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

[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)