Hi, there!

Let me start by saying I'm not an expert on race or anthropology. I just have my own educated-layperson-level intellectual interests and lived experience as a mixed-race person to go off of, but objectively publishing is very white. Most publishing industry professionals are white, the vast majority of published authors are white, and so it's no coincidence that most fictional characters are also white. (People, after all, often say "write what you know!") (A statistic I'll never forget is one study showed children's books are 8 times more likely to feature animal main characters as non-white human main characters, something I've thought about a lot as I decided what books to purchase for my children as a mom.)

But as a speculative fiction writer, I'm always disappointed when an author could have imagined anything in their fantasy or sci-fi world and they just chose to imagine only one race or nationality of people. I always wonder what happened to everybody else - for example, why does everyone in space millennia in the future seem to speak English and why are they all white or American? Why are so many multi-kingdom fantasy realms just a bunch of medieval Europe-coded places with little differences in race, customs, language, or culture? Is there a reason in the author's plot for that, or was that just their default?

On a related note, it's also a big red flag to describe only non-white physical character traits. J.K. Rowling actually does this a lot in the Harry Potter books, I only realized as an adult: the white characters almost never have their skin tone described, but the non-white characters have to have their skin pointed out as if they're a deviation from the default. It's much better to describe everyone's skin as early as possible and not to dwell on non-default traits to an extreme (I'm looking at you, James S.A. Corey's repetition of Naomi Nagata's "epicanthic fold" - a term I didn't even know existed for a monolid - in Leviathan Wakes).

Another one of my pet peeves is when everyone in one culture or country in a book or show is depicted as having identical skin tones, as if nationality determinations rely on a Pantone color chart. Hence, the reason why the photo on this post is a picture of me and my son when he was a baby, showing some of the skin color contrasts that can occur within one family. One example of a creative work that does multiple skin tones within one family very well and is widely, rightly praised for doing so is Disney's Encanto.

If you're a writer or a reader who wants to notice these choices more (or see more positive examples to emulate), I highly recommend the Writing With Color blog, which is full of resources for writers (like this great one for skin tone descriptions that don't rely on tired, overdone stereotypes like describing brown skin as various Starbucks coffee orders like "mocha" and "caramel"); the Prose Without Thorns accounts on Instagram and Facebook run by editor and sensitivity reader Denise Leora Madre; and "The Danger of a Single Story" TED talk by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

I find it such a breath of fresh air when fiction settings, cultures, peoples, and the interactions between them are well-researched (if historical or set in our world) or at least well-thought-out (if speculative or secondary-world). If there's only one race in your book, but there are complex international dynamics at play, I definitely want to know what happened to all the other races! If it's never explained, it just seems like the writer didn't make the choice very intentionally - which is never a great thing for a discerning reader to conclude. Anyway, that's just my two cents. What do you think when you come across a book like that? Are you as frustrated as I am? Let me know!

Thanks for joining me!

Nicole

Disclaimer: The views expressed in my newsletter or on my website are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of State or the United States.