#writing woc

[diverse-writing]

I have a character who’s a black girl with purple eyes. In the place the story is set, in one kingdom (the one she’s from) everyone has eyes like that. In other kingdoms in the world, other people have normal color eyes. I have other characters who are black women/girls who have normal eye colors. The other characters from that kingdom also have purple eyes. I’ve been told that portraying women of color with crazy colored eyes and specifically purple or pink can be offensive. Should I change it?

In my opinion? Yes, you should change this.

Let’s break this trope down a little bit. We often see the “women of color with improbably rainbow eyes” trope commonly surface in two situations:

In magical fantasy, unusual eye colors are often a physical representation of the WOC’s magical powers. The trope is especially common in media aimed at kids and young adults, though it’s occasionally found in adult demographic fiction as well. Think Piper and Hazel from Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Fire from Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series, Storm from Marvel Comics, Starfire from DC Comics, Arya from The Inheritance Cycle, Yennefer from The Witcher, Ada Wallace from Red Queen, Allura from Voltron: Defender of the Universe, Zèlie in Children of Blood and Bone, and so on.

Alternatively, brown and black women are given quote-unquote “interesting” eye colors to make them stand out from their fellow WOC or to make them ~exotic~ and interesting to look at.  Missandei from A Song of Ice and Fire books, Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Winter from The Lunar Chronicles series, Nadia from The Arcana video game, etc. (I can’t come up with more examples of this one off the top of my head but rest assured, they exist.)

Within the context of your book, which category do unusual colored eyes fall into? Are unusual eyes a signifier of a character’s magic? Or are they simply a rare physical feature designed to enhance your character’s “interesting” appearance? If its option 1 where eye color correlates with magic, your narrative setup would indicate that only one country has citizens with magic, which inherently creates a power imbalance that would desperately need to be addressed. If its option 2 where eye colors are just added for interest, unless the one kingdom is physically secluded, rare eye colors would spread across the kingdoms as people migrated. Either way, it doesn’t make sense for only one kingdom to have purple eyes. 

Moving beyond the semantics of this particular book, I want to talk about why giving POC--and particularly WOC--“crazy colored eyes” is often seen as offensive. The truth of the matter is that brown in statistically the most common eye color in the world without even breaking down racial demographics; the percent of the population with brown eyes only increases once you remove white demographics from your analysis (i.e. when you’re only looking at POC). Now obviously, this doesn’t apply to all POC, but in general most of us tend to have eyes in various shades of brown. The problem arrises when light-eyed (and light-skinned) characters of color are overrepresented in comparison to actual brown-eyed POC who’s “normal” eyes aren’t as praised within general media. This impulse to give WOC “interesting” colored eyes often stems from the imposition of the white gaze or, in cases where the author is a POC, internalization of the white gaze. The end result is often the uncomfortable exotification of WOC based on how closely they adhere to Eurocentric beauty standards.

Even if you’ve created a narrative explanation for your character’s purple eyes, an in-story explanation doesn’t justify the real world implications of exoticizing women of color, especially a teenage black girl. Just because Rick Riordan had an explanation for Native American Piper McLean’s “kaleidoscope eyes” doesn’t mean that it’s a good explanation or that it has to be accepted as good representation. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, representation in literature (particularly kids and YA literature, which this particular asker seems to be writing for) is meant to show developing minds positive examples of characters like them in the media. And when the only women of color are shown with multicolored “interesting” eyes, you’re doing the opposite of showing people representations of themselves within fiction. This excerpt from a post on the Piper McLean debacle summarizes the point nicely:

Brown eyes aren’t boring. They aren’t ugly or plain or anything else like that. They’re gorgeous in absolutely every way. But when you only use blue or green or “multicolored” eyes to express that someone is beautiful, when you only ever describe brown and black eyes as “flinty” or “gleaming” or “intense”, you are saying that brown eyes are not beautiful. And when you use other eye colors for brown girls to show that they’re beautiful, you are saying that a brown person’s beauty is conditional on how many white features they have.

TL;DR: Women of color don’t need rainbow colored eyes in order to be magical or beautiful. Making POC “interesting” or magical only when they comply with Eurocentric beauty standards is gross. Brown eyes are BEAUTIFUL and fiction needs to reflect that.

[diverse-writing]

Following up on giving black people non-human eye/hair color, is it acceptable for a black character to have dyed hair if a. they actually have black hair and b. they have black/dark brown eyes

(For context: This is in response to this ask from yesterday. Normally, I answer asks in the order they were submitted to me but in this case, I answered this faster while the topic was still fresh in my mind.)

I really appreciate you taking my advice seriously in regards to giving Black people normal eye colors (though I will say that Black people’s eye colors can span the entire brown spectrum, rather than always being only dark brown). Additionally, I appreciate that you want your characters’ hair to remain black with dyed colors rather than giving them bright colored hair right out of the gate.

However, I kind of see fictional POC with unusual hair colors as a trope that goes hand in hand with unusual eye colors. Of the fictional WOC with non-standard eye colors I listed yesterday, the majority of them combine improbable eyes together with improbable hair colors. In fact, every canonically Black woman I listed has non-standard hair in addition to unusual eyes; Rick Riordan’s Hazel, Kristin Cashore’s Fire, Tomi Adeyemi’s Zèlie, Marvel Comics’ Storm, and DC Comics’ Starfire (at least in the live-action TV show adaptation) all have eyes and hair that aren’t typically found in Black women. As a result, we can see that giving fictional POC unusual hair colors is highly similar--and therefore, has a similar Eurocentric effect--as giving them unusual eye colors.

Once again, I want to return to this excerpt from a post on Piper McLean:

Brown eyes aren’t boring. They aren’t ugly or plain or anything else like that. They’re gorgeous in absolutely every way. But when you only use blue or green or “multicolored” eyes to express that someone is beautiful, when you only ever describe brown and black eyes as “flinty” or “gleaming” or “intense”, you are saying that brown eyes are not beautiful. And when you use other eye colors for brown girls to show that they’re beautiful, you are saying that a brown person’s beauty is conditional on how many white features they have.

If you replace every instance of the word “eyes” with the word “hair,” you get a good sense of why POC--and Black women, more specifically--can get uncomfortable with the overabundance of Black characters with non-standard hair colors.

I do think that maintaining your characters’ black hair and introducing colored hair via dye does change the situation slightly, though I don’t know enough about your plot to give more specifics. In your case, I think you need to ask yourself why you want to give your characters unusual-colored physical traits. Does colored hair or the practice of dying hair have cultural significance? Is there a specific reason one kingdom has hair dyeing practices while the neighboring kindom doesn't? Do your characters of color dye their hair because they feel the need to conform to certain beauty standards? Are their hair colors supposed to be an external reflection of an internal trait, and if so is it necessary? Or do your characters simply dye their hair because it “looks cool” or gives them a distinct appearance? If the answer to that last question is “yes,” I would probably say stick to writing Black characters with more normal hair to avoid perpetuating fiction’s issue of only presenting Black women with improbably colored hair. If you do have a legitimate plot motive for dyed hair, then I would say go for it provided you proceed with caution and don’t imply that dyed hair is “better” or “prettier” than Black people’s natural hair.

(On one last note: If you do decide to go ahead with your dyed hair characters, remember that most Black women have to go through several rounds of bleach/hair lightener before their hair is light enough for color to show. Within your worldbuilding, you may have to come up with an equivalent process that mimics Black women’s IRL hair dying experience. This might be easy if you’re writing science fiction or magical fantasy but could be more difficult--though not impossible--if your world isn’t technologically or magically advanced.)

[thewrittenmagic]

Two black feminist authors talk about race in the YA books.

[asheneclipse]

ncisduckie answered your question:How problematic is it for a writer to write a main...

It’s not problematic to write the main as a race that is not your own. And I could not see how it could be problematic to not mention race so that would work as well.

The problem - as I see it - with not mentioning race is we don’t have enough WoC protagonists as it is. While there is something to be said for letting the reader decide what the character looks like, making it clear the character is a WoC means the character is less likely to be white-washed - which is something I wouldn’t like to happen.

[asheneclipse]

How problematic is it for a writer to write a main character in a race different from their own?

Is it problematic to write a WoC main character (in a fantasy setting) if I’m a woman but not of color? Is it more problematic not to mention race at all?