Writing a different "race", "ethnicity", "culture" or "color"?

@Arannir

I'm not sure I understand this. Ignoring the typo, isn't part of writing fiction exploring different perspectives. You can write well without writing different ethnic/cultural/etc. perspectives, but say you're writing a piece set in Europe. You may have a few lead characters (not all POVs) from different countries, and that alone will carry certain baggage.

The question came up on another thread about writing across gender, and many people said write men and women the same. While every character must be unique, it is true that men and women think about things slightly differently in general. As @KaTrian aptly points out, they also face different anxieties. Likewise, my sister has to work harder to break stereotypes. While I have to worry about wearing a hoodie and looking suspicious, she has to worry about not looking like an easy target for predators, like a ghetto hoodrat, or like a mad black woman. But then if she wants to connect with black women in our community (which she will have to do in this pageant she's in) she has to be professional and glamorous, without alienating the people.

I know that's all real-word and may not matter in fiction, but writing a convincing individual, I don't think we can ignore being able to write from their perspective if we must, and that might include certain details about their background. Ethnicity helps us define ourselves, why would it be different wit fictional characters?

@jannert, I don't think you're the only one who is challenged by this balancing game. I think it comes down to research, and as @mammamaia rightfully noted, personal experience. I think it might also be important to remember the character as their own person. Not all black people like or play basketball. Not all Native Americans live on reservations or care about maintaining cultural heritage.

(BTW maia, I'm willing to bet you could write anything if you got it in your head to do it.)

@123456789 What would you consider a strong enough reason. I agree with you, actually, but just wondering what you might list as strong enough reasons to step outside of yourself. I could create a default american character without consideration of origin or ethnicity, but that default would probably make them White in most people's eyes. I suppose if it's not important to mention, then why include such details, but it might come in handy in a project I'm working on. I should probably read more AA lit. for that since I am shamefully inexperienced in writing any ethnic characters in a real world setting.

 

The hard parts are knowing which parts of history are considered the significant parts that matters today and what all the references mean.

 

If someone feels strongly about his/her heritage that in itself is an individual trait rather than an ethnic one. Anyway, all kinds of characters occur among all kinds of people. No matter if you divide them by ethnicity, sex, somato- or hair type, the differences between individuals within each group will be larger than between individuals of different groups. So you shouldn't feel insecure about writing a character of another ethnicity (or sex or whatever). That's what I was trying to say. The details (in your case heritage and how your characters feels affected by it) is simply a matter of research and writing abilities.

The thing is, writing someone with her experience does not require you to be a Somali woman in Finland. You don't need to be Somali, you don't need to be a woman and you don't have to live in Finland to write about someone like her. All you need is a grasp of what it feels like to be an outcast who is excluded and mistreated for stupid reasons.

 

This is actually a pretty huge question, and kudos to you for bringing it up.

I think it's misfortunate that American gives the automatic assumption of "white," but you're right. My initial reaction to this is to want to counter it by purposely making the MC non white. I guess the issue for me has to do with what I'll call author honesty. By writing about a character outside of my own ethnicity, say, an eskimo, I'm not really giving the reader an eskimo, I'm giving the reader some sort of a spectre, where there are elements (assuming I research well) of an eskimo, but at its core, it's something else entirely.

You asked what's a good reason to for an author to step out of his own skin. Considering what I wrote in the last paragraph, I'm not sure popularizing ethnicities outside of your own constitutes a good reason, since you're not really projecting the ethnicity but a perversion, despite best intentions. I think a good reason to step outside your own skin is if you have a point to make that might be appreciated by people of your own culture, but the point is best made by utilizing an MC outside of it. A good example I think is if a white American writes from the perspective of a an arab moslem, with the intention of garnering white American sympathy. In this case, the author might be trying to focusing on similarities rather than differences, whether those similarities be cultural or something on a more human level.

I'm thinking out loud here, but in fact, a general rule of thumb to use to answer your question is what the writer is ultimately achieving. Is he focusing on differences or similarities between cultures, ethnicities, etc? I think the latter case is more acceptable for an outsider, while the former should be reserved more for someone in that ethnicity. It's not my business to say what makes a particular ethnicity special, but I think it's ok if I want to make that ethnicity more relatable. Of course, if taken to the extreme, where you only focus on similarities, you wouldn't even mention the ethnicity of that character, because it doesn't even matter at that point.

 

@Andrae Smith -

Yes, you're right, but why, then, would I never DARE to write from the POV of a Native American who doesn't care about maintaining cultural heritage? Or care about the reservations? Or even one who does? Who am I to speak for him/her?

You see, that's the thing.

You can assume the persona of a sailor to write a sea story. If you get your POV sailor character wrong, other sailors will notice and your story won't be believable. You just need to do more research. Maybe even learn to sail.

However, if you get the Black/Native American thing wrong, you risk coming across as either a racist, or a patronising do-gooder. Or both. And it's very difficult to get it 'right' because the whole thing boils down to the character's perspective. It's perspective that somebody outside their culture, despite the best of intentions, will not share.

That being said, I would certainly include these characters in my story. In fact, I'm already planning for several major Native American characters in my next novel, and I will portray them as individuals, as well as members of the Piegan branch of the Blackfoot. But I would NEVER write them as POV characters. I just can't.

 

I'm more or less with you here, e.g. the point about it being an individual trait if someone feels strongly about their heritage.

Well, yes, basically. Transference is a great tool. But I'm afraid my discriminated Somali woman living in a cold, forbidding, mute, somber environment would not reach the depth of the same character written by an actual Somali immigrant, no matter how much I researched. As a point-of-view character, she would probably feel shallow to the people who have said traits in common. Though I think writing her as one of the main characters -- and if the story was about something else than being a Somali in an obscure Nordic country -- it could be doable. I guess depth and focus matter quite a bit. Let's take one of my favorite fantasy books, Joe Abercrombie's The First Law as an example. One POV character is a young black woman from a country that could be geographically placed in the Middle-East in our world, but the author (white, British male in his mid/late 30s I thnk) doesn't discuss her color or culture (even though she's in the minority), her thing is revenge, so basically she could just as easily be a white male or a green troll, so I think in that case it's possible to write a character like that and probably even without much research.

Good points. By the way, I think I mentioned Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sapphire's Push in some other thread, but in both of those novels the protagonists admire Caucasian beauty. If I wrote from the pov, say, an Afro-American girl living in the 1980s or 1940s, I couldn't write anything like that, I couldn't write my character be jealous about blond hair and blue eyes (neither of which I have, tbh, but I'm still white), it just feels wrong even if it was plausible. Those are stories that just had to be written by Afro-Americans.