Writing and race

[bubosquared]

I've been thinking lately about if/how to write about a minority I'm not part of. Specifically, about me, as a white girl, writing about non-white characters. This could apply both to fanfic and non-fanfic, but I'm mostly thinking about the latter, because in fanfic, if the canon glosses over certain aspects of racial differences, for example, it's easy enough to follow its lead and not bring that up in fanfic.

But when I'm creating my own canon, that's a decision I actually have to make, and it's one that keeps making me wibble like there's no tomorrow. On the one hand, I don't want to write "colourblind", but on the other hand, I also don't want to fuck up if I do write about the more touchy subjects.

(And that's not even mentioning the "How the fuck do you show-not-tell race?" issue, which is something else I wrestle with, and augh.)

So, yeah. Thoughts? Opinions? Pointers? Swats upside the head? Anything? Like I said, this is mostly a non-fanfic thing, but opinions pertaining to fanfic arealso welcome, as I do write non-white characters in fanfic as well. *vague handwave at Lee and Mickey* (This is not a crossover bunny!)

Comments

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

God, yes! I lucked out a little with my contemporary novel, because the major non-white character is Vietnamese, so I can probably count on her name tipping the readers off, but a) not a guarantee, see also Cho Chang and the Patil sisters, and b) her given name (Jesse) isn't especially Vietnamese, and I don't think her surname's going to show until like a third into the book. And with my fantasy novel, I realised as I was re-reading to editing that the only reference to one of the characters being/looking Arabic/Middle-Eastern is a mention of "olive skin," which is going out in the rewrite because it's just a leetle bit too close to that coffee-with-milk example you mentioned. (Not to mention, in context it's kinda skating the purple prose line, ick.)

This "writing" stuff is hard.

Tell me about it. They need to work on this whole cybernetics thing, so I can just syphon images into people's brain directly instead of having to go through that whole "words" thing.