[ SECRET POST #2884 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2884 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 034 secrets from Secret Submission Post #412.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[feotakahari]

The thing is, the folks who write "ethnic" literature are usually setting it in places that would believably have a large population of that ethnicity. That's different from setting your story in a very mixed town and then making every character white. And if your story is, I dunno, set in a 1950s prep school or something, you're not gonna get a huge number of people criticizing you for making the students white.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't want to make that argument, solely because that immediately opens you up to an argument about what settings and places POC characters have been present or not been present in, and that is just an endless frustrating slog of an argument.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, what first anon said. That approach is generally a non starter. Frex, someone could point out that in the U.S. at least, Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, and by the late 50s schools were undergoing desegregation. The decade's rather famous for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

Not to mention that in a lot of countries with prep schools, students of color aren't impossible or all that unlikely, either. Not for wealthy people, anyway. The children of rich Indian families have been educated in the UK ever since the days of the British Empire, the existence of POCs in major cities like London and Paris since before Elizabethan times, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

First anon here - just to be clear here, my position is that there are many historical settings where it's realistic to have casts that are all or virtually all white, and one of the main reasons that I find the argument frustrating is because, from my perspective, it seems as though people find any example of a POC in a given setting and then act as though that's the norm and everything in said setting must have lots of POC characters. Was there one African person in the far reaches of outer Siberia in the late 16th century? Then by god, you'd better have an African character in your outer Siberia story. At least, that's the way it often comes off.

I'd honestly be more comfortable with an argument that said to hell with historical realism,

[(Anonymous)]

That argument bothers me a little less, because it's the extreme POV. Most of the time, what reasonable people say is that the possibility and potential is there for a POC in damn near any setting in any time period, so if you want to write a POC character, go for it.

"I'd honestly be more comfortable with an argument that said to hell with historical realism,"

I'd be fine with this in SF/fantasy. For historical fiction, historical realism matters more to me, but fortunately as I said above, the possibility is there so authors can write POC characters if they want to.

[(Anonymous)]

I think part of the problem is how the argument gets used on the Internet.

Specifically, it seems to come up a lot in this situation. Someone will lament the lack of POC characters in some popular media property, usually one set in a specific historical RL milieu, and perhaps even accuse it of being problematic. Someone else, to defend it, will address the historical plausibility of POC characters appearing in whatever setting we're talking about. And then a third someone will come out and make an argument about the possibility of POC characters existing in said setting in the historical record.

Which is a fine argument, and usually a pretty reasonable one. But the problem is that in that context, it becomes really easy to read it as a support for the first argument - that is to say, as an affirmative argument that POC characters ought to be included. So it's a bit tricky to distinguish sometimes.

[(Anonymous)]

Well put, that's how it goes, IME. The argument gets a little tiresome as a whole but I hope that writers take away the significant bits: POCs were/are everywhere, feel free to include them if you want.

The problem is that "but-but historical accuracy!" is often used as an excuse for why you can't possibly have POCs in a setting, and then people enter into some sort of weird Justify My White Characters Olympics where they try to come up with scenarios where there were definitely no POCs. Geez, why bother? If you want to write all white characters, do it. No need to pull up "evidence" to prove why that's justified. But also, realize that there are very, very few situations where POCs didn't exist and could not possibly exist in the context of a fictional story, so just let that argument die.