In which I cannot tell which icon to use

[zeborah]

There's my pretty rainbow-zebra icon which I use for posts about privilege and such.
But then there's my Diddums icon, which I don't get to use very often.

Hmm. I'll go with Helen (whom, incidentally, Facebook recently recommended as a friend for me).

So Avalon's Willow wrote an open letter to matociquala about race issues, and matociquala responded gracefully, and matociquala's commenters promptly started off with things like:

1) "The open letter was an overreaction."

2) "Us poor oppressed white writers just can't win: if we don't include people of colour we're racist and if we do include people of colour but get them wrong we're racist. What's a poor white writer to do?"

Oh, wah wah wah.

1) As a person of 100% white extraction, I feel I can speak for my race in saying that the open letter wasn't an overreaction.

2) Of course white writers can't win. No writers can win. If you don't write any words you don't have a novel, and if you do write words but get them wrong you have a bad novel. What's a writer to do?

Learn how to write better, you freaking idiot.

Of course people will always criticise you. That's life. Listen to the criticism, learn from it, and keep improving.

Edited to add: Some people seem to think this is all about telling people what to say and what not to say. It's not. It's just about me telling people who say words like 'overreacting' that they're freaking idiots. They can still say it. They're just freaking idiots.

Anyway, I'm bored with talking about censorship, so I'm going to exercise it instead.

Any future comments that are primarily about how woeful the plight is for the white writer, and how repressed those politically correct people are being, will be summarily repressed.

Any comments, however, that are primarily about "Yes, this is an issue, and I want to do something about it without being a freaking idiot," are most welcome. Because I'd quite like to have that discussion if I can do it in an environment where I don't have to continually justify why I feel that myself.

If you think I've repressed your comment unjustly you can put it up on your own LJ.

Comments

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm either writing fantasy or future SF and I largely don't mention skin colour unless it's in passing. My characters could be black, pink, brown, yellow or red.

For the science fiction I figure that a few thousand years in the future it's not going to be an issue - or if it is it's not going to be driven by the same issues as now (which as you say are very different in the US and the UK and probably in India and South Africa and Germany and, well, everywhere, too).

For the fantasy it's only a problem if anyone relates the setting to a historical situation and starts quoting context, though my settings are always 'a bit like' but not exactly _that_ place and time.

[zeborah]

My characters could be black, pink, brown, yellow or red.

No they couldn't. If the skin colour isn't mentioned, then it's white.

The majority of readers - and I include myself in this - if they aren't told otherwise, they'll assume white. Everyone in Cora and sequels - in my mind, they're all white, because you didn't say otherwise.

That's because we live in a society where white is the default. In fantasy and sf in particular, white is the default.

So if, as a writer, your intention is that not all of these characters are white, then you have to say so explicitly. Because otherwise your readers will be visualising white.

It just the same as the sky or the grass. If you don't say they're not blue and green respectively, the reader will assume those colours. If you want green sky, you've got to say it's green; if you want purple people, you've got to say they're purple.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't think the default is necesserily white - much depends on the way it's written. Names, for instance. Ramirez wouldn't necessarily be white WASP, and neither would Patel. I'm going to doublecheck my names list and make sure I have some in there that definitely sound more ethnic.

[zeborah]

Yes, this is true: names are important and useful.

(I consider first names just as important: if there's a mixture of ethnic surnames but all the first names are Anglo-saxon, then I know the world is culturally, even if not skin-wise, white. And I'd like to see more worlds that are as culturally as skin-wise ethnic.)

In the stories with Paul (Faith, Hope and Respectful Attachment and its sequel) I did the mix of names. I still want to describe skin colour more because I'm convinced that Paul is some shade of brown _but I haven't said so_.

The other thing I did was, when there were jokes and stories being tossed around, to try and have some non-European-tradition ones. I got a Mongolian one in there, and I think I was trying to do something with the tiger, but I'm not sure how successful I was.