No. And if I wrote a book based on my experiences from the POV of a character like me, it would be full of people of color and contain no dialogue about their race because that didn't happen in front of me by whites or non-whites. Do race related conversations happen? Sure, but if it isn't happening in front of every POV, it isn't happening in a way that needs to be said to be universal. If I relate a story about training, deployment, life on the ship and a mission involving 10 characters - there is no real reason that a wide variety of both work and off duty dialogue and interactions would need to reference the race of the individuals, even if they are of different races or referring to people of different race than their own. Most interactions between people in life are about exchanging information, finding out about people's status, agreeing on a plan, sharing enjoyment of something, complaining, etc. They aren't driven by sharing theories about race. You have to have a real fascination with race to keep bringing it up in daily life.
And they’re not driven by sharing theories about gender. But I’ll bet you do know who is what gender, even if you don’t have a “real fascination” with gender. You also might know whose family was Irish, whose was British—you might know all sorts of cultural and family stuff about other people, even without sharing theories about those things or having a “real fascination” with those things. And it’s equally OK to know that someone is Indian.
To clarify: If you (the generic you) are saying that nationality, race, etc. should be kept generic unless there’s a strong plot reason to reveal them, I disagree with you. If you say that you can keep them generic without most US readers assuming that the character is white and US, I disagree with you. If you say that they can be included without the plot being about race, nationality, etc. yes, that’s my POINT. My point is that you don’t need a big excuse/justification to have a character who is not white-straight-male-Western-European-Protestant. You don’t need any excuse or justification at all.
The reason it becomes quickly clear that people have gender is because of gendered names and personal pronouns. Additionally, most people would agree that behavior is somewhat gendered, at the very least because of issues related to modesty. But as I pointed out, it would be relatively easy to write a story without gender, and it is not unheard of to cast a play or movie without pre-assigning genders to the different parts. "Culture" is not race. Some cultures are more likely to be found among a certain race, and if you make a character sound like redneck there is a good chance he'll read as "white". But it is equally apparent that many people insert themselves into cultures that are a "mismatch" for their race and there are many people that display no particular culture in their speech or behavior.
When did anyone suggest that? I feel like you believe Foxx and I are taking a very different position than we are.
We have a point of contention here. You want to know a character's origins, culture, and experiences. I want to know the plot. I'm currently writing a story in Standard Written Chinese and sharing the story on WeChat. The main character is a bunny rabbit. I didn't know if I wanted to make him a male bunny or female bunny, so I just used this pronoun (他). Then, his mother and sisters became 她, and his brothers became 他, which would give the implication that this bunny is male. Though, you wouldn't be able to tell that in spoken Putonghua, because they all sound like TA. TA is the third-person pronoun in Putonghua. I would guess that my character is a bunny rabbit, and thus would belong to a bunny culture and society. The use of Chinese kinship terms to describe everyone was to make the bunny rabbits more human-like and empathetic. The very first scene is supposed to be a foreshadowing of the last scene. As I write the story piece by piece, I begin to realize that the actual story is a bit different than the outline in my notebook. The dialogue and actions highlight what the characters are like. If I were to translate my story into English, then I would make the character more relatable to English speakers. English speakers don't typically pay attention to age when speaking, so that stuff is going out. English speakers also tend to address each other by name instead of relationship, so I would have to use personal names more. Yes. That's my point. I wasn't talking about this. We have another point of contention. Let's agree to disagree. It might. An anthropomorphic dragon is a detective for the government. Race/ethnicity/nationality are all referring to a kind of people. I should have just used the term "a kind of people". Yep. I have a sense that some readers are tired of seeing white, straight, Anglophone (though, you must write in English in English fiction), Protestant Christian, male, age 14-42, growing up in the US/UK/Canada characters. However, the authors themselves may actually be white. The setting is something relatable to a Western reader. Harry Potter is a British wizard. There are British cultural references in the book series. The author probably sets the story in Great Britain, because she is British. Harry Potter is also a nightmare to translate, because of all the English-based puns and wordplay, not to mention Lord Vordemort. The story is a very British story. Yes, in that case, the plot must discuss race. Race in terms of black and white is relevant to that story. In Harry Potter, race exists in terms of muggles and magical beings. Race is not inherently bad. But the classification of race is subjective. A Tatar girl is of the Tatar race. A Jewish boy is of the Jewish race. The "white race" is hard to define and very subjective. In America, a "white person" is someone of European descent. People of full or partial European descent who immigrate to America from Central or South America are not "white". People who immigrate from the Middle East may or may not be "white". A Jewish person may or may not be "white", even though the person may look indistinguishable from "white people". A person may appear "white" but that person is actually black, because his/her family members are black, and the biological parents are black. No one knows why the kid has very light skin and light-colored hair, while the parents look so dark. A "race of people" may just mean "a kind of people". Physically, one race of people may have men and women wearing different headdress, while the other race of people may have men and women not wearing any headdress. I don't know. But real people regardless of race may choose names to blend in with the environment. One character may be Jenna. Another character may be James. James identifies himself as white American. From his POV, Jenna does not look white. One day, he goes to work to check out the work schedule. Then, he checks out the list of names, and his eyes notice Muyun Xie. He wonders, "Who is Muyun Xie?" He asks a co-worker, and the co-worker says, "She's the new girl. You've seen her." James replies, "Hm? The Asian girl?" The co-worker replies, "Yeah." At that point, the reader may guess that Jenna is Asian. The legal name is printed on the sheet, but the employer displays the preferred name - Jenna - on the name tag. As you can see, that would be a very believable insertion of race. In America, you may also find this kind of situation: a man named Mr. Morris overhears two co-workers chatting in a foreign language. Mr. Morris doesn't understand the language, so he asks, "Mind if I ask what language you are speaking?" A co-worker responds, "Mandarin." The reader then assumes that the character is Chinese or at least speaks some kind of Chinese. But if the two characters are named Susan and Rachel, and Mr. Morris doesn't notice or care about the language or race, then who would know? I'm not really promoting generic, culture-free characters. All stories in the world are culture-bound. But the tiny details in the plotline can easily give information about the race of a character. Maybe one character has very dark skin. Blushing on a person with light complexion is visible. Blushing on a dark-skinned person is not that visible. They may blush like a normal person would, but the blushing may not be noticeable.
That could be. This line of discussion started with someone advocating avoidance of an Indian character, and instead substituting a generic character. I disagreed with that strategy. It seemed that you were disagreeing with me, and therefore agreeing with the generic. If you’re fine with having non-generic non-white characters, I don’t think we have a disagreement here.
Just for clarification (and not aimed at anyone), a race is a genetically distinct population within a species. As far as human genetics go there are no major morphological variations indicative of distinct differences in our DNA; technically all humans are the same race. So when discussing race among people we're pretty much always referring to ethnicity, which is the distinct culture of people in a given geographic region.
Mild disagreement on the second point, but agreement on the other two. The OP doesn't need an excuse or justification for making his detective Indian because the setting is the contemporary United States. As long as the setting allows for it; if this had been a hundred years ago, it would probably take a lot of explanation, and a very good explanation at that.
So a race is a distinct genetic population, there are no distinct genetic populations among humans, so the word race cancels itself out and no longer exists. Poof.
I think you probably know that "race" is not a formal taxonomic classification even when used for that, and its informal use to refer to people isn't an attempt at strict taxonomy. Soap box: The word 'race' once meant something like ethnicity. More recently, it was an observation that there were essentially three groups of people that were most phenotypically distinct from each other, and everyone else fell somewhere between them - something like observing you could get any color with red, blue and yellow. And that observation resembled the fossil record of the way people migrated across the world, but attaching that observation has become entangled with a simplistic understanding of genetics and population movement to make it mean what it shouldn't - that people are strictly one race or another. All of this has been further complicated by the difficulty of being sensitive to ethnicity has made attempting to describe a stranger a taxonomic nightmare, where describing a Korean person is a minefield where mistakenly labeling them "Japanese" is insultingly specific, while "oriental" was too imperialist and "mongoloid" having a stank from birth defects, so we have defaulted to the incredibly vague "Asian", which applies to white Russians. I have observed multiple occasions of people objecting that a African man born in England should be referred to as "African American" to be PC. Overall, modern people have a real problem dealing with the fact that our real world observations and shorthand don't dovetail perfectly with science, and that in turn causes all sorts of dissonance as people increasingly believe that everything is in conflict, like you have to choose science vs. the Bible. Shorthand that was once useful as an aesthetic observation has graduated into insults, and all we have left are fighting words.
Ethnicity : an ethnic group; a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, Now hopefully that's done with.
No, I'm saying that I made a statement that backed your earlier statement and you were driven by such a need to create drama that you backtracked on it. Only to accidentally agree with the latter half of the statement you needed to disagree with even though it and your original statement were in agreement. Now let's move on or take it elsewhere.
I don't think he's being dramatic. It seemed he was having a discussion and making an explanation, regardless if he's right or wrong. I assume you don't mean to do it, more than likely you're just out of patience, but I thought you might take it into consideration when you make potentially escalating remarks, because that's one of many ways that otherwise even-tempered conversations can turn ugly. Just thought I would share this with you because I would hope somebody would call me out if they felt I was possibly projecting my frustration. But not call me out like a jerk; more like a "hey man, this is what I noticed, and I thought you should know" kind of way. No condescending or patronizing intentions. I'm not trying to speak down. That's definitely not my place. It sounds like you two might have some past run-ins though, so I won't say more. None of that is my business. Just trying to say we should all keep it cool. Chicken and I had a reasonable misunderstanding and disagreement that reached a mutual understanding; it's important to not inadvertently escalate, something I catch myself doing all the time, often too late. The discussion has likely veered far from what the OP imagined, but it may - by some chance - be useful for the OP to know what 'race' and 'ethnicity' are, since he/she seemed concerned about figuring out how best to handle those in his work. This thread may have run its course of usefulness many pages ago.
