White Authors, Ethnic Characters
by Racialicious special correspondent Latoya Peterson
On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I decided to give my overly analytical brain a break and delve into some light reading.
I love to read, and as a result of being willing to read anything and everything, I have picked up a few interesting habits.
Case in point being my affinity for paranormal romance novels. I don’t know what it is, but for some reason I love reading about the exploits of women with supernatural powers. After blowing through most of Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the OtherWorld Series, and waiting on the library to stock Kim Harrison’s For a Few Demons More, I was drawn to pick up MaryJanice Davidson’s work.
A bit fluffier (and more in line with the typical romance novel) than I am used to, I picked up the first few novels while smirking at the ditzy Valley Girl Vampire Queen Heroine. I was amused for three books, but was brought up short at the fourth. In fourth friend, the protagonist’s token black friend is riding in a car, and instigating a coversation about the n-word, much to the chagrin of the other white characters in the car.
“It’s just a word, I’m past it…” says the black character, before turning to a white character and saying, “You can call me it just once.” The white character stutters on the page.
I take a break from reading. I flip to the back flap to check out the author’s photo. Yup, just as I suspected…white. I continued reading the book to see how the situation was handled. Luckily, the conversation was dropped in favor of other pressing matters – like staking the undead.
Still, I felt a little shaken by the exchange. Can an author realistically portray someone of another ethnicity?
As a writer, I would say I hope so. Having cut my teeth working on short stories and screenplays (non-fiction writing didn’t happen until recently), my stories do not work in a mono-racial bubble. Some of my characters are black, some are Americanized Latino, some are mixed race-Asian, some are white…the character’s racial background and physical characteristics are chosen with care. The images that are afloat in my mind become realized on the page in the form they shaped. It is almost as if I do not choose a character’s ethnicity – it is simply there, one small part of the overall character. And while I do occasionally assign racial characteristics to my characters for social commentary purposes (i.e. the token white character in my screenplay, office friend to my two protagonists, largely serving as the sidekick/comic relief), for the most part, I let the story unfold as it will.
Some authors can write about different races with considerable aplomb. James Patterson, for instance. In all of the Alex Cross novels I have read (and I’ve read them all), I can only remember one instance that drew me out of the narrative of the story. In one of the earlier books, there is an extremely long passage (a paragraph or two) detailing the suffering that African-Americans experienced at the hands of whites in the segregated South. The passage was fitting, just went on a tad too long…long enough for me to think “Would Cross really spend this amount of time dwelling on dead and buried history when he is trying to track a psychopath before the trail grows cold?” Other than that, all the other novels have painted an excellent portrayal of Cross, Sampson, Nana, and the other characters that populate Patterson’s novels.
Unfortunately though, there are authors that misstep a bit, focusing more on race than the character. I remember reading a supernatural collection, including a story about a white woman being pulled into the world of ghost-hunting by a Mexican Shaman. The story was pretty wan, but what made it worse was the shaman’s character. A Latino stereotype in the making, he is described as “dirty” with “greasy” hair. For a protagonist, he is described as quite unappealing and rough. He also seems to come with five pre-programmed Spanish words – si, chicha, senora, lo siento, por favor – that he uses as punctuation to his sentences. At the end of the novel, the mousy heroine is swept away by his strange and exotic savagery.
Excuse me while I vomit.
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