[ SECRET POST #2637 ]

[case]

⌈ 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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?

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

You'll probably never read this because the discussion's gone cold (since I'm in a different time zone), but I'm going to reply anyway, to clarify my own thoughts.

Of course the characters I write aren't carbon copies of me. (Those would be self insertions!) But if I'm writing a murderer, say, when I've never committed a murder, I reach down into the part of me that's wanted to 'kill' someone for some minor annoyance -- you know, stole my parking spot on a bad day, or whatever -- explore those feelings in depth, and use them as the basis for my murderer, backing them up with research and with imagination, like every writer does.

However, and this is the point, I do have to have had those feelings -- in this case, the feeling of 'wanting to kill' -- in order to make sense of any of the research I do, in order to ground the character I'm creating in any sort of reality. And there are limits to my experience. I have a major OC -- I write murder mysteries set in the LOTR universe, so I create a lot of OCs -- for example, who is a psychopath. I tried very hard to understand what a psychopath is, and the character does kind of work -- people have told me they hate him -- but I'm not happy with him. I found it almost impossible to write someone with no empathy. All the time I was writing him, I was having to ignore everything my instincts were telling me about the way he should behave, having to ignore the pull towards giving him inappropriate emotions...

I am NOT saying, btw, that I think a person of colour is as 'other' as a psychopath!

What I am saying is that if I were to write a person of colour, I would blithely write their character (whatever function that character happened to be playing in the story -- male, female, hero, villain) by reaching down into myself for the appropriate feelings/experiences and supplementing those with research and imagination. If you'd be happy with that, great! I'd be happy, too. In five or ten years' time* I can see myself doing it. At the moment, though, I foresee that doing it could provoke a dog pile (assuming that anyone read my story, though, to be honest, they tend not to) which I'm not prepared to risk. In shying away from possible controversy, I'm aware that I'm privileging/respecting the views of some persons of colour over those of other persons of colour, aware that I'm not doing the thing I admire when I see it in film, TV and theatre (casting persons of colour in roles that were written as default!white -- in Shakespeare, for example -- without comment, simply because they're good actors), and aware that I'm retreating to a place where I am more comfortable, but that is what I feel I have to do, at the moment.

* I think we are currently in a transitional phase, where previously disprivileged persons are taking (and being given) room to express their anger, but that cannot last. But if, in ten years' time, it is still acceptable in online fandom to, for example, call a straight, white man 'scum' just because he happens to be straight and white and male, then we will have failed to improve equality, and simply have replaced one set of disprivileged people with another.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

For what it's worth, I read your comment and I enjoyed reading your view. Thank you.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a definite dichotomy here in how people view things. Personally, I see your approach as being full of good intentions, but still slightly racist in an institutionalized sense because it's still about assumptions that are based on someone's skin color. Of course you can't assume that other people are like you beneath their skin, but you can't make that assumption about anyone regardless of their skin color!

So if you only make this assumption ("they're too different for me to write about") about POC and not about other white people who aren't you, well yes, that's racist. It doesn't make you a bad person, but it does mean that your outlook on race is very us vs. them. There's a reason why people call this "Othering". White people (including people of the opposite gender) are enough like you where you feel you know them, but non-white people are somehow too alien for you to even guess. Doesn't that sound kind of odd to you?

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT, but yes, it seems odd to me, and yes it is a dichotomy. However, it is essentially how the original race!fail discussions began, way back in metafandom. The original spark that set off the discussion was a write author saying that she wrote POCs just as she would any other characters; out of the avalanche of opinions that followed, there was a strong undercurrent of white authors have not lived the POC experience, therefore they cannot understand, therefore they should not write it.

But yes, I agree, it is ridiculously odd and surreal.

[(Anonymous)]

anon the previous anon was replying to!

Until RaceFail it never occurred to me that it might be 'wrong' for me, as a white person, to write a character of colour (though the situation had never actually arisen). I think that the world (of fandom) is now moving towards a place where it will soon be acceptable for white writers to include persons of colour in their stories, but we're not there yet, and I'm not there yet (given RaceFail), and I won't risk it yet.

IMO, that's more about self preservation than racism.

[(Anonymous)]

Copied and pasted from my reply to another anon above:

I were to write a person of colour, I would blithely write their character (whatever function that character happened to be playing in the story -- male, female, hero, villain) by reaching down into myself for the appropriate feelings/experiences and supplementing those with research and imagination. If you'd be happy with that, great! I'd be happy, too. In five or ten years' time I can see myself doing it. At the moment, though, I foresee that doing it could provoke a dog pile ... which I'm not prepared to risk.* In shying away from possible controversy, I'm aware that I'm privileging/respecting the views of some persons of colour over those of other persons of colour...

* And I do have a legitimate say in the matter!