Malinda Lo
Blog
May 3, 2011
Writing about race in speculative fiction
Ever since I blogged about the casting of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, I’ve been thinking about a broader question: How exactly should one write about race in a novel of speculative fiction that is not set on this here Earth right now, so that readers understand what you mean?
I’ve blogged on writing about race in fantasy twice before, so if you want to see the development of my thoughts on this subject, read this and then this. Before I jump into this potentially fraught subject, let me lay out my cards:
Today, I’m blogging about my opinions on how a writer could approach the issue of racial identification in a work of speculative fiction1 (from now on abbreviated as spec-fic) that is set in a world that is not the here-and-now. Your opinions may differ, and that’s partly why I’m posting about this. I’m curious to see what other perspectives are out there. Although I think my post could apply to adult as well as young adult spec-fic, my experience has been in YA, so that’s where I’m coming from.
I’ve published two secondary-world fantasy novels, one of which is not overt about race (Ash), and one of which is more overt (Huntress). I’m also working on a book that does include race, but is set in the very near future in the United States, so it’s practically a contemporary. All of these books require very different negotiations with race, and I think the first lesson is that you have to figure out where your book falls on the scale of how similar it is to the present day.
How different is your spec-fic world from the here-and-now?
The closer it is to the here-and-now, the more you can rely on the reader to make correct assumptions about racial identity in your novel. The less it is like the here-and-now, the less you can rely on the reader to make correct assumptions; you will have to do more work to situate the reader’s experience in this different world. Which brings me to another point:
Consider the reader (sort of)
Every book is an experience that is shared by at least two different people: the writer and the reader. Every writer has a different perspective on how much they are willing to be influenced by readers’ expectations. I personally write stories for myself, but I am also aware that certain aspects of the story will be read differently by different readers.
No writer can guarantee that every reader will get the same thing out of a story; in fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that won’t happen. But there are certain things that do need to be clear. For example, I think that the main elements of the plot need to be clear to every reader. If a character is meant to be heroic, that needs to come through clearly. But there are other things that don’t need to be as crystal clear.
In YA specifically, I’ve found that sex is often unclear. This is partly because it’s often off-stage, and if something is not described explicitly, some readers will assume that it didn’t happen. I think this is actually quite a useful tool, and I admit I’ve totally used it.
When it comes to race, I think that its significance varies according to character and situation. In Ash, even though I saw the characters as looking Asian, I did not describe them as such because I did not believe that race was important to that story. What this meant, though, was that most readers probably read the characters as white, because that is the default in fantasy published in the United States today (and yesterday, for that matter). I am OK with this in the case of Ash.
But what this taught me was that for every book, I have to decide if I’m OK with the reader assuming that any given character might be white. If I’m OK with it, then I don’t need to describe their race. If I’m not OK with it, then I need to make their racial identity clear. That brings us to:
How do you make a character’s race clear without sounding totally awkward or like a jerk?
A lot of times I see writers debating which words to use when describing someone’s skin tone, or worrying that if they simply say “brown skin,” readers might believe that the character just has a tan rather than being South Asian. There also seems to be a fear that if you just write, “The Asian girl at the counter turned to look at me,” people will judge you negatively for calling out the character’s race so clearly.
I think that writers really cannot be beholden to political correctness. If a word fits, use it. That’s what words are for. Of course you have to be careful about which word to use, but you have to be careful about which word to use in every sentence. Every word counts. So I think it’s a bad idea to reject some extremely useful ones just because it’s not OK in contemporary American society to identify people (in some contexts) by their race.
If the book in question is set in the near-contemporary United States, it’s even sillier to not use a word such as “Asian” in favor of, say, “black-haired and almond-eyed.” For one thing, that’s three words instead of one, which is both inefficient and possibly inaccurate.
But also, writing fiction is not the same as real life. I know that in some real-world situations, it’s awkward to mention someone’s race. In other situations, it’s perfectly natural. But fiction is a totally different ballgame. In fiction, the writer is telling a story, and that story must be told with words that convey the author’s intent as clearly as the author intends. If you intend a character to be African American and you want every reader to understand that, then I think it’s fine to use those words to describe him.
If the book is a set in a secondary world or very far in the future, the writer needs to think first about how race is experienced in that world. Is it a multiracial world or not? Do people notice others’ race when they first see them? Are different races exotic or normal? Figuring this out will help you figure out how to describe your characters’ races and their reactions to other races.
It’s also important to remember that race is only superficially about skin color. It’s also about cultural practices, beliefs, rituals, food, language, etc. In a near-contemporary or a secondary world, culture can be a useful way to describe the differences between characters.
A few things to remember
Keep it simple: If race is unimportant but you still want the character’s race to be noted, it can blend into the background more easily if race is just described as simply as possible — “black,” “Asian,” “Latina” — than through some wordy description of the person’s skin color or hair. I think that the more words you use to describe someone’s race, the more emphasis you give to that race.
Names: Sometimes, you can signal race quickly through a character’s name, but that isn’t always the case. African American names do not necessarily sound any different; Willie Brown could be black or white. Asian American names can be used as racial signals, but the writer must then be careful to indicate the correct nationality (Korean names are different than Chinese names, for example, even though to an untrained ear they might sound the same). So, names are a tool that can be used in some cases.
Metaphor: The one thing I think is very important to remember when writing any spec-fic is that metaphor is extremely powerful. Even though the world of that book may be extremely different from our here-and-now, it is being read by a reader in the here-and-now. So the writer must be aware of how race in the spec-fic world might be interpreted through the lens of the here-and-now.
Be aware of the metaphor you’re broadcasting if you make all your evil people dark-skinned, and all your heroes pale and blond. Be aware of the metaphor in play if a pale-skinned hero saves all the brown-skinned natives.
Ultimately, that’s what writers have to do all the time: Be aware of the words we choose. I don’t think there’s any short cut here. You have to do your research, and you have to think about every word you use.
But I also don’t think you should let fear get in your way. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes, and there’s always going to be someone who totally does not understand or like your book. But if you put careful thought into the choices you made, at least then you’ll be aware of what you did and why — and better able to learn from mistakes if you do make them.
How do you think race should be handled in spec-fic? Please keep the discussion on-topic and friendly. I’ll be moderating the comments.
- I.e., fantasy or science fiction. [↩]
Awesome article! I agree with all of it.
Another excellent, thoughtful post.
I so struggled with how to use character physical description in Cold Magic and its book 2 because although they are set in an alt-Earth 19th c. landscape and written from the first person pov of a heroine who takes for granted that there are a lot of mixed race people (including her) and that persons of African ancestry are as likely to be upper class as working class, I knew I was writing for readers now who, like me, might have a lot of expectations and assumptions about the way default characters look in any story much less one set in a 19th c. Europe.
So one way I dealt with it was by making sure she is as likely to notice “white” or “pale” skin as “brown” or ” black” skin. But then, by doing that, I felt like I was focusing too much on skin color and, as you say above, that by focusing on that I was to some degree undercutting any larger point I was trying to make.
Yet at the same time, it did matter to me that readers notice and think about what’s going on, that the default for characters isn’t white — I was interested to see your mention of how this was not as important to you in ASH — which meant I felt I did have to use cues to alert the reader that this is not the Earth history as they know it.
And you’re right, ultimately physical appearance is only one way of describing identity.
Interesting post, Malinda. I’m particularly struck by this thought: “for every book, I have to decide if I’m OK with the reader assuming that any given character might be white,” which so perfectly captures the struggle of publishing forward-thinking books in a world that’s thoroughly stuck in Today. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on how to straddle the line between the two.
This is so interesting! I think it’s a really fine balance — writing the story we want to write and while dealing with the fact that readers live in the real world. And especially if you’re writing a fantasy with echoes of a 19th century Europe, I can see how that could create some dilemmas in terms of how to explain race in that world to the contemporary reader.
You’re welcome! Thanks for your comment.
fantastic post as always.
i always think caucasian unless very
clearly specified. even black hair and almond
eyes mean nothing to me but caucasian
unless coupled with other cues by the author.
because growing up, reading what i read and
seeing what i saw in the media, nothing
ever contradicted that assumption.
for my novels it was very clear to me i was
writing ab alt china like country. in the prologue i described an imperial concubine giving birth to a boy with a gold tint in his brown hair and tea green eyes–much to the shock of all in that
scene. my crit group didnt understand what the big deal was.
because my concubine was asian. and my emperor! al with black hair and brown eyes! so
i had to add a line “not the emperors son” just to clarify.
they werent reading with that assumption.
Wow, really? I don’t know why I’m surprised by that but I am! Maybe because it was also the very beginning of the book, before the reader really gets that it’s set in an ancient China-like world? I think that’s part of what makes this so hard — you have to set up the fantasy world at the beginning of a book very carefully. You can’t do infodumps (well, it’s not recommended), but at the same time you also need to set up the way people look. By page 100 readers would have understood that Ai Ling’s world is Chinese-esque and they might have understood that the baby isn’t the emperor’s son without needing to be told, but on page 2 they don’t get that yet. It’s definitely a difficult line to walk.
yes. they had read only 2 diff scenes by then but with
the names, the food… they were all cues from the
start. i think because i didnt say THIS IS CHINA it was
hard for them to immediately grasp that everyone
was asian (like 99%) in my world. it was fantasy, afterall.
def a challenge in alternative worlds imo.
I definitely assumed at least Ash was Caucasian in the book because Aisling is a Celtic name, and Sidhean is, to my eye, Celtic looking, so I pictured red hair and pale skin and the like as I read, though I don’t remember how I pictured the other characters. Your point in names as potential markers of race is great. How did you come upon the name Aisling? I think I first read it in a Charles de Lint novel and then again in Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series, so I have several images to reinforce Ash’s look in my mind. I read somewhere else that it’s considered kind of gauche to use food and drink imagery in describing people of color (cafe au lait, chocolate, milk, etc), particularly if the food words were used for the non-caucasian characters only.
I think sometimes modern readers forget that the range of food and drink — using two examples of potential cultural difference — we are accustomed weren’t necessarily available in, say, premodern Europe. And then names can even be “understood” as “fantasy names” too. The defaults are so hard to overcome, as you so well describe.
I agree with a lot of this, it is a tricky thing to write. In my dystopian novel set in the near future I tried to define my character as being of Jamaican decent by describing the food cooked at her house and her looks without being too obvious.
It’s a difficult process to get the balance right. I’d love to write in the dialect of different ethnicities, but the probability of creating a very stereotypical character (such as in Hollywood films) puts me off. Instead I feel it’s better to subtlely bring in parts of the culture rather than smack people in the face with it. But then sometimes writers can be too subtle. As a reader I didn’t have a clue about Rue’s ethnicity until the casting for the film. I took all of Suzanne Collin’s descriptions to be skin tone only!
I also find a good way to hint at ethnicity is to google popular names in different countries and use these as the character name. Even if the novel is set in the future you could use a variation to make your character stand out from the others.
I go the easy route, Asian, Latina, etc. I have written some shorts where there are two Caucasians, an African American and an Asian girl. This is, however, and interesting discussion. Thank you for bringing it up.
I just finished reading Shipbreaker and I think it does a wonderful job of describing characters ethnicities by discussing their cultures, their religion, and their skin tone. With Nailer, I just assumed give his father’s last name that he was Latino. I think more books should strive to be more inclusive.
I can’t wait to reading Ash and Huntress btw. I really hoping they are at my local library.
Aisling is a name that I found in one of many lists of names, and it’s Gaelic in origin. There are a lot of Gaelic/Celtic cultural markers in Ash, so it’s not surprising that people think the characters are white. Some of them are, but nobody has red hair except for Lady Isobel, and hers is pretty dark red. Sidhean is very pale, with white skin and light blond hair, and Ash has brown hair and eyes. They are both described in the book (Sidhean quite extensively), so it’s interesting that you just guessed about their appearance from their names.
I don’t think it’s always gauche to use food terms to describe people of color — it can be done in certain situations. But if you’re using food terms because you’re afraid to just identify their race, I think that would need to be reconsidered.
I’m curious: in your case, are you avoiding just saying that your MC is of Jamaican descent? If so, why?
Thanks! I loved Ship Breaker and I agree, that book does an amazing job of writing a clearly racially diverse group of characters. It could really be a guide to how to do it right. And yet, I’ve heard some people are still confused about the characters’ races — I think the assumption of whiteness is just so deeply engrained in many of us as readers that it’s sometimes almost impossible to overcome. (See Cindy Pon’s example above.)
I’m someone who doesn’t quite understand why people don’t address race directly in a book where the world is clearly the world in which we (the readers) live. I understand that people don’t want to seem insensitive, but talking around race/ethnicity tends to irritate me more often than not. Especially when physically describing a character: dark skin and dark hair, or golden skin and almond eyes–those could all apply to pretty much any ethnicity. If it’s important to the author to clue into a character’s ethnicity, then tell us, don’t describe it. Otherwise I am going to assume “white” (unless said character has an “obvious” ethnic surname). Names aren’t any guarantee either; some last names belong to multiple ethnicities (Park, for example. Even Lee.).
In works of spec-fic which take place in a world not like ours, I would prefer that race/ethnicity be re-envisioned, especially if it takes place in the future and/or on a different planet. In works of high fantasy, it can be tricky, although I thought Jacqueline Carey did it pretty well with languages and languages. (Although her books are pretty Western-centric.)
Not really. I imagine her as Jamaican but would rather the reader discern her race on their own. Her race isn’t really important but the book is set in Britain and Britain is multicultural so it would make sense people are of different race. But it is also set in the future in a dystopian society so I’m trying to give the feel of disengagement from our present society…. if that makes sense! The characters have no contact with any worldwide news and so she might not even know anything of the country she came from generations ago.
P.S she isn’t my MC but the MC’s best friend. There are some nuances that I haven’t ironed out yet (half way through!)
*clap, clap, clap* Thank you, Malinda.
I loved Ship Breaker too, and the character descriptions were very interesting. I had fun trying to guess the characters’ race/ethnicities based on their names, however, there were character descriptions that didn’t always match what we think of when we think of a particular race/ethnicity (i.e. a character named Wu who is tall and blond, and Nailer’s dad has blue eyes, light hair and skin (although he could be white Hispanic)). It gave me pause to think that not only in this book that’s set in a dystopian future, but also in our future and our present, there are many, many people who don’t fit into these preconceptions of race, ethnicity, culture. They can be mixed race, adopted, or just are.
Tangentially related aside:
My UF novel is set in the Very White Midwest, so there’s not a lot of racial variety. Two otherworldly secondary characters are black and one mundane character is. The story is told through the eyes of two very sheltered and frankly racist (ethnocentric, homophobic, backwoods redneck) protagonists. They were raised in an area in which the KKK is rampant, and they lack, shall we say, sensitive racial vocabulary. They toss around the word “nigger” more often than not. Another character is Clueless White Guy (one of his lines of dialogue is, “This is Sefu. He’s from Africa”). Granted, people call the protagonists out when they toss around racial epithets, and Clueless White Guy is pretty obviously clueless about a lot of things other than race.
All this was purposeful, because a lot of people really do think that way in that region especially, but I have to admit I’m a little anxious that people won’t GET it. I suppose I can only do my best to present race in a realistic way and make it clear that my views don’t match those of my sheltered protagonists.
“I understand that people don’t want to seem insensitive, but talking around race/ethnicity tends to irritate me more often than not.”
Ditto. As Malinda said, we only have words; why not use the ones that apply, that convey the correct meaning most clearly?
I struggle with the fact that one of the worlds I am writing is really completely disconnected from the history of the world we live in. It’s a different planet; if the people who live there came from Earth, they were brought there so long ago that it’s no longer remembered; and, in fact, they do interact with people from Earth, but none of those people are POV characters.
So it would make no sense to say “Asian” because nobody who lives in Korravai or Vanarijan has ever heard of Asia. In the beginning of the story, if I say “Daelze”, people don’t know what that means, so I am stuck describing the Daelzu characters who appear early in the story by stating that they have long straight dark hair and dark almond-shaped eyes.
The really big problem, though, is that most of the characters are black and people default to white on them, and it really really bothers me. My main character is white, but she’s also a displaced person. I described the Emperor, Tarakhevan, repeatedly as having dark brown skin and woolly braided hair (Tarakhevan’s appearance is discussed mostly by a boy who’s in love with him, so these descriptions aren’t vague) and yet when I was sharing this story with friends on a mailing list, people drew my characters as white people and put them in fairly classical European clothing and backgrounds, despite the fact that I talk about hot smoggy delta cities and deserts and other non-Celtic terrain a lot.
I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I don’t think the names I use are particularly European, although they’re not really African or Asian either, because these are alien languages.
I don’t want to use food metaphors because some people are offended by them, but Tharinna has dark red hair and cinnamon coloured skin, and if I don’t mention her skin colour, people think of her as looking stereotypically Irish, not as a tall, red-haired black woman. I know this because I’ve seen what they think she looks like.
So on the one hand I have people telling me that I describe my characters too much (which is a valid crit when I’m writing from Liuterin’s POV, she really doesn’t care that much–Mikaija is the one who’s obsessed with that stuff and he’s only the POV character in Seafoam Diaries, which is a story that’s heavily inspired by the Kagero Nikki – Gossamer Diary – only queered.)
I think that helps make it clear to audiences, but what if you don’t want to use a name like that, like if you’re writing an Asian American character?
It’s equally frustrating to me that in many stories, if a character is Asian American, their name will be “Ling Su” or “Mei Ling” or “Mariko.” To the point where if I read a story with an ensemble multiethnic cast and everyone has a “normal” name except for the Asian character, I do an “oh, typical.”
Malinda (Lo), George (Takei), John (Cho) are all Asian American names as well. Hard line to walk.
Do you find this complicated by the fact that the current trend is to make covers that obscure characters of color?
For example, readers of the hardcover “Silver Phoenix” will at least be able to guess that the characters are Asian in the first chapter because of the cover art. But the paperback, which shows a girl character that could easily default to white, might not help point readers in the right direction?
hi marissa! no, i’ve not had any readers confuse my characters as not being asian–they may ask which ethnicity specifically xia is inspired by. i think even with the cover changes, it’s quite obvious–and this is thanks to the asian elements on the cover as well as the jacket copy provided.
what i spoke of was when it was just a manuscript getting critiqued by my friends and there were not such markers (despite the cover changes, if you look at the jacket, there is quite a lot of chinese influence). and they couldn’t immediately grasp that in my fantasy world, 99% of the people were asian.
i think the whole package upon publication actually helped to dispel that, even with the newer less asian covers.
“i think the whole package upon publication actually helped to dispel that, even with the newer less asian covers.”
Which really feeds right back into the larger question of what expectations we bring to things, and how outside factors (unexamined assumptions, defaults, or in this case, book packaging) influence those expectations.
Yes, this. I live in Hawaii. Here are the first names of some of the women I paddle outrigger canoes with — can anyone tell me which are EuroAm and which AsianAm: Michelle, Faith, Julie, Karen, Sally, Tammy . . . etc.
Good luck with your writing!
I see what you mean, Marissa, but you know, sometimes Asian Americans do have Asian names. It depends on how recently the people immigrated to the US and a lot of other factors. I find it annoying, though, when Mei Ling is the *only* Chinese-sounding name you ever find in books. I mean, it’s a common name (I have a cousin with that name), but Chinese names are usually so unique to the individual! In my family it’s a faux pas to give your kid a Chinese name that anyone in the extended family has.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track.
I have looked up surnames from various countries to name characters, and I’ve agonized over whether a name is generation-appropriate, or whether it’s an American immigrant manifestation of an old-country name, etc. Naming is certainly tricky!
That does sound like a potentially, er, challenging book.
Yeah, it really bothers me that covers with people on them can be so influential in forming a reader’s picture of what the characters look like. That doesn’t always happen, but it is one reason I really dislike having pictures of people on the cover! I’m going against the tide with that in YA though. Most people seem to want people on the cover.
I also do hope that the current trend is toward including people of color on the cover and moving away from whitewashing. I think there has been a lot of awareness of this recently and I do think publishers are being more mindful. We’ll have to see in the future.
Generation appropriate, definitely. I see this with my own Danish American background. My father’s mother’s name (her parents were born in Denmark and immigrated here as young adults; she was born in the USA) was Helga; she married another first gen D-A name of Hans. My dad’s name is Gerald. And he goes by Gerry.
Definitely.
Having spent my entire childhood in Barbados, and half my working life in Japan, my default is Black or Japanese, so I won’t be thrilled about ppl assuming they’re white. If I write a white character, they’ll b ewhite for a reason. Still I don’t want my book to come off as screaming, “She’s BLACK! He’s ASIAN!”
Delighted to have just discovered your website, as well as Diversity in YA, following the links from Reading in Color. I’m a picture book writer just beginning a YA series with a multiracial cast set in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Your observations are so useful, addressing the exact questions I’ve been pondering:
“If the book is a set in a secondary world or very far in the future, the writer needs to think first about how race is experienced in that world. Is it a multiracial world or not? Do people notice others’ race when they first see them? Are different races exotic or normal?”
Several centuries into the future, I’m imagining much more mixing among races, but that there are still some concentrations, such as browner people in the world’s southern areas, whiter people in the northern. I think that race/ethnicity still matters, but not in the way it does or with the same in the 21st century – looking forward to discovering how.
So far, I’m describing the characters’ varied skin colors and features with the same weight as other physical realities. Race is not the core of what the book is about, but it’s important to me to describe the characters’ racial characteristics for several reasons:
- The world I live in is multiracial, and I’m passionate about racial and cultural differences as one of the most wondrous and fascinating aspects of being human. Why wouldn’t I want to mine this treasure trove for all the richness it can add to my book?
- The practice of Othering seems pretty universal among humans, and as long as the people I’m writing about are racially diverse, it’s hard to imagine that race would be invisible.
- I’m intrigued by the prospect of considering race through another lens, different from my somewhat obsessive 20th-21st-century race- and racism-consciousness. I hope I might learn something from my time-travel that could inform my perspective (and someday, with luck, my readers) on the world we live in today.
- Young readers of all races need to be able to find themselves reflected in our books.
Thanks for the thoughtful post and for moving my thinking. I look forward to more.
p.s. – correction:
I think that race/ethnicity still matters, but not in the way it does or with the same LABELS AND IDENTITIES AS in the 21st century – looking forward to discovering how.
Awesome post! And I’m loving reading the comments. I agree; I think cultural markers are really important (though not always accurate, since race=/ethnicity, and one person having disparate races and ethnicities can lead to confusion if you only describe their cultural practices and not their looks) because otherwise, it’s going to be almost anyone’s natural instinct, just because anyone in this country, at least, is going to be used to the publishing practices of this country, to identify the non-white characters easily as “the Asian girl in the bookstore” and “the black boy sitting across from me” and forget to name all the white people as such. But then again, one thing I’ve found frustrating in real life, not just in writing, is that descriptors such as “dark skin” don’t actually mean anything. I’ve had Midwesterners call my sister dark (she’s half white, half Mexican, and her coloring is typical eastern European, with light, olive undertoned skin and dark hair–the only time she’s tan is if she’s been swimming a lot) while I’m in the same room, and I wonder what they’re going to call me (half white and half black, and certainly light by black standards, but far darker than my sister).
Anyway, I was actually going to comment because I think I recall, though it’s been ages since I read it, that Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Choice dealt with race in a really interesting, subtle way but still emphasized it enough so that you knew that part of the warring had to do with race relations. I’ll have to try and read it again.
Interesting musings about race on the page–I’ve been thinking about this, too, in wanting to write about racial issues in my spec fic world.
I’ve found it helpful to focus on racism and stereotypes rather than on race itself. It doesn’t matter what race a character is until it matters to someone else in the story world–and seeing other characters’ reactions seems to be a more active, evocative way of making race important.
As a reader, I may or may not be interested in the fact that a girl is Indian. But the story gains more depth for me when another character reacts to her–either because that character is also Indian, and they’re living in rural West Virginia; or because some white employees of a convenience store refuse to wait on her at the cash register.