“Writing all Races Equally”, Problems Inherent In That Attitude
Hi! I recently joined a very diverse writing group in order to learn more about other races and ethnicities from people living those experiences so that I can include diversity in my own writing in a healthy, balanced way, and it has been a lot of fun, but then yesterday there was a conflict which resulted in me getting removed from the group. Most of the POC in the group are from the USA, but I’ve grown up in, and still live in, a small European country, so A LOT of the negative tropes and stereotypes about POC that are deeply rooted in the USA are things that are basically non-existent where I live (mostly because there’s not really any people of color living here). I had always been under the assumptions that POC characters are best written just as regular people with emotions and struggles and relationships etc., not reduced to just their race and treated more special/more negative for the color of their skin. They’re just normal people after all.
My idea had been to write POC characters the same way I would write my white characters, with the same respect and depth and not treat their skin color as something special or exotic or anything like that. However, when I expressed that to the writing group, a lot of the people there got very upset with me, telling me that the way I viewed writing POC was disrespectful and that I couldn’t write any POC characters or POC coded characters the same way as white people because they are inherently different and therefore must be written in different ways. I could see I’d hurt a lot of the other writers from the group, and I tried to apologize but the damage had been done. Now obviously I’m not going to sit here and say they are all wrong and I am right, but I do wonder if this is a widely held opinion, because in my head, all races are equal and I wouldn’t have ever given writing one race more thought or care over another until this experience made me question that.
Is the idea that POC characters have to be written with more care than a white character and treated better or with more respect or thought because of all the racism in real life a stance held by the majority or could this be a product of centuries of racism and oppression that caused a lot of POC people to request that they be written with so much more compassion than anyone else because of frustrations of never receiving equal treatment and finally being sick of it? I do want to clarify though that this wouldn’t apply to writing about a culture or religion, because those are very special and sacred things that I will always do a lot of research on before attempting to write about, here I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion, although I realize as I write this that that might be an issue all of its own, but that’s something for me to reflect on and ask about another day because this is getting really long and I don’t want it to get any longer. I know this isn’t a directlywriting related question and I apologize, but you have an amazing writing blog with a lot of perspective and thought put into it so asking you guys was my first thought after I’d gotten kicked out. Thank you for your time :)))
WWC Note: this ask has been edited down to just the points we’re replying to:
The attitude you hold is called “colorblindness” and it’s a problem for multiple reasons, the primary one being:
White is not the default emotional experience of the world, and assuming we’re all the same is the biggest way ignorance-based racism persists.
When you begin to assume that everyone has a generally similar life path that’s only faintly informed by race, you ignore everything that shapes a person. You currently view your own white experience as the default that anyone has the potential to live if they have the same class, gender, sexual orientation, religion (including cultural religion), and education as you.
But this is a fallacy, and a person’s race will modify everything they have experienced even if they are identical to you in every other way.
The thing about marginalized groups is, we have assimilation pressures. Native people have been forced to live like white people for centuries, and it’s resulted in a lot of bloodshed. A lot of critique of the adoption system is about how white saviour-y it is, and how much trans-racial adoptees (aka, adoptees that are different races and cultures from their adopted parents) suffer either because their white parents refuse to participate in their culture, or assume that because the child of colour is from a white family in a white-majority area, they won’t experience racism because, somehow by the virtue of having white parents, they’ll magically get access to white privilege.
Aka, it’s traumatizing. Very traumatizing. Even if you weren’t directly being assimilated, the trauma just… lingers. It’s generational. Your body remembers, your bloodline remembers.
And the impact of writing colourblind is: a lot of PoC will feel assimilated into white society, when society already tells you that you should assimilate, and it hurts. One of my biggest points in writing diverse characters is: you have to be careful you’re not re-skinning your own values onto a different skin tone. Remember how I said culture and race are often interlinked, even in a diverse area? This is part of it.
There’s a concept in social justice: equality vs equity. Equality forces everyone to be the same, while equity accounts for their differences. This comic illustrates: Equity vs equality vs justice.
For example, equality is having everyone wear the same sized hat. But if you have thicker, fluffier hair (either curly or coiled) then your hair won’t fit in the hat. As a result, many PoC (especially Black) are forced to wear their hair much shorter, because their hair won’t fit in the required hat. This is assimilation
Equity would acknowledge that people have a right to wear their hair however they want, and has multiple sized hats available for people of all different hair textures to wear. They might all be in the same colours or style, so you can tell they’re all from the same place, but they are varied and allow people the freedom of self expression. This is equity that results in actual equality, because it allows everyone the same level of freedom of self expression with their hair.
Writing from a colorblind perspective is the fastest way to hamstring any research efforts for where to put equity, because you are assuming sameness and therefore not researching. Your assumption when writing any sort of character of colour should be assuming difference, because everyone—white people included—have a racialized experience.
This is the principle of intersectionality: that the mixing of any race with anything else will produce a unique experience. A Black Muslim will experience the world differently than an Arab Muslim, and both will experience the world differently from a white Muslim. A Native woman will experience the world differently than a Persian woman. A white trans man will have a wildly different experience than a Chinese diaspora trans man.
They will share similarities, yes, because people are people and anything shared will produce some sameness between experiences. But if you assume that the white experience is the default, you’ll miss all of those intersections and write something inauthentic. The amount of sameness is probably a lot less than you think of on first pass. And then on pass twenty, you’ll realize a bunch of similarities you probably never considered.
It is not reducing people to their race when you acknowledge that race influences every part of your life. It is respecting their unique experience as a person of colour.
So yes, it is a commonly held view that you should write characters of colour as being deeply influenced by their race, because their race influences everything about them. This isn’t even getting into how a lot of things white people assume are constants aren’t; emotions, gender, sexual orientation, mental illness* and emotional expressions are all culturally influenced.
Racism has existed for five hundred odd years (since the concept of race was invented for European colonialist ends), but xenophobia has existed ever since people have existed. As soon as you are Other, you have a different experience than the dominant culture. You’ll probably make a new culture, or will have already had a new culture that made you the Other.
Assuming we’re all the same, while it looks kind-hearted, is actually the fastest way to invalidate everyone around you. It closes your ears to hearing about difference. Yes, we are all people, yes we all have feelings and likes and dislikes and interests and we can share many, many, many things. But our relationship to those things will still be influenced by where we came from.
A person who listened to a certain band to survive a terrible time in their life will have a much different relationship to that band than someone whose parents were fans of them so they associate it with happy times. If you can understand the difference between those two people, and realize you should write their internal lives while listening to the same song differently because of that different experience, you can understand the difference that race and culture will produce in response to the same stimulus.
* a cross-cultural study of schizophrenia showed that in two non-Western cultures (Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India) auditory hallucinations aren’t seen as scary, and are instead seen as ancestors helping guide. This positive-to-neutral view of voices was not found in the American population of schizophrenics, who universally found the voices bad and destructive, indicating there is a strong cultural component to views of your mental illness even if you experience the same symptoms.
As to why you need to put more care into writing characters of color than you would white characters: it’s not because people of color want to be treated better in fiction out of some sort of affirmative action to make up for the racism we experience in real life. It’s because it’s always more difficult, on a writing skill level, to write about things that you aren’t familiar with, than about things you know well.
This principle applies to a lot of things. If you’re writing a story set in a location you’ve never been to before, it will require you to put in a lot more work to write it accurately than if it was set in your hometown. Same for a story set in a time period you don’t know well, versus a contemporary story. Or for a story about a character who has a highly specialized job you know nothing about.
Skill and Difficulty Levels
Think of it as a difficulty setting in a video game. The more you add variables that you are unfamiliar with, the more you’re raising the difficulty level. Writing a story set in your home town in the present day with characters who share your background and life experiences is playing on easy mode. (There’s nothing wrong with playing on easy mode. In fact, until your skill level increases, I recommend it.) Writing a story set in the 12th century on a different continent with characters who are nothing like you? That’s a lot harder. And will require a lot more effort, and care, and research. If you go about it carelessly, you’re bound to get things wrong, and the story won’t be very good.
This also applies to writing characters of color as a white person. Especially as a white person who has little to no interactions with people of color in your daily life.
You wouldn’t assume “well, 12th century South Africa is basically the same as present-day Europe,” right? Even if you don’t know how exactly it’s different, you assume the differences exist, and you put in the care and effort and research necessary to learn about them before writing. Similarly, don’t assume writing characters of color is basically the same as writing white characters. You might not understand what the differences are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means you can’t see them, and need to put in the work to learn about them.This is why you need to write your characters of color with more care than your white characters. It’s because there’s more that you don’t know, and it will be more difficult to get it right.
Authors of color aren’t exempt from this, by the way. Whenever we write characters whose background we don’t share and aren’t intimately familiar with, we need to put in more care than we would writing about characters who are just like us. It’s a question of competency. You have to be aware of what you don’t know, and be willing to put in the work to learn, in order to do right by your characters.
Lastly, I want to draw your attention to this sentence in your ask: “I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion.” You said yourself that you realized as you were writing it there might be something wrong with this way of thinking, and you were right. Nobody exists outside of culture. Unless you’re writing characters who got their memories wiped before getting dropped on an isolated, uninhabited planet, they have a culture. They have been immersed in culture since the day they were born, and that has shaped who they are. You have a culture that has shaped you, and if you don’t think about it as culture, it’s because you’re so immersed in it that it’s invisible to you. And so you assume your cultural background is just what “normal” is, and you expect everyone to share it by default. Anything that deviates from it sticks out to you as “culture”, while everything that aligns itself with it is just the way things are. This is flawed thinking, and you only start realizing it when you become exposed to other people’s “normal” and notice how those are different from yours.
Historical Context for Colorblindness
A little background on colorblindness: It’s a deeply ingrained philosophy in Western spheres that emerged over the latter half of the 20th Century, with the Civil Rights Movement in the US and other activist movements providing a push to view people equally. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote from his I Have A Dream speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is a major backbone of the approach. Most of the people that preach this philosophy tend to have grown up in white-majority suburban areas, which shapes the culture surrounding race very differently from non-white majority areas.
From a racial-ethnic socialization (R-ES) standpoint, it typically emerges in children aged 2-5, as this is when they first start encountering children who look different from them–their parents tell them to treat everyone nicely and that it doesn’t matter what they look like. Psychologically, it changes attitudes towards race and reduces general capability of understanding the differences in experience based on race, like Lesya said before. Many adolescents discovering their own opinions on race can run into this barrier when confronting their biases and struggle with their conception of race in the absence of encouraged discussion of race and its related issues.
Internal Bias Because of Colorblindness
Racial Colorblindness can limit understanding of intersectional issues such as wealth inequality, sexism, queerphobia, etc., as race affects every part of a person’s life. One’s ability to empathize on common issues can also be affected. This approach to socialization affects perception of facets of identity in most respects. Many believe that they judge entirely based on merit or behavior, even when their unconscious bias proves otherwise.
Even though it’s really only been super widespread since the 60s/70s-ish, it’s everywhere in Western media. After the popularization of the approach, the representation of various groups and the messaging spread about race began to reflect it. This continued to the point where it’s being socialized into people of all races beyond the normal parental racial-ethnic socialization. It can affect how children of color approach racism and discrimination before learning coping skills. It can lead to isolation from their culture of origin because they struggle to reconcile the very real issues they see in their communities with their upbringing. In recent years the approach has started to fade, but its legacy remains, and the ill effects can be combated through education and extended R-ES.
Writing characters with a colorblind eye means that character is probably not going to reflect actual experiences, and if the goal is representation, that isn’t going to cut it.
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