region. And it always bothered me that the Aiel, despite having lived in a harsh desert for three thousand years, were still only fair-skinned people who developed strong tans in their environment. In that amount of time, their skin should have darkened somewhat.

Around the same time, I first started to seriously notice that other races exist, and took the approach of randomly inserting minorities into my work, which sometimes feels like tokenism, but is after all more accurate, and tends, in itself, not to have much real significance to a character, although associated cultural mores might. (I take a similar approach to gender)