Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.
With the recent discussions about the Oscars (#OscarsSoWhite), especially trending on social media, this article from RJ Crayton discussing race and publishing is relevant. Over at Indies United, she brings up some really good points in a well written, thoughtful manner. As always, let us know what you think in the comments. Do you feel there are issues with race in publishing?
A recent incident at my writers’ group sparked the idea for my post today. A writer submitted a piece where he offered no description of characters that exposed their race. However, the things he chose to write about the characters did make people wonder what race some of the characters were. The main character was a white man married to a black woman, and there were subtle hints — particularly around hair care — of the race of the wife, but nothing explicit. He’d done this on purpose, with the idea that he wanted the reader to imagine the characters to be however they wanted them to be. One of the ladies there, Pam, asked, “Why? Why would you want to be less specific about them? I’ve never heard a good reason for doing this?”
And I totally agreed with her. People motivated by the good intentions of not promoting stereotypes and being inclusive can, by failing to provide certain descriptions, end up with the exact opposite of inclusivity. I can only assume some of the impetus of this comes from Martin Luther King’s most famous oration, the “I Have a Dream” speech. People get in their head the notion that a “colorblind” society is literal, rather than figurative. The idea of judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is exactly that. It is a notion based on the idea that we see their skin color — no matter what it may be — and we don’t make any assumptions based on that. We wait until they open their mouths and speak before we judge them to be fools or geniuses (or somewhere in between).
The idea of literally making characters colorless is problematic when your book is set in the real world. Despite King’s dreams, we do not live in a colorblind society. We live in a society where color is an issue in everyday interactions. Pretending it’s not in any sort of real-life settings (be they historical or contemporary), just isn’t very realistic. Now, if your book is set in some type of fantastical or futuristic world that doesn’t have the current world’s hang-ups, then fine.
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