How to Portray the Other
Dear Horace Greeley,
I'm working on a novel that I describe as a magical realist romp through a psych ward. The protagonist is an Afro-Latina queer midwife having her first psychotic episode / awakening into a magical world. I've had a lot of doubt about being a white writer writing a protagonist of color and I'm committed to either trying to do a great, anti-racist job with it or going back and changing her entirely. I'm thinking through questions like what does it mean for her to be Afro-Latina, how is her experience different than if she were white, how do I make sure to avoid racist tropes, etc. I'm looking for examples of white writers who have done a great job with protagonists of color and I was curious if you know of any? Any thoughts you have are welcome. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Don’t Want to Appropriate
Dear Don’t,
This is a really good question, and one that is at the heart of a lot of controversy.
While I’m not qualified to judge whether a given white writer has portrayed people of color and their interactions with society effectively, I can absolutely tell you that the backlash against white writers who get it wrong is enormous.
Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, was lambasted for using racist stereotypes and a paternalistic attitude toward her black characters in a way that a lot of black readers found offensive.
Using intersectional categories like “Afro-Latina” is going to make your work even harder. If you live in the US, you know that societal norms in the American south differ from those in California or Wyoming or Maine, and that’s all within a single country with a shared language and history. “Latinx” encompasses 33 countries in the Caribbean, South America, and Central and North America. The experiences of a black person in the Dominican Republic would be entirely different than someone in Uruguay or Mexico, and someone coming from that background and society, even if the action of your story takes place in the US, is going to bring a whole host of attitudes and behaviors with them.
Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, saw her publicity tour canceled, her novel denounced, and her own reputation smeared over her portrayal of a Mexican woman fleeing to the United States, even though Cummins herself is Puerto Rican.
Having met some of the people involved in fomenting the backlash against American Dirt, I can say with confidence that the issue was less with the author herself for telling the story, and more an indictment of a publishing industry that preferentially chooses white voices to talk about POC experiences. The mainly white, mainly male publishing world is now a little gun shy about publishing POC stories by white writers.
I’m not here to say it’s impossible – just that there is a huge amount of preparation to be done before one can write this kind of intersectionality in a way that reflects lived experience of people in that demographic, and even then, the publishing world may not jump to embrace your work.
Your Humble Servant,
Horace Greeley
