[ SECRET POST #1958 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #1958 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 104 secrets from Secret Submission Post #280.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[megalomaniageek.livejournal.com]

OK so
I'm no expert - I'm white - but I've done a lot of reading on cultural appropriation and stuff and I know people from other countries and descendants of people from other countries and I've read books written by foreign and American PoC authors.

One thing that's worth differentiating, to me, is whether the PoC you're thinking of writing is in a culture similar to yours or in a culture different from yours, and if they're in a culture similar to yours whether they were (or their parents were) from a different culture before. For my example I'll assume you're a white non-immigrant American and go from there. An African American and a fourth generation Japanese American are probably going to be considerably culturally closer to you than an FOB Indian immigrant or Romani living in the UK. The hypothetical African American and Japanese American characters' experiences will be impacted by being PoC in the US and by the culture they grew up in, but overall you'd be less likely to make them seem unrealistic with your natural inclinations for writing characters because culturally all these characters are Americans and are shaped by American culture, so they'll be similar to white American characters you would write. Like, write a character and imagine casting them for a TV show or movie - what would have to change if you hired a PoC actor?
Doing research is usually best though, even just a little. The more the better, and the further away the culture is from your own/the character is from you the more you should research before feeling comfortable.

Try reading something like Mindy Kaling's autobiography if you're not sure what I'm talking about (I greatly enjoyed this book and it illustrates my point, so I picked that as an example, but if you've never seen The Office and aren't interested in NBC comedy you should probably pick something else). If I wrote Mindy Kaling as a character, for example, I feel confident I could write her because she's similar to my age and was raised in my culture, and she and I speak similarly and feel similarly about many things. She and I are both creative but lazy. I identified a lot with her struggles trying to get work after college. Her experiences at school and with friends were similar to mine. But I couldn't construct her experiences with her immigrant parents, which she also discusses in the book. Much of my understanding comes from hearing from her about it, very little from my own experience; it's not something I could spontaneously come up with. With research, I might be able to get enough sense of it for my purposes...but then, that's if I feel the need to examine that part of her. If I was just writing about her work life, it would be something helpful to understand her more fully, but she wouldn't be an enigma to me without my knowledge of her experiences with immigrant parents and Indian culture. It's a facet of her, but it's not her in entirety.