Multi-Racial Issues

Do you only want to read books about people who look like you? Only the stories that revolve around your culture?

I don't. I think that would get old in a hurry. I thrive on variety. I love to read about things which are foreign to me - whether that foreignness stems from a real culture different from my own or from a world the author made up out of whole cloth. (Also, I tend to think brown-skinned people are the most visually appealing and it would be a shame to cut them out of the game just because I'm so darned pasty.)

Race in romance novels is a topic that seems to be coming up more and more frequently of late. (Or perhaps I've just become more aware of it?) Dear Author has an interesting thread focusing on multi-racial romance recommendations. The world isn't monotone and it is nice to see romance novels starting to reflect that.

I'm white (of mixed-European descent), but I come from a multi-ethnic (multi-racial, whatever
I'm supposed to call it) family. My father's side of the family is from Hawaii and I spent a fair chunk of my childhood there. My time in Hawaii among my ethnically-varied family engendered my attitude that we are defined less by our racial profile and more by our cultural upbringing.

Take actress Thandi Newton. What race is she? I have no idea. Mixed, perhaps? How would I describe her? British. Her nationality defines her and how she interacts with the world around her more than her skin tone, in my opinion. To me, it is the dominant aspect of her cultural profile.

I don't feel comfortable creating characters if I am not familiar with their cultural profile. That is why I feel most capable writing European, Caucasian-American, Latin-American or Asian-American characters, as those are the cultures I have been most prominently exposed to in my life. I would not want to disrespect anyone's culture by inadvertently misportraying it.

Could the dearth of romances about non-white characters actually have to do with racial sensitivity? We've been told to "write what you know" and what do I really know about being anything other than myself? (But how boring would it be to write only about Euro-mutt girls from Alaska/Hawaii all the time? Not to mention the narcissism involved.)

Then, supposing you decide to put some realistic racial mixing in your book, you have to take into account how you are going to broach the topic of race. Bookavore posted this plea a few days ago, that authors stop naming the race of their characters only when the characters aren't white, bludgeoning the reader without the affirmative action in their prose.

I can agree with that grumble on several levels, but I do have a bit of a rebuttal: Point of view. If my heroine is white (I'm thinking of Jo, from The Ghost Exterminator) and she thinks of her boss as Asian, then when I am describing Karma from Jo's point of view don't I have to refer to her as Asian? (This argument is a one-way ticket to "Well, then your heroine is racist and that's just as bad!" isn't it?)

I have two series going right now. Serengeti Shifters & Karmic Consultants. In the Serengeti Shifters series, I've set the world up so that most of the shifters have leonine coloring (blondes, mostly), and they all come from a small collection of families (inbreeding, yay!) so there isn't a lot of racial diversity. (And I gotta say, it gets boring writing about a bunch of people who all look so similar to one another. I have to bend my own rules just to make it interesting.)

In Karmic Consultants, it's a "real world" type setting, just with some paranormal zaniness thrown in, so the races are all over the map. The Ghost Shrink's hero is mixed race and so (of course) is his sister, Karma, who is a recurring character throughout the series. Depending on whose POV we're in, they are described in slightly different ways, but I don't think I ever come right out and say what their ethnicity is. (Japanese-African-French! The truth revealed! You heard it here first!)

The Sexorcist hero is Mexican-American. He very strongly identifies himself by his culture and he has an pretty strong accent. It would be weird if I didn't identify his ethnicity. Of course, I also identify the heroine's. So does that make it okay? The Naked Detective heroine is Chinese-American, and the hero (racist bastard!) thinks of her as Asian all the time (and hot enough to burn his tongue). Is that bad?

When the racial filter is coming through the characters themselves is it still as offensive? We don't exist in a bubble. We can't ignore race without making the book ring false - well, you can, but not if you're writing about the modern American culture.

It's a tricky subject. And now I feel like I ought to apologize for bringing it up. Well, I'm not gonna. We should be allowed to talk about these things. Taboos just make people more inclined toward prejudice. So here's to diversity! And to my feeble attempts to accurately portray the beauty of our diverse populace. I haven't had any hate mail yet. I'm hoping that's a good sign.