I had my main character's insensitive co-adopted brother make fun of her appearance, though she herself was never told where her parents were from.
I have a similar issue with my characters sometimes. They are quite diverse, since that's what I like, and that's what my life looks like. And I want the reader to see the spectrum that I'm creating. For example, in one of my stories, my protagonists are a couple - black girl, Korean guy. I typically describe black girls with brown/dark skin, kinky hair, braids, full lips, afros, etc. With my Korean character, you can kind of tell by his name - River Seung. And I sometimes make allusions to his family. I love writing mixed/ambiguous character. And in one of my novels, it takes place in a medieval-like fantasy world. Two of the main characters have blond hair, blue eyes, sandy hair, green eyes - so that's not an issue. However, there's a black girl with an afro... but I can't exactly call her "black" nor can I use "afro" because "Africa" does exist in this particular world. So, that was pretty difficult. In one of my recent short stories, though, the protagonist isn't described at all. It's told through her eyes, and I want the reader to identify with her as much as possible. She could be literally anything.
in the novel I'm currently writing, the setting is a small town in the midwest, so obviously most people are white, and 2 of my characters are african american and one is hispanic. For the hispanic character, his name is pretty self explanatory, and for the two others, I added some cultural 'hints' , ex the character is from the south, and also the way she talks has some features of african american english, and the last one, is not going to be important until the end of the book so I didn't even mention the way he looks etc so we have no way of knowing his ethnicity. Anyway, all that to say that I don't say, " this character's skin is black etc" I never mention the ethnicity of a character just a the beginning of the description, unless I need to for the plot etc
Eh... I don't see this as "obviously" at all. Are you seeing the Midwest as almost entirely white? I'm tentatively guessing that you're not from the US? I'm also concerned about what sound like possibly stereotypical speech patterns?
One thing I wouldn't necessarily want to bleed into literature from Hollywood is the surprisingly common typecasting of African-American characters into these (often less educated) clichés with very BEV-heavy vernaculars, often also used for comic relief, especially as the white character's best friend if they're male, or as the "sassy" best friend of the white female MC, usually serving as the interim savior of the weaker and shyer white gal until her usually white, male love interest arrives on his white steed. This is not a scientific observation in any sense of the word, but I'm subscribed to quite a few African-American YouTubers, probably at least 50, possibly ~100, and they're pretty much all very well-spoken and at least I can't discern any ethnicity in their speech patterns unless they use BEV for comic relief/sarcasm (e.g. Nathan Fisher does this a lot to poke fun at racial prejudices). Granted, that's a pathetically small sample, but since I live in a mostly white community, the few African-American people I'm around with any frequency (students and professors at uni) are an even smaller sample although they, too, lack ethnic speech patterns discernable to my EFL speaker ear, which makes me suspect clearly ethnic vocab and way of speech isn't nearly as common as Hollywood would have us believe. Of course this is not to say there aren't different groups that use different vernaculars to establish and portray a specific (group) identity, but replicating such speech patterns might be dangerous for someone who's not a part of the group, it can come across as racist. In this sense it would be less racist to just mention the character is black, if it's necessary information, and have them speak without clear ethnic speech patterns or at least focus more on regional speech patterns shared by most characters from the same region instead of being afraid of saying the character is black while making them speak like the token black character from your average 2nd rate action movie.
Depending on what character the perspective is I usually say it outright, but if its a more liberal character then I wouldn't. I have also read somewhere (it was talking about TV shows) that the general audience sometimes doesn't know what to do with abstract characters. That its easier to understand something they expect, using stereotypes without being offensive. Just that you have to make the world/ characters relatable and even if its a culture they don't necessarily have a familiarity with, the audience will need to relate.
Ummmmmmmm.............. have you ever been to the Midwest? And I mean the actual Midwest, not just the big cities. Big cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Milwaukee, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, yeah, those cities are filled with blacks. But outside of those few very large cities, black people hardly exist anywhere in the Midwest. The region IS almost entirely white. It's just one big, huge, rural expanse of vampire-white German farmers. In the average Midwestern town/village, minorities of any kind are so rare that people stare at them like some sort of exotic zoo animal; traffic slows when a black man walks down the sidewalk. People don't know what to do when they see someone who isn't white (though the typical response is "don't say anything, don't make eye contact, and quickly shuffle away before - god forbid - they try to speak to you"). If you were to drive around any one Midwestern town and collect one cent from every non-white person you came across, you would not have enough change at the end of the day to use a payphone or a gumball machine; you might be able to buy a drink from a six-year-old's lemonade stand, provided he's nice enough to give you a discount. Welcome to the Midwest.
Is Kansas mid-west enough for you? My mother grew up in a very small town where there was exactly one black family. He was the preacher of the town. There were a lot of different types of Indians around, but only one black family (About 5 of them. Parents and three kids). I've already told the story about how my Mom came down to the south east, and didn't realize that the N word was such an "offensive" word. She thought it meant to be hard working. Where I am right now (south East USA) you can tell the difference between a black person and a white person just by speech. It's slightly more difficult if they're educated, but I can guess (with a 98% success rate) if a person is white, black, or other just by listening to them. It's not always just their southern twang.. but there's something there that's different. I'm not sure how to describe it. I've traveled to many different places, and I know that people are different everywhere. You can tell you're in a different state just the way people (of all races) speak or carry themselves. It's quite interesting.
I have done a lot of research concerning the state I'm setting my town in ( Iowa) from Immigration data to population census and I even went to several real estate websites where they give information about the ethnic breakdown of different neighbourhoods etc.. The degree I'm studying is in English language & civilization, I have studied american history, from the first settlers to nowadays, I also have a friend from the midwest who gave me info about her own small town, and I also study linguistics/sociolinguistics as well as phonetics , so I think I know a thing or two about the Midwest and vernacular english.
Hmm. Two-lobed response on my part. First, I grew up in the midwest, but I'd call the area "suburbs", not "rural", so that may be the difference. I was picturing your small town as being near another small town; it sounds like your small town is separated from the next one by loooong expanse of corn or grazing land? If so, then I defer to yours and others' expertise on the demographics. However, if a non-white face is that rare, I would think that the characters would be pretty conscious of it, and so I can't see any reason not to mention it flat out.
@ChickenFreak The Midwest is not monolitihcally white but Iowa in particular is one of the most heavily Caucasian areas in the U.S. They get beat out by Vermont and I think New Hampshire - maybe one or two others - but if you're looking for a lily-white small-town American setting, rural Iowa is about as close as you can come. I actually had to work an exhibit booth at the Iowa State Fair one time, and got the opportunity to watch half the state parade before my eyes for three days at a time...which was culture shock to me as a Coloradoan (now transplanted to Washington DC). I thought I had a handle on "White America" before I spent those three days in Des Moines and I left realizing I didn't have a freaking clue about anything other than my Mountain West and East Coast bubbles. It was total culture shock, and yes it was almost entirely white people. Now, @PrincessSofia - One thing I definitely would advise you to do is follow a lot of local Iowa TV news stations on Facebook and get a feel for the area in it's modern iteration. You're right about the demographics and such (I do that for foreign settings in my own stuff), but where you might hit stereotypes is what people think of as "rural white America". Your "midwestern farm kids" these days are going to be a lot more modern, less idyllic, etc. For instance, the one thing I took away from my time in Iowa that surprised the heck out of me was that I'd never seen such a heavily tattooed group of people...especially among whites. It was a very blue collar, ball-cap wearing, salt of the earth environment - and in 2015 that means tattoos on both sexes, rock music, etc. Not to overstereotype, but look at what country music is doing right now - cowboy hats are gone, backwards ball caps and ripped jeans are in. Luke Bryan is topping the charts singing about his "Country rock mixtape" which includes "a little Conway (Twitty) and a little T-Pain." (From the song "That's My Kind Of Night"). Kid Rock and Eminem are the voices of the generation as much as anyone else. Oh...and Meth...don't forget Meth...drug of choice for small town America and generally wrecking havoc out there. (If you want to depress yourself about small towns - listen to song's like Toby Keith's "35 MPH Town", Kacey Musgraves' "Merry Go Round", etc.)
Thanks these suggestions are helpful . I actually do that, the facebook thing, I look at my friend's facebook ( she's from a really really really small town in Iowa , but she goes to college at Iowa state university right now, and from the pictures etc, I see a lot of modernity, just like you said) EDIT : It has no link with the topic , but I just realized that what you said is actually very similar to the situation in France : In a lot of regions from the north/ north east , outside of big cities such as strasbourg, nancy, mulhouse etc.. There are a lot of rural small towns with almost only white people, and maybe like 1-2 % non white, and they are modern in the sense that they have tatoos, some listen to rap music etc, but in rural areas there's also lots of problems of unemployment, alcoholism and drugs sadly. I also noticed first hand while going to several small villages in Alsace that most white people ( even the teenagers) were really racist against non white and non chrisitians ! ( and the older people were also prejudiced against other french people who did not speak the alsacien dialect, but that's another matter) Do these problems of drugs , unemployment and racism are also big in the midwest , or not more than anywhere else?
OK - I'm not an Iowa expert so I will stick to what I do know about those problems. First - drugs. Meth is a big problem in small and medium size cities all over the country. People say it's a "white people" drug but really it's a rural drug and working it's way slowly into the cities. The more rural and area is, the more likely Meth is available and more urban drugs aren't. But that's a nationwide issue in rural areas. Unemployment - this is a problem across the board a lot of America, especially small towns. But the Upper Midwest has been hit particularly hard in that a lot of the industry there was manufacturing and that industry has just died....which is not unlike certain industrial parts of France you bring up. Iowa is more agrarian bur that industry has shrunk too with increasing mechanization and corporate ag. Prejudice - I'm usually hesitant to assign a "these people are mostly racist" label to ANY group...and in my experience nationalism in French context comes out a bit differently than it does in an American content, although not entirely dissimilar when it occurs. I'll try for a broad assessment of prejudice in America when I see it. How much of this happens in what region is something I can't comment on other than where I'm from which is the West. Now - in terms of racism, yeah anywhere you have a large concentration of non-diverse socially conservative people, a certain number of those people will hold varying levels of "old-fashioned" beliefs (actually that's true about any population). That said, flagrant anti-black racism is more a creature of the American South than the Midwest...not that it doesn't exist in the Midwest but not to the same degreee. What you do see a lot lately is anti-illegal-immigration sentiment (which if you're in France is something you should also recognize). This will come in two forms. You can have people that are straight-up Anti-Mexican and make a big deal about Spanish taking over and people needing to learn English, or talking about deporting them all. But given that people realize that we are a nation of immigrants (we all realize white people aren't indigenous to the continent) most people will couch this in terms of legal status rather than ethnic claim to the land. To return to France, Marine Le Pen can plausibly (if wrongly) make the argument that the French are the indigenous inhabitants of France and therefore it's their land. You can't do that in America. Hence the argument is usually phrased as "immigration is good, people should come here, but not people who disrespect our laws and don't learn our language. And if you come illegally we should throw you out." Even if somebody IS racist, they're more likely to feed you the law and order line. Coincidentally - one of the members of Congress most vocal on that issue (Steve King) actually represents West Iowa. Lastly, in terms of culture, Midwestern people are generally stereotyped as being politer, more restrained, an "nicer" than other Americans. In fact, Midwestern politicians who run for President are almost ALWAYS met with criticisms about being "too boring" or "Midwestern Nice" (examples - Scott Walker, Tim Pawlenty). So while this is obviously not universally true, sentiments in the Midwest tend to be less strongly stated than they would in the South or elsewhere. So even if people do hold objectionable views they're less likely to be loud and obnoxious about it. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of the early settlers of this area were German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and you see those influences in the culture TO THIS DAY. Lastly - Western Iowa is a lot more Evangelical, more rural, and more strident conservative than East Iowa. I work in politics and since Iowa is an early voting presidential primary state, people in my world are very familiar with that East-West divide in the state.
Racism: It depends on the person. I can't really deem any particular area as "racist", nor do I think it's fair to. Is racism more common in small, rural towns than it is in the cities? Perhaps so. I'd say it's more likely to develop, but not that it's any more "common". That's a tricky one; like I said, it varies from person to person. And it's hard to verify since very few people will actually admit to being "racist". Unemployment: Since the "Great Recession" of 2008 (which lasted to around 2011/2012), many people who live in small towns and worked in larger towns have lost their jobs in the larger towns. Then the people from the larger towns who also lost their jobs moved to the smaller towns and began to take the jobs there. This left the jobless people in the smaller towns unable to find a sufficient-paying job, since industry and retail are typically centered in the large towns. So now there are a lot of people who are stuck, stranded in small towns and unable to leave because they either do not have a job, or their job does not give them enough money to leave. Drugs: Yes, drugs are a problem. Heroin in particular is a growing problem in the Midwest. Methamphetamine used to be the most popular, but law enforcement has cracked down on domestically-operated meth labs leading to a reduced supply, so the junkies have turned to heroin imported by the Mexican cartels.
@JadeX here's a resource to explore with an open mind http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/ excerpt from their FAQ Frequently Asked Questions “What are some appropriate ways to describe my character’s skin tone?” Please see the Words for Skin Tone Guide. “How do I introduce the race of my characters?” Please see the description tag, or one or more of these posts: Ways to indicate Race Defying White as Default Indicating Race Explicitly Identifying Race Inoffensively Describing POC and Avoiding Caricatures Introducing Race and Skin Color Naturally “How do I denote the race of my characters in a fantasy setting?” Indicating POC in Fantasy Settings Describing POC without stating Race Describing PoC and Avoiding Caricatures
