The writer of Black Beauty actually did a terrible job of thinking like a horse. I mean, the anthropomorphizing was pretty extreme. Which is fine, because it's an entertaining children's story, and because horses can't read or be offended or hurt by the misrepresentation. Black people, on the other hand, have a right to be represented accurately. Yes, the wounds are still there, and there is still a lot of racism on-going. And these wounds have an impact on the way people feel and act (and therefore the way characters should feel and act). If an author doesn't fully understand these impacts, she can't write good characters. The answer to this question will depend on whether Katniss lived in a society where race is an issue. If she's in a completely non-racist society with no history of distinctions based on skin colour, you're right, it shouldn't change the story. That's why it's easier for white authors to write characters of colour in fantasy/scifi settings. It doesn't. Once our world has gotten past racism, colour shouldn't be an issue in our writing. Until then, though...
For me, it's not about being labelled racist, as if I'm right but some other people are being oversensitive. It's about the possibility of being racist. Not deliberately, but as a white person I've grown up not necessarily paying attention to everything a person of colour might notice. In general, I think it's easier for scifi writers to write characters of colour, because you can write a world without racism. But then, honestly, you'd need to do some serious worldbuilding work to explain why, in a world without racism, a world where we've been so far removed from our areas of geographic origin that we're actually travelling in space, the race of "Asian" would still exist. Why, assuming there's no racism and assuming there're no geographic barriers, wouldn't your characters' ancestors have intermixed to the point that everyone's a lovely mid-brown colour? I'm not saying it's impossible for white people to write about other races. I'm saying it's challenging, and we need to make sure we're giving it lots of thought rather than just plowing ahead thinking it's easy.
The writer of Black Beauty actually did a terrible job of thinking like a horse. I mean, the anthropomorphizing was pretty extreme. Which is fine, because it's an entertaining children's story, and because horses can't read or be offended or hurt by the misrepresentation. Black people, on the other hand, have a right to be represented accurately. I'm really not trying to be tempermental here, I just still don't get it. "Black people" is such a general term. You've got black Africans, black Carribeans- are we talking about race or colour? If we're talking about race- the fact that you're writing a character of someone who lives in another country then yes, research away. But what I think is that it's silly treating someone of a different colour in such a tiptoe-way. How would someone go about writing a so-called "accurate" black or Asian or Indian or white or any other coloured person? As soon as you say represent an "accurate black person" you're saying that there's a typical way for someone of a different colour to act. There isn't. You'll get people who are of different colours being mean, nice, funny, serious. You cannot write a colour into a mould. There is no such thing as writing an accurate person who is a different colour.
To side with BayView for a moment, imagine a black guy in the suburbs of America. A happy-go-lucky friendly dude who loves to hang out with his friends, go on a jog, play videogames, watch movies, etc. He's no different than anyone else. However that won't change how others react to him. He might have to deal with the fact that the old lady on the porch freezes and stares at him every time he walks by on his morning jog. When he watches horror movies, he'll have to deal with the fact that the black character is almost always the first one to die while the white characters save the day. He might even have to live with the fact that whenever he's at the park, an overly-worried mother might rush her daughters away from him. He might have to deal with the fact that some people just don't like him because his skin is a different color. It's not that we're afraid to write about black people, or people of other ethnicities; we're afraid to write about them as if they don't have to deal with the fact that there are people in this world who look down at them because of their skin color. It'd be like if we wrote about a gay person who never had to worry about homophobia. It's unrealistic and insulting.
No, I agree, there's no monolithic character of colour. And I agree, you'd need to know a lot more than just the character's colour in order to write her accurately. And I agree that there's no biological connection between skin colour and personality. But, depending on where your character comes from, there could be a huge social connection between skin colour and personality, at least those aspects of personality that are socially derived. Obvious example - in the post-Ferguson mess, there has been a lot of talk about the relationship between black people and police. Obviously this talk is at a macro-level - black people as a community, the police as a group. There are lots of exceptions, quite a few black police officers, whatever... but assuming your black character doesn't meet any of those exceptions, it seems clear that a young black man in the US in 2015 is very likely to have a different attitude toward the police than a young white man. Likely enough that if your character didn't have that different attitude, you'd really need to explain how he managed to avoid it. So, say your character gets into trouble, knows he looks guilty, and sees a police officer. It would be much more likely for a white character to ask the police officer for help than for a black character to do so. Not because of anything inherent in each character's biology, but because of the system under which they've grown up. And then once we've got that basic difference, what are the other implications? If a character feels he can't really trust the most obvious symbol of governmental authority in his world, is he going to be equally likely to trust other symbols of governmental authority? etc. Assuming you agree that there are still serious issues with race in the US, and assuming you agree that these issues have an impact on real-world black Americans, I think it has to follow that black American characters would also be impacted. Obviously this is a US example, but I think it applies to First Nations in Canada, Australian aboriginals, etc. If you're writing in a setting where race doesn't matter, then race shouldn't matter to your characters. Absolutely. But if you're writing in most current-world settings, I think it will have a pretty significant impact on them, and ignoring that impact will lead to characters who don't feel real.
