if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do… research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?
Unless you’d consider yourself an expert on medieval history, if it feels easier to get into ‘the mind’ of an 11th century knight than it does a normal 21st century person of a different ethnicity than yours that’s not a sign of ‘being woke’ and you should ignore any weirdo twitblrs that basically wanna reskin racial Othering as a good and moral thing to uphold bc that’s what this discourse amounts to
I would much rather have white people wanting to learn about my cultures through trying to write about them than to have them be so scared of getting it less than perfect that they’d ignore them completely. And even if something is not quite right, there’s a massive difference between maliciousness and ignorance, and people treating those two as the Exact Same Bad also contributes to this othering attitude.
Being so scared of being disrespectful that you give a nonwhite character absolutely no flaws, ambiguity or just plain human traits is how you end up just churning out bad characters, not respectful ones.
