White Characters Dominating Fantasy Worlds

I'm not quite following. Can't tell if we agree or disagree here.

 

It didn't matter to me what color my character was. Because the story was about a kid buying drugs. Not a black kid buying drugs, not a white kid buying drugs. Just a kid.

In the story I referred to, there are three major scenes. One at his house with his mother where she asks him to buy drugs. The next is the drug dealers house where he buys the drugs, then the climax takes place right around the corner of his house as he is about to return with the drugs. He's not interacting in any place that he would be discriminated against.

So, in my specific story, is he automatically white because he wasn't discriminated?

 

I can't tell what the reader is likely to assume unless I read the story.

A question that seems related to me though perhaps not to you: If our language had a comfortable gender-neutral pronoun, would you have been comfortable not specifying whether this child was a boy or a girl? If not, why not?

 

I think Simpson overestimated the percent of non-straight individuals in the US, otherwise the math would be correct. I found an article from the Washington Post that puts white males at 31% of the U.S. population (second largest single demographic group, behind white women at 32%). It is a few years old though.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/08/65-percent-of-all-american-elected-officials-are-white-men/?utm_term=.c2c2d324c730


The stats I can find put the percent of Americans who identify as LGBT at 3.8%, so you'd end up with somewhere between 29 and 30% of the population as straight, white men.

 

I think that you have a math error here--you seem to have split that 3.8%--perhaps between male and female? You'd leave it whole, which would put you at 27.2%.

 

That would be true if it was 3.8% of the male population, but it's 3.8% of the whole population. So you have to multiply rather than subtract.

Edit: so that's 31 x .038, which would give you 1.178% of the whole population is non-straight white men, and 29.822% would be straight white men.

 

But you said--

So that's why I asked.

Edit: my story is set in a non-named city in the US. My character is not discriminated against. I still don't think my character is pretty obviously anything.

 

Edited to remove cupcakes.

Hmm. Ok, I either see your point now or I've been hypnotized.

Edited to add: Yep, your math is right and mine is wrong.

 

Yes, I overstated. I was thinking of a book-length story. While it's not impossible for a book-length story with a character of a discriminated-against category to avoid all scenes that would involve discrimination or the effects of discrimination or any and all results of discrimination, it's pretty unlikely--I feel that you'd have to make it a major part of the writing of the book, like the Hilary Tamar books make not-revealing Hilary's gender a major part of the books.

In a short story, it's easier. Now, when you said "drugs", I thought your child was going to the drugstore and presenting his mother's prescription. I think that's a situation where race is likely to have an impact on the reactions of the adults. A privileged white child is more likely to get sent home with a head-pat (but probably no drugs), while a black child (privileged or not) in a white neighborhood is more likely to be speaking to the manager or the police.

I'm still curious about the boy/girl question.

 

Sorry I meant to answer this and spaced it.

I would have been thrilled to use a gender neutral pronoun instead of specifying male or female. I only specified because I all but had to. Having a gender neutral pronoun would have fit with my ultimate goal of making it less about who the main character is and more about what he/she is doing.

 

This means that you are admirably consistent, and also that your writing style and process are so different from mine that I can't address it with any level of comprehension.

I'm not saying that as a criticism, in case that's not clear. Like a clean-culture row gardener and a food-forest gardener--neither is bad, but they're just too far apart to discuss certain things.

 

I'm not saying that's my goal for all my writing. I love character driven stuff, too.

But for that specific story, the plot was so thematically heavy that I wanted to best showcase that aspect of this particular story.

 

Well, if the person killed was a racist person, maybe, but that's not what I meant. Can we just drop it?

 

A practical problem I've seen with pushing "diversity" is the emergence of dozens if not now hundreds of threads by various forum members, asking how to write "non token" minorities without making it seem political, or how to write a female character, as if that person never met a female in his entire life, not even his own mother.

 

Right, so wouldn't it just make more sense to let people write what they want to write?

I don't think anybody is afraid of writing non-white characters. Everybody I know who mainly writes straight-male, white characters, tends to do it just because. And the same can be said for those who don't write straight-white, male characters.

 

That's both White Hispanic and White non-Hispanic: Wikipedia says that 63.7% are White non-Hispanic and 8.7% are White Hispanic. (Also that there are 0.97 males for every female)

Orientation is trickier to measure because online surveys (even those not sponsored by LGBT groups specifically) tend to show wildly higher numbers than official government surveys, but the ballpark that I go with is: 4% ace, 4% bi, 7% gay. The "official" estimate is 1% asexual, but that's from before most people even knew that it was a thing, so it would have to be higher – people wouldn't join sexual preference surveys if they didn't think of their lack of interest as a legitimate preference – and the percentage who are gay would have to be even higher than that. 15% gay/bi/ace seems middle-of-the-road enough that if it's too high or too low, then it won't be by very much.

 

Yeah, that's not a demographic we're supposed to hear about and think "minority"

 

But by that logic everyone's part of a minority, so it cheapens the term. I mean, I get what you're trying to say and basically agree with it, but it still seems like a weird argument if you're pushing for more minority representation. It's just too easy to twist that argument into saying that writing a straight white man is doing just as much for diversity in literature as writing, say, an LGBT character - they're all minorities, right?

 

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But diversity isn't about writing any single minority - that's the whole point of diversity. It's about writing a diverse group. And if one group is already totally over-represented, then...?

 

Maybe it's because the English language is predominantly used by white people? Are we going to push for statistically uniform ethnic diversity in Chinese/Mexican/etc. literature?

 

I grew up with Star Trek, westerns and Clint Eastwood. So, I wrote...you guessed it, Star Trek, westerns and Clint Eastwood. That meant, white guys in charge and white guys to the rescue. Then, inspired by a song, I wrote a short story about a young woman who was dealing with the results of a choice she had made. Where my other short stories had always been successful and well received, this one bombed. But, you know what? All of these girls that I had know about, that I had passed in the hall and sat with in the classroom, approached me and told me how much they had loved the story and how it had touched them. Not one white guy had ever had that kind of reaction. Screw awards and screw popularity. From that point on, I wanted to write something that meant something to somebody, even it if was just one person in the room.

 

....what?

Have you truly not noticed that there are non-whites in the US, Canada, Britain, other English-speaking countries? Really? Seriously?

Your logic is not our human logic.