Many of the responses to this post have indicated it’s fine for white people to write PoC MCs so long as you aren’t publishing them, because publishing is set up to favour white voices and you’ll be taking slots away from an author of a non-white background if you write diversity.
When it comes to the English-speaking Western market, the issue with this is twofold:
1- Most WWC readers will not be traditionally published writers; the odds of anyone becoming one are very low
2- It places a little too much blame on individuals for systemic problems in an industry
The Statistics of Becoming a Published Author
Quite a large number of people attempt to become published authors. Very few of them make it, and even fewer make their whole living off of it. So when we are giving advice, we rarely assume that these people will become professional writers, or at least, will become professional writers as their sole job description.
Also, the indie publishing market is where quite a few marginalized writers end up going, either from not being able to gain traction in traditional publishing or from simply preferring the creative control. In the indie market, there are no slots for you to take, as anyone can enter the market.
(White privilege is still in effect in the indie market, in terms of who gets talked about the most and whose social media efforts pay off the highest, but there is a slightly more equitable potential from a lack of gatekeepers limiting the flow of stories)
As a result, lecturing people who have a very low chance of making it in traditional publishing about how terrible they are if they try to publish because they’re doing it wrong has very little point, and ends up serving as virtue signalling.
Diversity in creators is a deeply important thing, yes, and supporting diverse creators will help move the needle. But:
Systemic Change Needs Systemic Solutions
So you have successfully convinced a whole bunch of white writers that they cannot have diverse MCs, because if they do, they are stealing slots.
Have you convinced any editors or agents? No. And it’s the agents and editors who will allow new writers to come in. As evident by two literary agencies imploding in the wake of 2020’s BLM protests, and one industry organization near-imploding at the start of 2020 from racism, these structures are very racist and will not be convinced easily.
Talking to writers, especially aspiring writers, is talking to the group with the least amount of power in the situation. Traditionally published authors, both established and trying-to-break-in, are at the mercy of their agents, editors, and marketing team. They are also at the mercy of the governing bodies of their organizations, which may very well not have their best interests at heart.
Publishing is very white, yes. Publishing talks a big talk over being progressive without actually being progressive, yes. You can’t fix those issues without addressing the poverty wages that favour those with independent wealth and/or are secondary incomes for their household, the lack of remote work opportunities (the pandemic ground traditional publishing to a halt, because most publishers didn’t even allow electronic signatures until the pandemic), the fact major publishing houses only exist in expensive cities like NYC, and the lack of part-time opportunities.
How, pray tell, can even a large group of writers fix that, when they are not the ones who are doing budgets for publishing companies?
Writers are not a unionized profession. There are some organizations that have some metrics of checking the industry, but there is a definitive lack of any single writers group that can create a collective strike until diversity demands are met. If a writer, or even a group of writers, strikes—they’re simply replaced. There is far, far too much supply of people who would cross the picket line to fill up those slots for writer actions to have much impact.
The Power of an Established Author
This might be controversial, but an established author adding diversity to their work can indeed help authors from more diverse backgrounds write fun stories for themselves.
Publishing is at the mercy of “the market.” They make all of their actions in the name of “the market.” And since publishing margins are so thin, and they pay most of the costs up-front, they will base everything off what has already sold.
Their sample sizing is small and their studies are flawed, but this is what they’re working with.
If an established author does something like, say, write a fairly prominent character who is of x marginalization, and that representation is done well, and that representation sells and leads to people snapping up that book—you have now added data to “the market” that says that this type of character is profitable, and therefore allowed to exist.
Asian stories began expanding in film after Avatar: The Last Airbender and Crazy Rich Asians, because network and studio executives saw these stories could be wildly popular. Yes, AtLA had problems and got ten buckets of things wrong from the start. Yes, CRA was xenophobic from an intra-Asian perspective. However, both were groundbreaking for their times. The same could be said for Buffy, both for being groundbreaking at the time and not standing up to newer representation in the same genre.
Will it guarantee a trickle down? No. But it does help show the white team that these stories are profitable. And you get enough clamouring for those kinds of stories and enough sales for these kinds of stories, and you begin to see creator profiles diversify.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to act as a bridge between white people and creators of color, by writing a story that has a not-white MC in a voice that’s still tinted by whiteness, but is hopefully not completely white and allows for the less white voices to come in. That is what it means to use your white privilege for good.
The ones who have some power to move the needle are consumers. Consumers can buy not-white authors and prove the market can support multiple of them. Consumers can seek out the indie market to show large publishers that people want to buy certain kinds of stories (this is how LGBTQ+ romances began to break into mainstream).
Note that this is still not systemic change that would allow the publishing industry to diversify, but it is something that would allow some change in what authors receive offers of traditional publishing.
WWC’s advice is primarily to writers. We drop in many notes to read diversity, especially if you want to write with it, because it is important to support real Creators of Color instead of exclusively supporting the characters in media themselves, but we are speaking to writers.
Consuming diverse media will help you write diverse media, doubly so if you are writing something that might be touchy with the group in question.
This has both the benefit of supporting the creators of color and encouraging the market to diversify, but it also gives you very important data around what is safe to be discussed in media. Only good things can come from diversifying your media selection, both in the books themselves, and seeking out reviewers of color to share in the joys of those books while also exposing yourself to new perspectives.
You, as an outsider, cannot determine the boundaries of what is hurtful and what is not. Only insiders can do that. If you can’t find writers from the background you wish to use writing about a certain thing— don’t do it as an outsider. And if you can barely find any authors from that background at all, that’s a sign you need to vote with your dollar first, try getting it published second.
You will need to sample a large, varying group of authors to get a general sense where the boundaries are— and you’ll never make everyone happy. But at least if you have absorbed a lot of stories, you’ll know you’re within some people’s boundaries of what’s allowed to be discussed and not.
Probably the most controversial of the lot.
Depending on which group you talk to, you’ll either get an “absolutely not” or a “well, we have enough material out there, so… run it by us first but go ahead and try?” You can and will get these differing opinions within the same group.
Cultural competency is a skill learned over time, particularly when leveraged by experience. If you are starting from “I’m from a mostly white town that has maybe one token PoC family I was never close with”, chances are you’re better off starting with diverse side characters and consuming a whole lot of stories from non-white people before attempting to write a character of colour as a main character.
But if you’re from a really diverse town, you were perhaps the token white family around, and you’ve experienced tons and tons of cultural sharing from just making friends? You will be in a much stronger position to write something that really tackles deep issues.
If we examine the backgrounds of many white authors who are considered to be more successful by BIPOC communities when writing non-white characters, even for stories centered on identity, we see these patterns of cultural competency. These are individuals who have lived or worked in settings where they themselves are the minority, who have studied the regions and cultures they feature in their stories, who have spent time in fields that put them in touch with a wide variety of human experiences: diplomacy, teaching, library sciences, healthcare and social work.
In short, they are people who, independent of their writing career, have done active work in connecting to people different from them. This does not mean that being a schoolteacher automatically makes a white person better at writing with diversity. However a white person who chose to become a teacher in order to address inequality in education is more likely to utilize the skills they might employ to better understand the perspectives of their non-white students to create realistic non-white characters.
Discourse activists often treat structural issues as if they are made up of isolated problems, each with a single solution. However, most workable solutions must be multi-pronged. Imagine the probable profile of a paid, white author. Compared to their BIPOC counterpart, this person is more likely to:
Be published in a traditional publishing setting
Have wide visibility with consumers
Enjoy the economic and political freedom to write as they please
Much of this is because Western publishing environments afford them these privileges. However, while one can reasonably ask people to be aware of their privilege, it is less reasonable to expect them to restrict their own opportunities and act against their own interests (Would you?). Operating with zero-sum logic is rarely as effective as encouraging people to pursue mutual benefit.
More sensible recommendations for the public as a whole, including writers, may include:
Encouraging white writers to promote their POC colleagues
Rewarding established authors who provide networking/ mentorship opportunities to aspiring POC writers
Demanding greater transparency from publishers on editorial staff demographics, promotional and marketing budgets and salaries for authors
Pursuing expansion of consumer tastes
Incentivizing educational institutions to nurture POC writers
Supporting the number of POC involved in the criticism, evaluation and analysis of compelling media (including independent reviewers such as booktubers of color)
Increasing public consumption of written media through book fairs, libraries, independent bookstores while reducing reliance on monopolies (Hi Amazon) for distribution.
It is easy to point out problems in society. It is a much more difficult and involved commitment to be a part of the solution.
P.S: Individual moderator perspectives will be coming at a later date, likely in a separate post
