fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2637 ]

[ SECRET POST #2637 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2637 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 070 secrets from Secret Submission Post #377.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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... but who lives in a place with zero non-white people? I mean really, none at all?

New Hampshire.

Maine. I'm pretty sure there are a number of small towns up in the northern parts of the state where no one non-white has ever been since they were founded.

Stephen King's from Maine and he still manages to write black characters, somehow. Maybe it's not as crippling of a handicap after all?

This. Also? Stephen King just writes characters.

Have...have you read Stephen King's black characters? Up to this day he's still recycling the same Magical Negroes that appeared in some of his earliest stories. He's also still recycling the same horror tropes, so it might be that he feels, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (But it is broken, oh, god.)

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-24 03:44 (UTC) - Expand

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darkmanifest - 2014-03-24 03:53 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-24 04:58 (UTC) - Expand

yes, stephen king. this is where i want to hang my hat for the "it's totally possible for white writers to write PoC characters" argument. this is the hill i want to die on.

Many places in Eastern Europe, for one, don't have that many non-white minorities. I'm not saying there aren't any at all, but I don't think I've seen any non-whites, aside from the occasional Romani, outside of Warsaw in Poland, for example. (But I don't live in Poland. Maybe they do have another big minority).

It's just as likely to live in an entirely white community as it is to live in an entirely black, asian or even native american community.

Poland is still overwhelmingly white, even though it's been slowly changing over the past decade or so, but the only considerable minority (size-wise) are still the Romani (though their number doesn't even begin to approach the number of POC in countries like the States, the UK or even Germany or France). But given our recent history, it's not all that surprising that there hasn't been much immigration movement (simply because it was almost impossible under the communist regime), so chances are that you might live your entire life in Poland (especially in the rural areas) and not meet a single person of color.

There can also be a difference between the people physically around you and the people you tend to notice, whose images would be ready in your mind when reading. Not saying that's a good thing, but it happens.

I had not seen any non-white people irl before I turned 15 and visited the capital city of our country for the first time... That's how Eastern Europe is.

This is a good point, but I have a question. Say you were going to write a story. Or maybe you've already written one? The things that took place in your story... were they only things that take place in your hometown? Is your story completely bound by the reality of your daily existence, or are you going to include things in it that you just pluck from your imagination because you're a writer?

What I'm getting at is, if a writer comes from a place where there genuinely are no non-white people, they don't have to be bound by that unless they want to. I want to write stories about vampires, airships, crimefighting duos who live on a riverboat and gamble for a living... none of those people or things exist in my life except as figments of my imagination. So why couldn't or wouldn't I also imagine greater diversity of race for my characters, regardless of the lack of ethnic minorities in my town?

nayrt - I think writers may wish to include more diversity in their stories even if they don't experience it in their personal lives.

BUT, the OP was talking about fancasting books (presumably not written by the fancasters). And if I'm visualizing people from books, I tend to visualize things that are similar to what I know and to the people around me. I default to my experiences, unless the writer cues me otherwise.

If you are white, that apparently makes you a "big ol' racist." At least according to this secret.

SA. Oops, I'm sorry - I see you were posting a subsequent question to AYRT.

nayrt

It's not the same, though, is it?

I've also written airships and elves and werewolves, I've written people from Far Harad, and I've written Blaise Zabini as a minor character, but I would never attempt to write an OC of colour because I have no experience, either cultural or social, of what it's like to be a person of colour, so the character would simply be me (a white person) with darker skin.

You're arguing that (in a fantasy context only?) that doesn't matter, and five years ago I might have agreed with you, but the discussions I have seen online, and the opinions expressed by people who I have no reason to doubt are persons of colour, have persuaded me that, at present, it would be an inappropriate thing to do it.

Is that racist? There's no simple answer. To some people (including me), it is, because it means I'm assuming that persons of colour are somehow different from me. But to other people (also including me, looking at it in a different way), it's respectful, because I'm not assuming that I (a white person) am some sort of archetype.

Okay, I'm...gonna be a bit harsh, here.

If every character that you write is just you, then you're doing something wrong. People are often told to "write what they know," but that's just a jumping off point, and holding hard and fast to it is a recipe for stagnation and redundancy.

It is possible to write characters who are nothing like you. It involves research and hard work, but it's necessary, and if you're not doing it, then the fact that you're avoiding writing POCs is the least of your problems.

As to the rest, the individuals that you came across who think that white people should not write non-white people are flat-out wrong. It does not matter if they themselves are not white; their attitude is irrational and self-defeating. One cannot cry out for representation while simultaneously stifling it, unless one is more interested in being angry at the problem than in fixing it.

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-24 10:29 (UTC) - Expand

Upstate New York. Scandinavia. There are still lots of places out there.

Scandinavia is /not/ uniformly white. Some isolated rural areas and towns? Sure. But as a whole? Absolutely not.

na

But the question was, ... but who lives in a place with zero non-white people? I mean really, none at all? One of the answers is, some Scandinavian people. They don't even have to live in an "isolated rural areas or towns". The further up north you go in my country, the less likely you are to see POC*. I think I was 20 (so abuot 10 years ago) when I first saw a POC when I went to attend a university in a bigger city, and I certainly didn't live in a rural or isolated ares. You see more POC even in my hometown now because the immigrants and refugees have finally started to spread from the south.

*I don't count the local Roma community as POC since they don't do that themselves.

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-25 18:19 (UTC) - Expand

Agreed.

Also, it is not racist to have an all-white cast in a work set in Scandinavia.

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-24 15:43 (UTC) - Expand

Right. Just as much as Japan isn't uniformly Asian.

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-25 17:58 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2014-03-25 18:05 (UTC) - Expand

Certain parts of rural Home-Counties England. The county I live in is 98% white. I'd never seen a non-white person until I first went to London at 15.

Never seen in real life, to clarify.

OK so not quite all white populations, but some of the towns in the borders of England and Wales have some Asian families but hardly any Black residents at all. The town where I lived for a short while (Hereford), the first Black family moved there in 1970s (according to the collective memory of my long-time native colleagues - so take that with a pinch of salt). I think there were only a handful of black people when I was there (the early noughties).

Coming from a very ethnically diverse city, it was really, really disconcerting.

Areas of rural Ohio. We just have Amish out here.

(I'm not kidding. The first time I ever personally saw someone who wasn't white I was five or six, and my mom had to hush me because I kept trying to ask her why that man was so tan. The only poc's I'd ever seen were on TV, and I thought they were pretend, like cartoons or magic.)

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