I’ve been thinking a lot about race in today’s culture (America and beyond) and particularly in fiction. I’m flabbergasted by the news that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested on the porch of his own home for suspected burglary, even after he showed the police his ID. Ditto for the white-washing of Justine Larbalestier’s cover for Liar. I would like to link to Larbalestier’s post on why her protagonists aren’t white, since she says a lot of what I’m thinking a lot more eloquently. Also, I’m pointing you toward an older article about race in children’s books.
I will admit that when I first started writing novels as a young teen, my default protagonist was a white male. I soon became annoyed by the lack of strong girls and women in many of the books I was reading at the time, so I switched to female protagonists. It’s taken me a little longer to address the issue of race in my own stories. Other has a white girl of Welsh ancestry as the protagonist, a Greek dryad best friend, a Japanese kitsune love interest, etc. I made a conscious decision in Unseen to make Lila black, partially because I just hadn’t done it before, and partially because I wanted to explore her point of view on the prejudices generated by Vincent’s albino skin color. But a big part of me wanted Lila to be black because she is black, because in being authentic to the story there would be people of color at Vincent’s college. It worries me, though, that people like me still have to make conscious decisions in order to create diversity in their fiction. It’s better than nothing, though, I hope.
What do you think?
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