Writing from the perspective of another race

I am a white female and the story concept I have can be done using only a white female's perspective, I just believe to enrich the story of my individual characters, that they should come from diverse backgrounds. There are five main characters. We follow their own individual stories and one of the points I am attempting to make with this story is these five people all come from very different life situations but are all very good people in a hard situation. I feel the story cannot reach its full potential if all the characters are white females. But I am struggling that I may stereotype unintentionally while attempting to do this or perhaps miss a very important part of a person's perspective. This story also takes place in the future (maybe around 50 years from now, still deciding on the timeline). Does anyone have any advice on how to tell a story of a fictional character who is not of the same race, possibly same cultural background? I have thought about getting the main story down on "paper", then going back and really exploring each person and adding more of their background, etc when I go back through. Then after a few more edits, give it to a friend who may have similar backgrounds to the characters. I just feel that I am limited in what I can give to some characters' perspectives due to my own background. For minor characters, I don't have to worry about it this as I don't tend to flesh them out and I certainly am not in their "minds". I do think putting the story in the future does give me some flexibility with it. The point of this story is a fairly political one, so the diversity in backgrounds, I feel, is really important.
Sorry if some of this seems a little jumbled, I just got the idea this morning and it has been jumping around in my brain all day. I am chomping at the bit to start writing the outline and some character sketches, but I feel that I cannot quite start till I get a plan on what I am doing with this issue. Usually, my stories are from a perspective of a white female or male of different backgrounds. If I write from a perspective of another race or culture, I feel that sensitivity and respect are due.

 

A different race or a different background? Many characters in fiction are fairly colourless, in that the colour of their skin does not impact upon their character. Living in London, there are issues that differentiate people far more than race, wealth being the major one.

 

I'm not sure that you can really write the story and only later add in the racial nuances of your characters - would those nuances not play a part in the story? Would they not play a part in how those characters might behave or react to certain situations?

As a sweeping example - and this is just a generalisation - a white man might be more swift to say stuff like, "It isn't always about race. Aren't you just being a little over sensitive?" Non-white folks may say the same thing but it is more likely that a white person would, at least in the west.

Or for example, when I asked my dad whether I should take this new job and my dilemma was, "What if I don't enjoy it?"

His response was, "You can't always enjoy everything. That's why they pay you."

He's Chinese and from a poorer background - he's now middle class and an accountant, but he came from only a mediocre background. Chinese culture is very much about doing whatever is necessary to feed your family - get a good job, a good career to make sure money isn't a problem. Work is work - it has nothing at all to do with enjoyment.

That's in direct contrast with the west, or more specifically with England, where "Do what you love" is almost a mantra, to the point where the Education Secretary once argued that teachers should work more hours but for exactly the same pay because "aren't you supposed to love what you do? I thought you weren't doing it for the money!"

When I tell my European friends I rang my parents once a week, nobody batted an eyelid. When I told my Chinese Malaysian friends the same thing, they were horrified - so infrequently!? They ring their parents almost everyday!

Or when I paid the larger chunk of the hotel bills for our family holiday with my parents and sister, my parents thought nothing of it. In Chinese culture, often the children would pay for EVERYTHING for the parents. It is just normal - because the parents have given you everything, you are supposed to give them everything too, unreservedly. You are family, and family help each other. They do not count every penny.

Yet when I told this to my English friend, his first reaction was horror. "But why did you pay more?" Because English culture is very much split - you and me. We go halves. We pay for ourselves. Often times even down to the penny, even when it's your parents. A penny is a penny. I find this strange, but such is culture.

And then right now, I'm considering putting my daughter into preschool. In the US, there's what, 6 or 12 weeks unpaid leave. In the UK, there's 1 year paid maternity. In the Czech Republic where I live, there's an option of 2-4 years paid maternity. Therefore, the Czech norm is that mothers are expected to stay at home till their children are at least 3 years old - putting a child into a preschool any earlier is like sacrilege. Compare this attitude to the UK or the US and you'll see that people from these 3 different countries might react differently to my question of: Should I put my daughter into a preschool at the age of 2? Many factors go into their responses of course, but to some extent, these cultural conditions will have an impact.

Or currently, at the Japanese elementary school where I work, I wanted to show the children a movie because it's the end of the school year (their school year finishes in mid March) - you know, 'cause it's end of the year so it's nice just to relax a little. I asked the principal and he disagreed. He said, "Movies are fine, but what is the teaching purpose of them? How will they be used? It cannot be just for relaxing. It must be for teaching - it is a lesson!" He has a point - and it's coming back to Japanese culture. School is about hard work, not fun. School is first and foremost for learning - having fun is secondary. European education puts more emphasis on fun than Japanese education.

Anyway, your question is far too broad for anyone to give you actually useful answers. Consider which cultures you really want to include, and then consider what kind of message are you trying to convey. You wanted your cast to be racially diverse - why? What are you trying to say? Now handpick some experiences and cultural norms that would serve in telling the message that you want. You need to be more specific about what you want to write about, because just "racial diversity" - well, that's the whole world. You'll drive yourself mad trying to research every last culture on the planet. And if you wanted to do it properly, which you seem to, then you must be specific about it. The Germans are not the French. Chinese are not Japanese. English are not Americans. You get the idea. Some things might be shared or related but in the end each one will be subtly different - and it's in being specific to the cultures you're writing about that you can truly do it properly and do it justice.

You know, many of my African friends laugh about this. They say about us Europeans, "You always refer to Africa like it's an entire country! We're all just from 'Africa'!" They took it lightly, with humour, but it is telling. It's true - we wouldn't just refer to Germans as a "European". They're German. So why is a Nigerian and a Ghanian both referred to as "African" when they have distinct cultures and languages? So, that's what I mean - you need to be specific.

ETA: You also have to consider where your characters were raised, what kind of school they may have gone to. I'm Chinese by blood but raised in England, and you may have noticed some of the things I said came from an English mindset, but my view on family and sharing expenses were more from a Chinese mindset. Someone raised solely in Hong Kong (where I was originally from) will be still different from me. The children at my Japanese school are very Japanese in culture, even though a number of them have never lived in Japan - why? Because they attend Japanese school and have almost exclusively Japanese friends from their own school. You may pick up on your school's culture more than necessarily the local culture - it kinda depends on how immersed your own parents are in the local culture and how open they are to it.

 

You just need to make them different from each other. Give each one different life priorities, motivations, and belief systems. Then, everything they do or say in the story, look at it with these traits in mind. How would they react? Why? How do these traits inform their decisions?

 

Maybe both? I have a good handle on being really poor verses really rich, I have either experienced various incomes or have people close to me that have experienced them. For some of the decisions my characters need to make, I could see how their culture or race may come into play in order for the political statement to be made.

 

All of your comments were extremely helpful. All my main characters would be raised in the United States. One of the points I am trying to make, is each character comes from different American backgrounds, but they could be you. Each one is different, but we are all humans and the reader can feel themselves in the character's head, trying to make the right decision. I want my reader to feel that different presepctives were looked at and this isn't just the story of white females, but these are the stories of American women. Hopefully that makes sense? So I already have different decisions made as far as the women's socioeconomic status because that is a very important piece of the overall point-- that women who have more, have more opportunities. It isn't negative about people who have wealth, it just shows that they don't often have to live with the same repercussions or decisions.

I think you make a good point about writing first may not be a good idea, maybe I need to just do a very indepth outline instead. I need something to help keep me on track where their stories work together.

 

Maybe you'd be interested in this book, Girl in Translation. It's about a child from Hong Kong emigrating to America and starting a new life, beginning with dire poverty and how she adjusts to American culture, how she paves the way for herself, how she is different not just culturally but also because of her poverty. So this would be one type of American woman.

I would imagine the book, The Help, could be informative? Perhaps set in a different era to when yours will be, but it does give you a glimpse into how life is different for the black American and the white American. I imagine something like To Kill a Mockingbird might be good too, since it very much explores Scout's budding womanhood and the culture of women of her time, and then there's her relationship with her maid, whose name I think is Cal?

And then there's this British author whose books I read a loooong time ago. It's not about racial diversity but the two books of hers that I read centered around a group of women each with their own lives, in their own unique situations. The stuff is more about relationships like children and marriage and neighbours, rather than class or race, but maybe it might give you an idea for how your book could be approached?

The Girl Next Door
The Reading Group
By Elizabeth Noble, both of them.

I've not read her other books but just browsing on Amazon now, it seems she writes women's fiction - many of her books seem to centre around groups of women who are connected in some way.

Your book sounds like the thoughtful type I'd actually love to read Hope to see it on the shelf one day!!

 

Just FYI, I've seen a fair bit of mockery about The Help--that it's a story of helpless passive minorities being rescued by the wise liberal white person. I haven't read it myself, but that would worry me about using it as a source in any way. (However, others disagree with that assessment.)

The Blanche White novels by Barbara Neely (who is African-American) might be a better example. The new movie Hidden Figures? The newer movie Get Out?

I realize that we're using fiction to feed fiction. But, hey, fiction is what we consume.

Edited to add: Oh, yeah. Hidden Figures isn't fiction. And there's a book. How embarrassing of me.

 

I read The Help but a long time ago - nothing spectacular jumped out at me personally. The liberal white American saving the day is a common ailment in all stories about race, really. Even Hidden Figures - I mean, I haven't watched it. I've only seen the trailer. But that clip where Kevin Costner says something like, "We either all go together or we don't go at all!" (something on those lines) - yeah, liberal white hero right there.

Get Out would be a far better movie to watch. I read a blog reviewing it and it sounded very purposeful - a horror with depth. Here: review of Get Out by Justin Lee. Given that I am an ethnic minority and have seen passive discrimination all my life - things those doing the discriminating almost never acknowledge - it was refreshing to find a film like this. I scare way too easily so I wouldn't watch it, but for once it's a horror I wish I'd watch.

I guess maybe books by Toni Morrison would be good ones to go to for black Americans. I've only read The Bluest Eye - the ending's creepy.

And for some reason I just remembered Jackie Chan. I think Rush Hour was one of his first movies of breaking into America, right? It's all played up, of course, but the way Chris Tucker treats Chan when they first meet in the movie is quite telling - the overt racism. (I don't mean the actors themselves in real life. I mean within the story of the film) In the bloopers, right at the end, Christ Tucker is filmed trying and failing to say Xie Xie (謝謝 - thank you in Mandarin Chinese). The clip runs 4 times and still he fails - and right at the end, Jackie Chan turns to the camera laughing, saying, "See? TWO words. He can't say just TWO words. And my English?" (by contrast, Chan is trilingual in Cantonese, Mandarin and English - but from a very poor background. I've never read his biography but I think he pretty much grew up in martial arts school? Education certainly wouldn't have been easy to come by - not in that generation, which was my parents'.)

It was all taken with good humour, of course, but his comment, again, is telling. He must have been mocked for his English in the past. My dad says the same thing Chan does: if they wanna laugh at my accent, then let them try speaking Cantonese. They won't manage one word.

I guess I brought up Jackie Chan because I've noticed most of these fiction sources are about black Americans. It would be good to have sources for Latin Americans, Italian Americans, Asian Americans etc.

Gran Torino is a good film that involves Asian Americans, actually. And I believe you guys have some very talented Asian American authors - the book Girl in Translation would be one of them. Joy Luck Club, perhaps? I haven't read it but it's usually hailed as the book to read, a classic written by an Asian American about Asian Americans?

 

Kevin Kostner definitely wasn't the hero of Hidden Figures. His character didn't go out and find these women and drag them to success. They fought their way there through their own efforts. His contribution was to refrain from enforcing SOME of the barriers that other people tried to set against them.

As an analogy, imagine that they needed to climb to the top of a steep hill. He didn't cut a path, he didn't throw them a rope, he didn't reach for their hands and pull them up. He didn't even particularly notice that they were there. He did refrain from personally rolling boulders down at them, and when others had been rolling boulders for a while, he did eventually notice and say, "Stop that," so that some of the larger boulders stopped coming down.

Maybe that's also true of The Help; I don't know. But I had the impression that The White Woman in The Help did help pull the women up the hill, rather than just decline to actively sabotage their efforts.

Edited to add: And I'm not criticizing the real-life man that that Kostner was depicting. Saying "Stop that" was, I'm sure, a very large act of leadership and courage. Accepting help from people that his culture taught him could not possibly help was also probably a very large act of leadership and courage. But if we have to choose rescuer and rescuee, the women were the rescuers and NASA was the rescuee.

 

Apparently there was no "real life" equivalent of Costner's character... he's, at best, a composite of several white men, and many of the most dramatic scenes in the movie were made up. (http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/hidden-figures/)

I think this points to the danger of using fiction to inspire our fiction. I mean, of course we do it, but there is the risk of a sort of Colbert-esque "truthiness" arising, I think. The legends, shared so many times, begin to seem like the truth, and maybe they blind us to the more subtle, less Hollywood-friendly issues characters faced.

And I definitely felt like The Help was a mess, in terms of race. (I only read the book, didn't see the movie) The white saviour character essentially steals the lives of the black characters, just transcribing their own words and not even editing them, gets published, and gets famous for, as far as I could tell, being a typist. The black characters risk their lives and we're supposed to sympathize because the white saviour might not be invited to the right tea party or whatever it was? Definitely problematic for me.

 

Color should be physical. That's it. It shouldn't affect personality unless they are discriminated against (privileged) in some way. I don't mean inherent privilege like white privilege crap. I mean instances where other characters specifically treat the person differently in a certain way based on their race, that is relevant to the plot.

 

Thanks for the ideas and advice. I have read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help, but I need to check out theses other suggestions to see if they can give me some perspective.

 

I've read your post three times and I am still not sure what you're saying. Are you saying to be discriminated against means you're privileged? Probably not but I can't seem to read your sentence any other way... And are you saying race shouldn't be an issue unless racism is at play? I'm not 100% sure I got what you said so maybe I've got it wrong...?

 

Thank you for your perspective, I also have heard positive and negative regarding The Help in that regard.
Thanks for the book recommendations! My reading list is definitely increasing from everyone's help which is great because I love to read!

 

Thank you so much for your recommends and perspective! Overt and passive discrimation is what would be most relevant for my own book. It is based 50 years in the future, mostly to explain a different political climate than we currently have, so hopefully we are moving forward by that time period and racial issues are not as rampant, but my point is to show that a certain political movement effects all across the board, regardless of race, etc only the wealthy is able to escape and live on their own terms, for the most part. I am trying to show the political movement in a way that shows the repercussions, but doesn't really give a moral judgement on if it is a positive or negative-- that is for the reader to decide.

 

Hidden Figures has been on my list for a while, I need to maybe move it up and then watch the movie.
My own book doesn't have a main rescuer, even in each individual story, I feel like the main character females continue to pull strength within themselves to continue on in their circumstances. There isn't any resuce for them.

 

I agree that I can't use all fiction to help me with this issue. I might go pull some non-fiction from my library and see what I stumble upon.

 

I don't necessarily have a problem with people being rescued. Sometimes people find themselves in a situation where their only option is to rely on outside help, and often that outside help will come from a comparative position of privilege.

However, I think The Help was problematic, for the reasons identified by @BayView .

 

Privilege and discrimination are opposites but both are racism at work. You got it right. You were just confused. I didn't say being discriminated against is privilege.

 

let me know if you think I should ask this over in the character section of the site, but after thinking about this some more, I think my characters will have these characteristics:

Female #1: Mother of two, married. Very religious. I am contemplating her being white.

Female #2: A college student whose mother is from China and her father American-- or vice versa, trying to decide. She is a very good student and much is expected of her from her family and this expectation forces her into making decisions she might not otherwise make and ultimately leads to her death. Is this stereotypical? The Asian child having these expectations? Or is it just true to the culture, so it's not necessarily stereotypical?

Female #3 A mid-twenties, African American affluent female. Her parents are well off and so is her very serious boyfriend's parents who is mixed, one white parent and one African American parent from possibly Zimbabwe, but studied in Great Britian. She is struggling with becoming as successful as her parents and getting out of her mother's controlling grasp. Here is where I want to be sensitive. In my book, 50 years from now, many of the issues that plague the African Americans as far as poverty and incarceration rates have declined and put them inline with Caucasians after a second civil rights push. But there is still a stigma or a sterotype that is felt by older generations and almost a fear, especially due to another movement that took place near the time of the second civil rights push. So this character's mother and grandmother put a lot of expectations on her to be the opposite. This isn't typical of all people in those generations, but it is true for her own family. This leads to her allowing her mother to make a lot of decisions for her, as she is not as dominate of a personality. The wealth of her family intimately saves her.

Female #3: A female who lives in a very poor area of town, but is dating a more well off male. The female in this case would be Hispanic, coming from Mexico. Due to various political decisions in the past 50 years, it has lead to those within the Hispanic community to have a hard time within society in America. I am contemplating having her boyfriend being from a very strict Muslim family, but he isn't going to be the most sympathic character, so I am hesitant. The real antagonist is the mother of the boyfriend, but he doesn't stand up for the female and a couple things would be done in the name of religion --- but nothing that someone with Christian faith couldn't also use in the same way. I think I can make that clear with some minor characters who are also Muslim that the actual faith isn't important to this.

Thoughts? It's hard to describe without putting everything out there.

 

Sounds fine to me don't worry too much about offending people by the way - inevitably somebody is gonna be offended, esp when you're dealing with race/class/wealth issues. Inevitably we do generalise things in our writing - we're representing something, which means we must pick examples that are representative of the issues we're trying to communicate. To do that, it's hard to escape all stereotypes. And sometimes these stereotypes would be true to an individual, in any case. The stereotype of black men being violent is wrong, but violent black men certainly exist, and to depict a violent black man in your story would not necessarily be racism, depending on how you handle race in general in the book.

I'd say speak to as many people as possible whose backgrounds match your characters' and ask them for their personal experience that's relevant to your story. Then apply them to your characters and make them unique to the characters. And then get these same people - or someone else, doesn't matter, but people with similar backgrounds to your characters - get them to beta read your book. It's hard to get everything right when you haven't lived through it, I think, because there will be perspectives you haven't considered, so it's best to get those who have to inform you of whether your characters are realistic and sensitive to real life.

 

So, for me, if you want to write any character who has a different background than you do, I would suggest a little research on the front end rather than after a draft. People's experiences and background play a role in who they are, and that will end up informing how they react to certain decision points within your story.

And that's not just people who have racial differences from you. It could also involve people that have class differences, come from different parts of your country, etc. Also, I personally find generic "white" identity to be a to be a bit deceptive for white writers, because white people come in a lot of different variations. As a white writer, I've had to do almost as much research on my white protagonist "Nina" as I have on her Indian-American co-protagonist "Vinya". Yes, Nina and I are both "White Americans" - but I'm an Irish/German-American man from Colorado whose dad worked in I.T., which means I know next to nothing about Nina - a Greek-American woman from North Wisconsin whose family owned a diner. Getting inside her head required me to look at all three components of that identity (Greek-Americans, Northern Wisconsin, diners). So, I definitely encourage white writers to consider increasing the ethnic diversity not just between white and non-white characters, but also within the white components of their cast.

Now, in terms of writing outside your culture, especially when you're dealing with "racial" divides or cultures that are quite distant from yours, that all goes double. You're going to need to know who this character is, what inputs their cultural background has put into their worldview that's different from yours, how racism impacts their day to day life and behavior choices (and the answer to that question is never "not at all" - and I say that as one of the most politically conservative people here). You probably should also look specifically into common stereotypes of that culture up front and make sure you avoid them.

For Vinya, I did do abstract research on Jainism - but I also went and looked through the newsletter archives of Young Jains of America to try and get a bead on how modern American practitioners operationalize the abstract concepts I only knew from textbooks. I also watched a ton of YouTube videos and BuzzFeed content and such written by Indian-American youth aimed at other Indian-American youth. I found a lot of that stuff really useful, because I needed to avoid stereotypes, but I needed a character who could pass muster as an Indian-American with Indian-American readers. So, the two questions I went in with were "what do young people in this community complain to each other about when they're talking to each other" and "how people in this community make fun of themselves." For me, it really helped knowing both which stereotypes make people cringe ("nerdy Indian"), but also the stuff people talk about constantly that people outside the community just don't understand (I had no clue how much stress Indian weddings could produce). That led me to a character who is purposefully antithetical to Indian-nerd stereotypes (she's a professional pop-music-blogger with extremely bold tastes in fashion, and very much a loudmouth) but I also purposefully left in the potentially stereotypical idea that she has a domineering, culturally conservative mother obsessed with marrying off her kids (which I did because that theme surfaced in almost EVERY piece Indian-American content I could find). I think you can get out a first draft paying attention to those sorts of basics - on revision, I think the thing is to have someone read it who is from that community and figure out which pieces you missed the mark on.

I know that sounds like a lot (and I'm a bit of a research nerd on stuff like this ) - however, a lot of it isn't that intimidating and doesn't take to long. You can get a pretty clear picture of someone in your head starting with cursory research and build onto it as you write. But I would plan out the characters' backgrounds up front and do some preliminary research - for me that helps "gel" the character in my brain, and I get a really good feel on how they react to things.