Colorless Writing and Internal Editors

[lydamorehouse]

As many of you know, I've had lots of rants here on this blog and my tate blogspot about this very thing: Why Writing Colorblind is Writing White (a rant) by Brutal Woman.

Her reaction is to something that John Scalzi said here.

I intentionally identify my characters by race. In the AngeLINK books by my alternate personality I describe Jibril as a black African Muslim. Mouse is Arabic and Muslim, and he's brown enough that Rebeckah (an Israeli born American) misidentifies him as an Indian from India. Michael is an olive-skinned Mediterranean (his surname identifies him as Italian) and Ariel is Asian, though I never identify which specific country. I did this in my science fiction particularly because the future is so very often shown to be the purview of white people (specifically white males).

But more than that it seems unrealistic. Sure Americans and Europeans seem to dominate the political and economic landscape currently (at least from where I'm sitting), but that certainly wasn't always the case. And it only makes sense to me, particularly given the tendency, shall we say, for the U.S. to mismanage its economy, that some other ethnic/political/economic group could rise to a similar kind of dominance given the passage of time.

But those are the kinds of things you think about when you write SF. When it came time to write the Garnetverse books, I could have not bothered with race. The stories are all set in the pastoral (though not entirely rural) Mid-West, and a person could make the case that there just aren't a lot of people of color living in Wisconsin. Except, of course, that's a lie -- or at the very least a gross misrepresentation. Thus, I consciously identify Izzy as black.

I think that Brutal Woman is absolutely right when she says that when you don't overtly point out that someone is a person of color, the default in the majority of readers' minds = white. It's even a problem when you *do* it subtly, as I argue with Elizabeth Bear in the interview I did with her for the Internet Review of Science Fiction.*

Subtly doesn't get us anywhere. People like to say that race doesn't matter, but I think it does. I've admitted to "the default" when talking to Bear, and my partner and I have had long conversations how sometimes our "racial programming" will work pretty hard to ignore clues if they're too subtle. (She never imagined Poohka from Emma Bull's WAR FOR THE OAKS as black despite Bull's fairly overt, "He looked like Prince.")

I don't know what else to make of that except to say that this is just a really long-winded way of saying, "right on, sister" to Brutal Woman.

* You need to subscribe to Internet Review of Science Fiction to read this, but its free.

Also, I've been bloggin' all over, so if you're interested you can check out:

"Beyond the Cloud of Negative Energy" at SF Novelists and Infernal Internal Editors at Wyrdsmiths.

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I did this in my science fiction particularly because the future is so very often shown to be the purview of white people (specifically white males).

Yeah, that's a good point! Authors create futures in which everyone looks exactly like them and miraculously never meets anyone who isn't exactly like them.

It's not only the physical description, either--authors have to think about how coming from a certain experience affects the character's inner life, and that means doing research about people's lives in the present.

[lydamorehouse]

I love the icon!

And what you said, of course.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I got it from one of the communities promoting International Blog Against Racism Week (which has unfortunately passed.) It's a sentiment I like enough to keep around during the rest of the year.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Yep, me too. laurashapiro said that anyone could use it; just credit her for having made it (in one's userpic comments, presumably).

One person who got away with spoofing it, though, was Neil Gaiman with Anansi Boys. in my mostly-white book group, more than one person had done a mental double-take when they realized that the only time skin color was mentioned was for the white characters. That was kinda cool.

I usually (but not always, alas) notice when authors point out what characters look like, including markers for persons of color and/or diverse backgrounds. I love it when it happens -- but then sometimes I still am happy to see lots of decent female characters, too (but that's a different post).

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Thanks for giving me the info on this pic! I couldn't find it. Now I have it in my userpic info.

I liked Anansi Boys. I did notice that Shadow, the protagonist in American Gods had African-American heritage, and I think that gets lost in online discussions of that book. The guy is barely described in the novel--we never even learn his name directly for heaven's sake--but we do know that his mom had sickle-cell anemia, and that he gets racial harassment in prison.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you were paying attention to what I said, Vincent *is* overtly a person of color. I describe his skin color in Carnival.

It's reddish-brown.

As Emma describes Phooka's skin color as dark.

People skim and make assumptions rather than reading.

[lydamorehouse]

I'm sorry. I thought I copped to being stupid (and racist) in the interview and then copped to copping that again here. I did misread you. It happens, that's why I think it's so damn important to be not only overt, but to occassionally use two-by-fours when dealing with readers.

One thing this reminds me of is the discussion I sometimes have with myself about how lazy readers are. I think the average reader (uhm, okay, I guess I'm really just talking about me here) tends to skip over things to get to "the good stuff" (however they define that -- for me, its dialogue and action) at the expense of things we authors consider really important -- like, skin color, or whatever.

Also I tend to skip prologues and anything that resembles a song lyric or a poem.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I think readers are often incredibly lazy.

But I think the assumed-white problem is broader than that. I mean, I have a character who is brown-skinned, makes occasional references to growing up on the rez, has conversations with other characters about colonialism, and talks about her three our of four native American grandparents, and people still assume she's white.

I suspect there is no cure for it except flamethrowering the unteachable ;-)....

[lydamorehouse]

First of all, it is shocking to me that people don't get that Jenny Casey is NOT white. Her race (or First Nation identity) is really key to her character. Even *I*, Ms. Lazy Reader of the Year Award-Winner *got* that.

However, Jenny doesn't look terribly non-white on the cover... or anywhere near her age, either. I also thought it was interesting that your CARNIVAL cover only shows a sliver of brown skin under the silver mask. I think that abets my racist/laziness.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hell to get a character of color on a book cover. And has been for decades.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Also I tend to skip prologues and anything that resembles a song lyric or a poem.

Oh good -- I'm not the only one.

[sbarret.livejournal.com]

I agree... sometimes you can beat the reader w/ a stick and they still don't see it. My upcoming SF book (Face of the Enemy... cheap gratuitous plug) is based entirely as an allegory to race relations. Humanity splits into two subspecies, complete w/ all the prejudice and bigotry taken to an extreme. One character is 'mixed-species' and I state that all African decendents are part of one subspecies. Every chance I got, I talked about my MC's brown skin, her dark features etc. Still, my first reader thought she was white.

[lydamorehouse]

Sounds like what Bear is talking about.

Having tracked back to Scalzi's original post, I was surprised to remember that my first impression of his main character was that he was black, too. And Scazli's response to the reader who'd also thought that was (paraphrasing), "Really? But he's the most like me!"

And I wonder if that isn't part of the "problem" here. I know that with Vincent (from Bear's CARNIVAL), he was my favorite -- the one I thought was "most like me." Thinking about it, that may be one of the reasons I missed all the clues about his racial heritage.

Hmmm. That's a disturbing thought.

[(Anonymous)]

So, how do you portray race without essentializing what are historically contingent characteristics? So, if you write a person who is identified by "race," how do you avoid taking what counts as "race" in this particular time and place and essentializing it? After all, it is just a product of our particualar culture and time that certain physical characteristics are "racial" and others aren't. Skin color, for us, has incredible social significance. If you give it that significance in some future world, isn't that just reifing it?

So, while I agree that future worlds are usually very white, is the answer to that always to "race" the future?

There are portrayals of different realities that I think avoid this problem. The MATRIX sequels, while lacking the strength of the original movie, I thought did a nice job of portraying a very mixed-race future where physical characteristics didn't have any particular social significance. And in LeGuin's EARTHSEA books, all the major characters are people we would consider "of color" except inhabitants of one particular island who are portrayed as strange, light-skinned people with yellow hair.

jpj

[lydamorehouse]

What does "essentializing" even mean?

I think the point Brutal Woman was making on her post was that one of the reasons Scalzi's work in particular, but other folks in general, "reads" as white is because it is, in point of fact, impossible to strip out the cultural baggage that goes along with "race." (which is, of course, as you say, largely a cultural construct). If you just talk skin color, it's all fairly meaningless and *isn't* really an attempt to be multicultural (because there is, then, no culture.)

I think we should remove The MATRIX from the conversation, as much as I loved the first film, because that's visual. It's hard to "forget" that Lawrence Fishburne is black because, well, there he is on the screen looking at you. In a way, that's the ideal SF because you can be "colorblind" in the way we all talk about wanting to be because it wasn't important to the story that Fishburne's character was black, he just _was_. My only complaint, besides the obvious storytelling problems, with the follow-up movies was that there started to be that whole "we can tell we're in the gritty underbelly of the universe because everyone is multicultural" thing going on, but that's more a media problem and the subject of a whole different rant.

The problem of reading/writing colorlessly is this whole superimposing one's own race/color on characters who are either not described or under-described or desscribed overtly but the reader blanks it.

[k-mankiller.livejournal.com]

I try to include characters of other races. I used to get a little resistance at some of my online critique groups, though. I don't mean anything like, "Why aren't these characters white?" I mean things like arguing with character names, which are spelled wrong/too hard to pronounce/too confusing/too hard to remember. Or "maybe she should dress more professionally," which means ditch the cornrows. I don't know, it all sounds trivial now that I'm typing it up but the overall effect is really obnoxious and makes me want to rebel and put in more "weird" character names.

Of course, I also had someone so surprised that my psychiatrist character in another story was a woman that she accused me of deliberately withholding information from the reader in a misguided attempt to be clever. Um. I didn't realize women psychiatrists were that surprising, and if the name isn't enough of a clue I guess I can put in a pronoun sooner. Um. 0_o

[holy-toledo.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble myself with the whole race thing.

As a good femenist/Women's Studies Minor, I hate that you have to "identify" race in a book for any character who isn't white. Like I don't have to say, "Evelyn had skin the color of ivory with strait, smoothe brown hair and hazel green eyes." I don't need all that, the only things I need to say are brown hair and green eyes if I want to, and even without them people assume she's white.

But then, things happen like when you're pre-screening "Thieves" to your family and "dark, blue-black hair and blue eyes," which would have been all I put down for a white character, does not quite hint that Shea is of mixed descent and actually has a skin tone leaning more toward copper. In fact, the vast majority of the characters in Thieves are not white, and I hate having to describe the skin color of most of a continent!

What happens to books in, oh, I don't know, 100 years when "white" is no longer the "default" race, Chinese is, and then people start reading all these books. Are they going to default in their heads that all the "white" people are really "Chinese"?

And how much is it going to matter anyway, when we often hope our main characters have a sort of "everyman" quality?

-Mel

[lydamorehouse]

"oh, I don't know, 100 years when "white" is no longer the "default" race..."

It isn't really the default race *now.*

But I know what you mean. Even though I said I was going to stay away from visual media, one of the things I LOVED about Firefly/Serenity is that when people got mad/excited/otherwise highly emotional they spoke Chinese. That was a really nice way to show that the culture of majority wasn't white, even though a lot of the characters in the show were. Thoughout that show there were vague Asian visual hints which supported that idea, which was never explictly stated.

Those are the sorts of things I get excited by when I see them in novels of the future. Just even throwing me the bone of a multicultural surname does a lot to mitigate my tendency to whitewash the future.