I’m really not as good at this as I could be.
Part of that is my own blindness, and part of that is the community I currently live in — which has been about as white as white can be.
I didn’t come from a white community. I grew up in a middle-sized town in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin took in a lot of Hmong refugees after the Vietnam war. There were a lot of Asian kids in my class, and a few black kids as well. There weren’t any Hispanic kids in my immediate classroom, but there were Hispanic kids in our school in different grades. We weren’t a raging hot bed of diversity, but we saw faces of different colors than our own every day.
Then my family moved to Minnesota.
Why a town of comparable size in Minnesota would have NO diversity vs. the town in Wisconsin, I do not know. But after 3 years, I began to get really uncomfortable with the lack of colored faces in the crowds around me. A local white couple had adopted two black children, and when I started high school in our new town and met one of the two of them, it was the first time in years I had seen a face that wasn’t sour-cream colored. And oddly, I found that I had forgotten how to act.
That was annoying. And embarrassing.
Growing up, a person’s skin color or whether they spoke a second language was simply another aspect of who they were, like whether their eyes were green or blue or they had six sisters or one brother. I didn’t stare, I didn’t feel awkward treating them like any other kid (including picking on the timid or nerdy ones), I knew the crap the adults said about them was stupid, and I didn’t worry about it further than that.
But meeting my first black person in over three years threw me. And I hated that it did. I stared. I worried about what I said. And I wanted badly to assure him that I wasn’t a stupid racist, but I worried that would sound racist. In the end, the boy in high school didn’t have a lot in common with me, so we didn’t wind up talking much, so it didn’t matter. But I still felt stupid feeling stupid talking to a black person when one of the most popular girls in my elementary school was black.
The diversity in my small little town has gotten better. The diversity in my life has gotten better. But for a very long time, there wasn’t a lot around me. That’s made it hard to remember to include folks who aren’t white.
My first “real” job was working at a coffee shop owned by a lesbian couple, and the LGBTQ community was (and still is) very supportive of the queer-owned business in town. But the town was still very white. So my books wound up populated by at least a few LGBTQ characters, but still not many faces with any color. I didn’t even begin to wonder about that until the town began to become more diverse, and I started seeing more people of color, and realized that while I had included a minority that I was familiar with, I had managed to overlook other minorities that I didn’t see day-to-day. I included a few people with some pigment as passing-by characters, because that’s what a lot of minorities were to me for a long time: background people.
There’s a couple of problems with this. First, I’m being just as dumbly blind as any other white person with no black friends by not including anyone of color in my stories
I don’t know if I feel comfortable or not making the main character of any of my books black or Latin American or Native American. One of my favorite authors made the main character of his last book Native, and the one before that, Hispanic. He argued in his author’s note that if an author is only allowed to write characters that resemble themselves, it would sorely limit us on a lot of fronts — not just race. I see his point, and agree. However, I’m not sure my level of comfort is quite there yet. I’ve been told that it’s okay to make my characters other races as long as I don’t make my story about race or the experience of that race in a predominantly white world. Like, it’s cool if my black or Hispanic characters are vampires or mages or werewolves or what have you, just not cool to make their story about being the Asian mage or the black vampire. This makes sense to me. I still feel just a little . . . weird about trying to write from that perspective. Perhaps I will give it a go in the future, just to stretch my abilities/comfort level.
Second problem, this just goes to show how little people of color are represented in various media. I read, watch movies, watch TV. But still I somehow managed to not put faces with color in my stories, except as background. This is a problem that needs correcting, and not just by me.
I would like to part of the solution. I have never wanted to be part of the problem. But I feel like just being ignorant that there is a problem is part of the problem.
I’m gonna try to do better.
