How It Started (Part 2): The Mermaid
How black is “too black”?
Right when you thought the stress was over, new and improved kinds of stress and anxiety spring out at you like a jump scare. I love a good jump scare but, in my arrogant opinion, they’re a lot less entertaining when they worm their way into your irl existence.
A few months ago, I started writing an action-fantasy novel called “Crystal Blue,” which happens to be my first EVER action fantasy novel. There was a lot about the genre that I still had to learn, but, as is typical of my stories, one of the first notable elements of this story was its highly diverse cast.
The main character is a biracial (Welsh and Cameroonian) mermaid trying to keep the general populace from knowing she’s a mermaid. (I promise it’s not as cheesy as it sounds.)
Tropes aside, it’s a major part of this mermaid’s character design that she has VERY dark skin. Like, her skin is literally black.
Reason being: her grandfather was a pretty dark-skinned guy already, the mermaids are kind of magical, and dark skin is gorgeous.
Here’s the hiccup: I was not very good at drawing, and I wanted to make promotional art for my story.
I’m a much better artist now than I was a few months ago thanks to the magic of practice and boring (but useful) art lessons. But back then I was just starting my digital art journey and I had no idea how to draw someone with really dark skin without their features (drawn with black lines) looking washed out.
I’m half Hispanic (Dominican on my dad’s side) and half African-American, so I’m not ignorant of things like blackface, sambo dolls, and other racist caricatures of black people. I just wasn’t prepared for people to bring up Mr. Popo when I asked a forum full of artists for some advice on how to make my character’s features more visible.
When I say things got wild, I mean things got WILD.
People posted comments (or…rants?) claiming that my character was not “representing” anyone and looked “lazy.”
Some folks boldly assumed that I didn’t know any black people because of my struggle to draw this mermaid. Others claimed that the mermaid’s skin was “just too dark for it’s context” - POC readers wouldn’t care that I gave the character the darkest skin I possibly could, just whether or not the character looked good.
I can’t speak for the entirety of my diaspora, but as a POC myself, I respectfully disagree.
As a black woman, and a black female writer at that, I’m sick and tired of black characters being restricted to a highly limited range of colors, especially black characters that are supposed to be pretty.
For some inexplicable reason, it’s only the racist caricatures that are allowed to have very dark skin, and that idea in itself is wrong and harmful.
There are thousands of shades in the black diaspora, and all of them are beautiful. Whether your complexion is molasses black or cashew-colored or anything in between, you are lovely. So why are some “black” complexions deemed more acceptable than others while other (real) complexions are dubbed lazy or racist.
For those who don’t know, and are curious to learn, there really are people in the world whose complexions appear ‘exceptionally’ dark or almost literally black. I know some personally, and when I was a child, I literally thought their skin was black.
Do these women not deserve to be represented?
Personally, even if my readers will only care how pretty my mermaid looks, I would much rather see an ‘average’ looking character who strayed away from the norm than one more “pretty black girl” cliche.
To the unkind commenter’s credit, they did say that there were other characters with very dark skin who still looked beautiful, but since I hadn’t done much rendering, my character looked “lazy” and I needed to use a different color.
The thing is, I didn’t know HOW to do the rendering. That’s why I was trying to get help.
Unfortunately, asking for advice led to cyberbullying in the form of passive-aggressive (or just plain aggressive) comments.
The most well intentioned artists who replied often just didn’t understand my point. They thought I just wanted to make a character look “black” (african/african american) and again and again the suggestion was to give them a chocolate brown complexion.
But that’s the problem. This is a character- a PERSON - not a concept. I wasn’t trying to just make a character who could “represent” a black girl like some sort of avatar for the entire diaspora. I was writing about one specific individual, who was a-typical, but still important.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with chocolate brown. I love chocolate. Chocolate is a beautiful color. But it’s not the ONLY color that black people come in.
The problem with lightening my character’s skin, even to a shade that was still (relatively) dark, is that it continues to turn us into tokens.
Writers and artists keep recreating the same black character and inserting them into different books, shows, and movies. More often than not, black characters in shows that don’t revolve around the black diaspora have extremely similar hair, facial features, and complexions, and that complexion is usually chocolate brown. That’s when we’re lucky.
Sometimes black characters are given the exact same facial structure as the white characters, and the only difference between them and the other characters is their skin tone.
Again, it’s very often chocolate brown or lighter.
But there is so much more to us than that.
So many faces, complexions, and hair textures fall under the umbrella term of “black” and those people deserve a moment in the spotlight too.
There are people in South Sudan who wear complexions every bit as “unrealistically” black as the complexion that I gave my character. So even if other artists fail to see the value of my creative decision, that doesn’t invalidate it.
Deep dark/black skin does NOT turn a character into a caricature. The very fact that particularly dark skin brings to mind racist caricatures is because of prevailing racist mindsets.
I think about it like this. If someone drew a white character with a 9H pencil and their features were hard to see, most people would just blame the mistake on the artist's inexperience. They wouldn’t assume that the character design was racist.
The only reason why it doesn’t go both ways is because we’re all still associating dark skin with sambo dolls.
That’s unfair. It’s unfair to artists and it’s unfair to all the people who really have this complexion who will never be represented because people are afraid to represent them, or are told not to.
A few months after this experience centering around my mermaid character, I met an asian artist who told me they hadn’t practiced drawing dark-skinned characters very much because they were worried about being offensive.
This isn’t the life we should be living.
For once and for all, black skin is not a problem. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We NEED to keep fighting to make this world a place where no one is afraid of the dark. No one should have to worry that giving a character dark skin or broad noses will make them “racist.” Racism is based in our intentions, not in our mistakes or even in our ignorance.
After 4 months of practice, I (defiantly) continue to draw characters with (literally) black skin tones. It isn’t lazy, in fact, it takes infinitely more work than it does to render my light and medium brown-skinned characters whose complexions never wash out their facial features. I’ve gotten better at art as a whole, and I can now draw these black characters in a way where their features remain visible and their designs remain distinct.
I am proud to be the creator of these lovely people.
We are all defiantly beautiful.
