What About Us? Everyone Who Isn't White!

Welcome back for part two of the mini-series, It Sucks Not Being the Default! part one is Half the Population is Women. So I hope that you read that one first. As you get from the title, this is going to be about the portrayal of non-white characters in writing. Now I will try to avoid being too political. The biggest problem (at least to me) that authors have with portraying another race is the fact that they believe the stereotypes apply to the entire race. Now, just to be clear, not all authors have this problem. But if a writer isn't careful, they can portray their non-white character in an offensive way.


This also includes portraying non-white characters a being unintelligent, highly violent, over sexualize, greedy, and poor. It is fine to have characters like this but, to repeatedly portray a race like this is extremely harmful. Because these traits don't apply to any one race. I feel that harmful stereotypes are born this way. The action of one person shouldn't reflect on others of the same race. I will leave it at that because this blog isn't about politics.

So if the author's white, how are they to portray a non-white character competently? And the answer is to interview non-white people. Of course be respectful of the things that they tell you. They have no reason to lie about their life. It would be good to talk to them before you write the non-white character because there's a chance that some stereotypes crept in. Again, I'm not saying that every author has this problem. This is just me trying to explain how to create diversity in an authors' work.

But what if the author themselves are not white? Will they still have trouble portraying non-white characters? Just because the author is not white doesn't mean they can portray their own race correctly.  Also if they're going to have characters not of their race then, they may want to research and interview people of other races as well. But of course, not all authors have trouble with creating a diverse cast of characters.

So how do we get a diverse cast of characters? The easy way is picking random characters out of one hat and their race in another. For a more serious way to get diversity in characters, it will include understanding the culture of different races. This again can be done with research and interviews. But creating diverse characters is easy when you honestly want to portray diverse characters. Doing it half-heartedly upsets the readers and the people of the race the author portrays in their work.

That is it for this mini series and I hope you like it. This is merely me trying to point out ways that could help with writing non-white characters. That being said, I hope you've enjoyed our conversation.