So you want to write more inclusive, diverse stories which
include people of colour. Good! The problem is that a lot of writers don’t seem
to know how to work this into the story very well. An even bigger problem is that writers don't even realise they are doing it badly in the first place.
What is the Problem,
Anyway?
Currently I’m reading through Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. In these books, we
get lots of description about the protagonist, Harry Dresden. We are told about
his outfits, about how tall he is, his physical condition etc, but one thing
the books doesn’t mention is his race (at least within two I’ve read so far).
The same goes for almost every other character , unless they happen to be non-white,
in which case there is a different approach used. The character Susan, a journalist who is eventually
identified as Latino, is repeatedly referred throughout as dark skinned. Then
there are incidental characters, such as in one scene, where a group of
prisoners are being attacked. One of the prisoners is black, and it’s literally
the only thing about him that’s described. The other inmates do not have their
race described.
The result of this approach is that the reader is encouraged
to assume that everyone is white unless it is otherwise specified. Even in
somewhere like the UK or US, where white people make up the most common skin
colour, it is weird to picture a world where everyone is white. What it also
does is single out people of colour for absolutely no reason. Describing a
character as black, and absolutely nothing else about them, is unhelpful in a
setting where it is quite normal for black people to exist. Unless there is
some plot relevant detail to their skin colour (such as the story wanting to
make explicit how race is viewed the society/narrator is), it is totally
unnecessary for skin colour to even come up.
It can also cause cognitive dissonance when that character’s
race clashes with how the reader is mentally pictured them. Not describing a
protagonist’s race seems at first to be an open invitation to imagine a
protagonist from whatever race you like, and someone new to a book like The Dresden Files may well picture Harry
Dresden as non-white. You could go most the book thinking this, until Dresden
starts pointing out the black people, then the reader says “oh” and now has to adjust their mental image
of the protagonist. They are not permitted their Latino Harry Dresden, he’s
supposed to be white.
How to Do it Wrong
Some writers try to describe race by the back door; in
fantasy novels, writers don’t think that “black” is a suitable descriptor for
their setting, so they will describe the character as “dark skinned” or
“dusky”, or them having “almond shaped eyes” if they are Asian. This is
actually worse than the above methods, because on top of the previously mentioned problems, now the description is too vague
– we know the writer wants us to picture this character as dark skinned, but
how dark skinned? You can still be white and have a dark tan, so would they
count as dark skinned? If this is a setting where race does matter, as is often the explicit case in fantasy novels, are these skin colours indicative of someone being of a different race, or are they simply tanned?
How to Do it Right
The simplest thing you can do is, when describing a
character for the first time, ask yourself whether their race bears mentioning.
One method is to do what J.K Rowling does in Harry Potter , and leave race out
completely. We are still encouraged to make assumptions about race based on the
details provided (like hair colour or names), but we are still free to picture
the characters however we like. Even if Rowling had a specific mental idea of
how each character should look, it never jars with how the reader imagines
them. Rowling was quick to point this out to critics of the stage production of
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, when
it cast a black actor to play Hermione Granger. As she made clear, her
description of bushy brown hair and big front teeth is limited enough that the character could be any ethnicity.
Then there is Ben Aaronovitch’s, Rivers of London series, which does the complete opposite of
Rowling by purposefully telling you almost every character’s race as soon as
they’re introduced. This works because the narrator wants to emphasise how race
plays a role in a modern London setting, especially from the perspective of a
bi-racial, black protagonist living there. It’s also sly as to how it goes
about introducing the protagonist’s race to the reader, mentioning it because
the character worries about becoming a token person of colour on one of its
teams most accused of racism. He similarly mentions every other character’s
race too, often to inform some joke or observation, and he does this
consistently throughout.
Finally, there is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a book in which identity is deliberately withheld from the viewer as much as possible as a consequence of the setting. We do eventually learn that the protagonist, Breq, is brown skinned, but this is treated as an incidental detail - it comes after the book has gone to the trouble of de-emphasising individual characteristics, to the point that we don't know anything about Breq's sex, race or general appearance. The refusal to use identifiers, like pronouns or skin colour, not only serve as part of the world building, but become a a major theme of the book.
