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Describing characters of color
I'm still sorting through IBARW links and posts, and doing a lot of reading, because a whole week of mostly awesome posts is a lot to go through (though a few people did fail so hard it hurt).
I came across this really great link from N.K. Jemisin (aka![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nojojojo) about the problem of describing characters of color. She cites a lot of good things, including the problems with the Harry Potter books wherein the editor decided for the U.S. version to specifically point out the race of the CoC, but not the race of the white characters in the book.
Her explanation of *why* this is so problematic is very excellent, and you really ought to go read over there. Her words > my words (by a factor of about 100), so I would definitely encourage you to go listen to what she has to say and pay very close attention.
If you're a writer who wishes to pen characters of color, I definitely think this is something you need to print out, keep with you, and periodically re-read.
Oh, and on a non-related note? Why the heck isn't 2010 so I can buy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms already. Seriously. Great cover + great sounding storyline = DO WANT.
One issue brought up for me by the article is the problem of defining race solely by skin color in a novel. So many white people fail to understand the many hurtful mistakes that can be made in penning CoC's, they don't understand the criticisms they receive when someone says their CoC's are "whitewashed".
Just saying "dark skinned" or "brown skinned" is not sufficient for marking race.
Let me pluck a few examples from my past to illustrate why.
Example the First: At the high school I attended in Tennessee*, we had a girl who over did the tanning. She did a tanning bed, plus laying out, plus self tanner. She had deep seated issues, but that's not the point. This girl came to school with dark skin. And I do mean dark skinned. If you had seen her, the color of her skin would have been one of the first things you noticed. You would have described her as VERY DARK SKINNED. This girl? Was white. Nobody doubted her whiteness (only her sanity). Even when others joked, "You look like a black girl with good hair" - nobody actually thought she was black. She didn't get treated less white (and if you don't think there's such a thing as being treated white, come over here. We have a long conversation to have).
We all had this understanding, without realizing it, that black is not just a color. For us, you could "talk black" or "dress black" or "talk white" and "dress white". Of course, this was part and parcel of the crushing racism that was imbedded deeply in the place, and for us white kids, we equated blackness with poverty, crime, and a lot of other negative things. But we all understood that race had farther implications than skin color. That there was a culture behind it. That there were black foods and white foods, black music and white music.
Hell, my sister, as well, can get rather brown if she puts in the proper amount of laying out. My sister? Is white, as I am white.
Example the Second: At this same school, there was another girl. She was not very dark skinned. In fact, she was actually not so much darker than the white kids. Tanning Girl was by far more melanin-alicious than she was. She even had green eyes and a naturally reddish cast to her hair. It was understood universally, however, that she was not white. Nobody mistook her for white. However, calling her "dark skinned" or even "medium skinned" would have been a lie. This girl was black.
How did we know she was black? The same way we knew Tanning Girl was white.
Because it wasn't just about skin color. Green Eyed Girl listened to the "black music" (why yes, we were a bunch of stereotyping, racism-infused idiots, thanks for asking), she talked "black". She listened to Bone Thugs 'n Harmony. She went to a black church. She dressed and acted in the ways that were typical of the black kids at my school.
Part of me crumples up inside to have to say these things, because I don't like stereotyping. I don't like the idea that if you don't check all the boxes you're some how less black or less white or less whatever. I don't like saying "all black people like rap" or "all black women have long nails and name their kids Shaniqua". I don't like stereotyping, but neither do I like denying that these were a deep rooted part of the lives of these kids I went to school with.
The problem being that there are children out there named Shaniqua, and yes, that name does derive from a racial and ethnic heritage. But so does the name Susan. Susan shouldn't be considered any more normal a name than Shaniqua or Sun or Sumitra. Each name has it's racial context, but in a perfect world, that context would have no more impact on how you well were treated by others than the size of the shoe you wear or your favorite food, which are also facts of life that inform what you do, but aren't reasons that people would, for instance, deny your children the right to swim in a swimming pool.
So I want you to understand, dear readers, that I'm taking you to the mindset that my peers and I had, so that you can understand why it is that it is not sufficient to say a character is dark skinned. I want you to understand that you can't pretend race is just about color.
Race is not just a color, race is about culture, ethnicity, religion, family background, heritage, history.
That's why it is not enough, Wellmeaning Clueless White Person, to take a character, say they're brown skinned and continue writing them exactly as you'd write a white character and think you've done due dilligence. As N.K. Jemisin said herself (in comments):
We white people have been fooled into thinking that white is a base, a state of normalcy, that it is not it's own ethnicity.
Apple pie is an ethnic food. Country-western music is an ethnic music. My name (Megan) is an ethnic name. It's just that my ethnicity, my race, has dominance, gets treated like the norm, the standard. But it doesn't make it any less an ethnicity.
My race also infuses and informs every part of my daily existence, just as Ms. Jemisin's does her.
I live in a working class white neighborhood in Queens and was raised in a middle class white subdivision in Tennessee because that's where white people lived in my town. My fiancee and I were welcomed into our apartment and our neighborhood because we're white and about 75% of our neighbors are white. People in my neighborhood feel comfortable seeing my fat ass power walking around the block at 6:45 in the morning for exercise because I, like most of them, am white. They do not wonder what my business in this neighborhood is. They assume that I live here because I look like I belong here.
Whereas if I moved one borough over and up to, say, Harlem, people would probably say, "What the hell is that big fat white girl doing here? Why is she walking so fast?" I imagine I would make many people uncomfortable (or make many people laugh so hard a beverage comes out their nose, whichever).
I wear certain colors because I am very pale skinned. Pastels do look good on me, and I can pull off very pale pinks, blues, and yellows because I'm basically two steps from albinism over here.
How I do my hair is definitely decided by my whiteness and my white privilege. I can, if I wish, walk down ANY hair care aisle in any major supermarket, pharmacy, or store that sells hair care products and find shampoo, conditioner, hair spray, gel, coloring, and accessories that are all appropriate for my hair type. Even for sub-types of my hair type. Dry caucasian hair, oily caucasian hair, split ended caucasian hair - it's all covered. The models on most boxes of hair coloring are of my race, and they advertise colors which are appropriate and attractive for people of my race and general complexion (such as "ash blonde" and "medium auburn" and "cinammon brown").
The color of my hair is an ethnic color. I derive my hair color from a long line of batshit insane German/Swedish women who have reddish-brownish hair, green eyes, big boobs, no asses, short builds, and chubby round faces. My round eyes are ethnic eyes. I inherited no epicanthic folds because my ethnicity does not have them.
Unfortunately, my ethnicity is privileged and normalized - so I often don't even realize it.
White is an ethnicity as well. Which is why you can't take a white character, slap a skin color on, and say, "Tada, now you're (insert race)!" Because your character, depending on what race and background they have, isn't going to look at white things the way a white person would.
In writing the UF!2girls novel, one of the things I that gave me pause was when the two heroines, one of whom is Chinese, the other of whom is white, decide to go out for a meal and get "comfort food". As a white person, I assume certain things about foods. Like, for instance, everybody loves hamburgers. They're universal comfort food, right?
Wrong. Because a character who has been raised in a Chinese family, and eats Chinese cuisine almost daily will not look at burgers that way. For her they are a white food, an American food, a food that's a part of an ethnicity that is not her own. Sure, because of the dominance of the white ethnicity, she may have become used to it, but a character who is Chinese will not automatically view those foods as comfort foods. Just as I wouldn't view tofu or baozi or duck blood as comfort food or default food.
In the novel I am reading right now (Happy Hour at Casa Dracula by Marta Acosta, for the curious), the main character, a Mexican-American woman named Milagro, describes the foods she loved cooking and eating with her grandmother. She describes watermelon with lime juice and salt, and chocolate with almonds and cinnamon, "frijoles savory with chorizo" (pg 136). For this character, even though she has grown up in the United States, these are her comfort foods, her default foods. Because she is not white, she is Latina, because being Latina is part of who she is.
Merely saying she's dark skinned and has a Mexican name but having her act as a white person would ruin this novel and make for a very false, hurtful character.
What is comforting, normal, and default for me as a white person may be deeply disgusting and troubling for others and vice versa. The point isn't to try to make everyone do what the white people do. The answer is to let everyone decide their own normal and not to hold one ethnicity above another.
And that's just one little thing. That's just deciding where to go for dinner. No, the character from my book doesn't go around saying "I'm Chinese!" all the time, the character from Acosta's book doesn't go around saying "I'm Latina!" every other page - but it does inform the facets of her life from what she eats to what name she gives to whom and why. It infuses the world view, the history, the speech, the thoughts of the characters.
The point is not to brag about how aware I am. In fact, I wasn't at first and I'm ashamed that there are places in my book book where I will have to go back and double check to make sure I'm not turning this character into a white person with Chinese eyes - and try as I might, I will probably miss lots of things.
I'm listing this more for my own edification than for any other reason. I cannot control the actions of others. I can influence them to do what I hope is right whenever possible, I can try to persuade them, but the only thing I have complete control over is myself. That is why it is important that above all else, I correct myself before I even begin to think about say something to someone else.
If something I say is helpful to someone else, I'm glad. I like to help. But please understand I am not holding myself up as wise or right or even adequate at this. I'm not. Right now, I'm slightly-less-clueless than before. I'm still existing in privilege at the expense of others. I am still probably doing things I don't even realize that are hurtful to others.
I post these things so that I may be open to criticism and correction, so that I may learn how to accept that I will be wrong, that I will make mistakes, and that I must be mindful of the things I am being told, and even the things that are not being said toward me, but are still being said.
* Just a small side rant I'd like to make:
Yes, I am a white Southerner. Yes, we white Southerners have been known for a history of racism, oppression, and prejudice. I will not deny it, I will not defend it when someone points out these shameful bits of our history. I will only acknowledge it and feel greatly disappointed in my ancestors and my history. It was wrong what they did.
What angers me is when another white person decides that because they are from elsewhere in this country they are automatically less racist and less prone to racism than a Southerner.
I am bothered when someone takes it upon themselves to point out how racist Southerners are before they examine the fact that the two worst, most publicized incidents of racism this year took place in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively.
I would remind my fellow white people who do not live in those states we call "Southern" not to get on their high horses, not to believe that because you're from California or New York or Minnesota or Oregon that you, somehow, have escaped the spectre of racism and live in some idyllic, post-racial world. The people of color around you can very quickly assure you that you *don't*.
If you are white, privilege and racism follow you wherever you go and inform everything you do. So before you so quickly point out "what those people in Alabama think" or "what they do in Mississippi" or "what they say in Tennessee", look around the place where you live. There is plenty of racism there, and some of it coming from you, even.
I would, also, if I were inclined to be especially and heinously snarky, point out that one of the biggest failures in all of RaceFail 2009 was perpetrated by a woman from Connecticut. Hmm, guess they have racism there, too. Funny how that works out.
ETA: Borked HTML, spelling, and things I thought of later.
I came across this really great link from N.K. Jemisin (aka
nojojojo) about the problem of describing characters of color. She cites a lot of good things, including the problems with the Harry Potter books wherein the editor decided for the U.S. version to specifically point out the race of the CoC, but not the race of the white characters in the book. Her explanation of *why* this is so problematic is very excellent, and you really ought to go read over there. Her words > my words (by a factor of about 100), so I would definitely encourage you to go listen to what she has to say and pay very close attention.
If you're a writer who wishes to pen characters of color, I definitely think this is something you need to print out, keep with you, and periodically re-read.
Oh, and on a non-related note? Why the heck isn't 2010 so I can buy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms already. Seriously. Great cover + great sounding storyline = DO WANT.
One issue brought up for me by the article is the problem of defining race solely by skin color in a novel. So many white people fail to understand the many hurtful mistakes that can be made in penning CoC's, they don't understand the criticisms they receive when someone says their CoC's are "whitewashed".
Just saying "dark skinned" or "brown skinned" is not sufficient for marking race.
Let me pluck a few examples from my past to illustrate why.
Example the First: At the high school I attended in Tennessee*, we had a girl who over did the tanning. She did a tanning bed, plus laying out, plus self tanner. She had deep seated issues, but that's not the point. This girl came to school with dark skin. And I do mean dark skinned. If you had seen her, the color of her skin would have been one of the first things you noticed. You would have described her as VERY DARK SKINNED. This girl? Was white. Nobody doubted her whiteness (only her sanity). Even when others joked, "You look like a black girl with good hair" - nobody actually thought she was black. She didn't get treated less white (and if you don't think there's such a thing as being treated white, come over here. We have a long conversation to have).
We all had this understanding, without realizing it, that black is not just a color. For us, you could "talk black" or "dress black" or "talk white" and "dress white". Of course, this was part and parcel of the crushing racism that was imbedded deeply in the place, and for us white kids, we equated blackness with poverty, crime, and a lot of other negative things. But we all understood that race had farther implications than skin color. That there was a culture behind it. That there were black foods and white foods, black music and white music.
Hell, my sister, as well, can get rather brown if she puts in the proper amount of laying out. My sister? Is white, as I am white.
Example the Second: At this same school, there was another girl. She was not very dark skinned. In fact, she was actually not so much darker than the white kids. Tanning Girl was by far more melanin-alicious than she was. She even had green eyes and a naturally reddish cast to her hair. It was understood universally, however, that she was not white. Nobody mistook her for white. However, calling her "dark skinned" or even "medium skinned" would have been a lie. This girl was black.
How did we know she was black? The same way we knew Tanning Girl was white.
Because it wasn't just about skin color. Green Eyed Girl listened to the "black music" (why yes, we were a bunch of stereotyping, racism-infused idiots, thanks for asking), she talked "black". She listened to Bone Thugs 'n Harmony. She went to a black church. She dressed and acted in the ways that were typical of the black kids at my school.
Part of me crumples up inside to have to say these things, because I don't like stereotyping. I don't like the idea that if you don't check all the boxes you're some how less black or less white or less whatever. I don't like saying "all black people like rap" or "all black women have long nails and name their kids Shaniqua". I don't like stereotyping, but neither do I like denying that these were a deep rooted part of the lives of these kids I went to school with.
The problem being that there are children out there named Shaniqua, and yes, that name does derive from a racial and ethnic heritage. But so does the name Susan. Susan shouldn't be considered any more normal a name than Shaniqua or Sun or Sumitra. Each name has it's racial context, but in a perfect world, that context would have no more impact on how you well were treated by others than the size of the shoe you wear or your favorite food, which are also facts of life that inform what you do, but aren't reasons that people would, for instance, deny your children the right to swim in a swimming pool.
So I want you to understand, dear readers, that I'm taking you to the mindset that my peers and I had, so that you can understand why it is that it is not sufficient to say a character is dark skinned. I want you to understand that you can't pretend race is just about color.
Race is not just a color, race is about culture, ethnicity, religion, family background, heritage, history.
That's why it is not enough, Wellmeaning Clueless White Person, to take a character, say they're brown skinned and continue writing them exactly as you'd write a white character and think you've done due dilligence. As N.K. Jemisin said herself (in comments):
I don’t walk around constantly thinking "Hey, I’m black today. Blackitty blackitty black...", but being black informs nearly every part of my daily existence. Where I choose to live (generally communities with a certain percentage of black people in the population, so I won’t be alone), what clothes I wear (earth tones look good on me; pastels do not), what foods I grow in my balcony garden (my collard greens have aphids! ::wail::), how I wear my hair (hmm, a blowout today, I think. Nah, it’s Saturday, I’ll just put it up in a puff), etc.
We white people have been fooled into thinking that white is a base, a state of normalcy, that it is not it's own ethnicity.
Apple pie is an ethnic food. Country-western music is an ethnic music. My name (Megan) is an ethnic name. It's just that my ethnicity, my race, has dominance, gets treated like the norm, the standard. But it doesn't make it any less an ethnicity.
My race also infuses and informs every part of my daily existence, just as Ms. Jemisin's does her.
I live in a working class white neighborhood in Queens and was raised in a middle class white subdivision in Tennessee because that's where white people lived in my town. My fiancee and I were welcomed into our apartment and our neighborhood because we're white and about 75% of our neighbors are white. People in my neighborhood feel comfortable seeing my fat ass power walking around the block at 6:45 in the morning for exercise because I, like most of them, am white. They do not wonder what my business in this neighborhood is. They assume that I live here because I look like I belong here.
Whereas if I moved one borough over and up to, say, Harlem, people would probably say, "What the hell is that big fat white girl doing here? Why is she walking so fast?" I imagine I would make many people uncomfortable (or make many people laugh so hard a beverage comes out their nose, whichever).
I wear certain colors because I am very pale skinned. Pastels do look good on me, and I can pull off very pale pinks, blues, and yellows because I'm basically two steps from albinism over here.
How I do my hair is definitely decided by my whiteness and my white privilege. I can, if I wish, walk down ANY hair care aisle in any major supermarket, pharmacy, or store that sells hair care products and find shampoo, conditioner, hair spray, gel, coloring, and accessories that are all appropriate for my hair type. Even for sub-types of my hair type. Dry caucasian hair, oily caucasian hair, split ended caucasian hair - it's all covered. The models on most boxes of hair coloring are of my race, and they advertise colors which are appropriate and attractive for people of my race and general complexion (such as "ash blonde" and "medium auburn" and "cinammon brown").
The color of my hair is an ethnic color. I derive my hair color from a long line of batshit insane German/Swedish women who have reddish-brownish hair, green eyes, big boobs, no asses, short builds, and chubby round faces. My round eyes are ethnic eyes. I inherited no epicanthic folds because my ethnicity does not have them.
Unfortunately, my ethnicity is privileged and normalized - so I often don't even realize it.
White is an ethnicity as well. Which is why you can't take a white character, slap a skin color on, and say, "Tada, now you're (insert race)!" Because your character, depending on what race and background they have, isn't going to look at white things the way a white person would.
In writing the UF!2girls novel, one of the things I that gave me pause was when the two heroines, one of whom is Chinese, the other of whom is white, decide to go out for a meal and get "comfort food". As a white person, I assume certain things about foods. Like, for instance, everybody loves hamburgers. They're universal comfort food, right?
Wrong. Because a character who has been raised in a Chinese family, and eats Chinese cuisine almost daily will not look at burgers that way. For her they are a white food, an American food, a food that's a part of an ethnicity that is not her own. Sure, because of the dominance of the white ethnicity, she may have become used to it, but a character who is Chinese will not automatically view those foods as comfort foods. Just as I wouldn't view tofu or baozi or duck blood as comfort food or default food.
In the novel I am reading right now (Happy Hour at Casa Dracula by Marta Acosta, for the curious), the main character, a Mexican-American woman named Milagro, describes the foods she loved cooking and eating with her grandmother. She describes watermelon with lime juice and salt, and chocolate with almonds and cinnamon, "frijoles savory with chorizo" (pg 136). For this character, even though she has grown up in the United States, these are her comfort foods, her default foods. Because she is not white, she is Latina, because being Latina is part of who she is.
Merely saying she's dark skinned and has a Mexican name but having her act as a white person would ruin this novel and make for a very false, hurtful character.
What is comforting, normal, and default for me as a white person may be deeply disgusting and troubling for others and vice versa. The point isn't to try to make everyone do what the white people do. The answer is to let everyone decide their own normal and not to hold one ethnicity above another.
And that's just one little thing. That's just deciding where to go for dinner. No, the character from my book doesn't go around saying "I'm Chinese!" all the time, the character from Acosta's book doesn't go around saying "I'm Latina!" every other page - but it does inform the facets of her life from what she eats to what name she gives to whom and why. It infuses the world view, the history, the speech, the thoughts of the characters.
The point is not to brag about how aware I am. In fact, I wasn't at first and I'm ashamed that there are places in my book book where I will have to go back and double check to make sure I'm not turning this character into a white person with Chinese eyes - and try as I might, I will probably miss lots of things.
I'm listing this more for my own edification than for any other reason. I cannot control the actions of others. I can influence them to do what I hope is right whenever possible, I can try to persuade them, but the only thing I have complete control over is myself. That is why it is important that above all else, I correct myself before I even begin to think about say something to someone else.
If something I say is helpful to someone else, I'm glad. I like to help. But please understand I am not holding myself up as wise or right or even adequate at this. I'm not. Right now, I'm slightly-less-clueless than before. I'm still existing in privilege at the expense of others. I am still probably doing things I don't even realize that are hurtful to others.
I post these things so that I may be open to criticism and correction, so that I may learn how to accept that I will be wrong, that I will make mistakes, and that I must be mindful of the things I am being told, and even the things that are not being said toward me, but are still being said.
* Just a small side rant I'd like to make:
Yes, I am a white Southerner. Yes, we white Southerners have been known for a history of racism, oppression, and prejudice. I will not deny it, I will not defend it when someone points out these shameful bits of our history. I will only acknowledge it and feel greatly disappointed in my ancestors and my history. It was wrong what they did.
What angers me is when another white person decides that because they are from elsewhere in this country they are automatically less racist and less prone to racism than a Southerner.
I am bothered when someone takes it upon themselves to point out how racist Southerners are before they examine the fact that the two worst, most publicized incidents of racism this year took place in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively.
I would remind my fellow white people who do not live in those states we call "Southern" not to get on their high horses, not to believe that because you're from California or New York or Minnesota or Oregon that you, somehow, have escaped the spectre of racism and live in some idyllic, post-racial world. The people of color around you can very quickly assure you that you *don't*.
If you are white, privilege and racism follow you wherever you go and inform everything you do. So before you so quickly point out "what those people in Alabama think" or "what they do in Mississippi" or "what they say in Tennessee", look around the place where you live. There is plenty of racism there, and some of it coming from you, even.
I would, also, if I were inclined to be especially and heinously snarky, point out that one of the biggest failures in all of RaceFail 2009 was perpetrated by a woman from Connecticut. Hmm, guess they have racism there, too. Funny how that works out.
ETA: Borked HTML, spelling, and things I thought of later.