: How to find authenticity in a character of color I am working on a book. I am aware that, being a white guy, I always perceive characters as white men. I want to push myself into building

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Find a black person that is similar to the character that you want to create, or alternatively, create a character that's similar to someone you actually know.

I did the latter, and asked the person what he would say in such-and-such a situation, and the character was quite "authentic."

African Americans won't necessarily feel differently than other people in a given situation. But they may act or express themselves differently, because they are a part of a different subculture.

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Note: By complete coincidence, I recently had a chance to attend a Q & A session with author Michael Chabon --who I referenced in my prior answer as a white author who does a good job writing black characters-- and I took the opportunity to ask him this question. I had originally edited this into my original answer, but it's really a separate answer, from a difference source.

Chabon said that (in addition to having grown up in an well-integrated community) the biggest prep work he did for writing the black characters in Telegraph Avenue was to read a lot of work by black authors, and to imitate the way they approached their black characters (in preference to the way white authors typically approach black characters).

One of the biggest "lessons learned" he cited (and I'm really paraphrasing and interpreting here!) is that being black is normalized in black authors' works, problematized in white authors' works. In other words, the black character in the black author's book is not thinking about being black unless there is some specific reason to do so (because to her it is not an intrinsically exceptional condition of existence). She is also not thinking about race in general, or about white people in particular, unless there is some valid reason for her to do so.

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I think you need to be more specific about your character. Simply being black does not give someone a certain personality.

Instead of focusing on the color of their skin, you should think about their childhood, the environment in which they were raised, and the environment in which they now reside. Then their ethnicity would play a more important role than just seeming like "I needed a black guy for this story".

Developing this background of the character will also allow you to more easily see the world through their eyes. Then, all you need to do is reveal that world to the reader.

If you do this for all of your characters, I would imagine the authenticity would handle itself.

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I really appreciate this question, because as a black person who reads a lot of writing by white authors, I've found that very few do a good job with their black characters, and many do a very poor job. Michael Chabon is the only well-known white author who easily comes to mind as creating black characters that read as authentic (to me).

I'm not sure there's a shortcut to writing characters that will read as authentic to someone of that culture other than to actually take the time to get to know someone of that culture AND to try to see the world from his or her viewpoint. The key problem is that many people --writers included --are heavily (although usually not consciously) invested in NOT seeing the world from the minority viewpoint.

With that said, being forced to adapt to majority-white cultural setting is a typical experience for most American and European black people. I think if you took the time to try to really understand the experience of even your seemingly assimilated black friends, you would find that their world and experience is very different from yours, even though you might expect it to be the same. For instance, you both might be at the same party, but if he is the only black person there, it is a different party for him than for you.

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Is your black character living in a world like the one your black friends live in, or a more immersively black culture, or...?

I think it's definitely a mistake to assume the character will be different just because of skin colour (unless you're talking about frequency of sunscreen application or something). You can't just write "a black character", you have to write a black character in a certain culture and context. If you're writing optimistic scifi, the character's race may not have any effect whatsoever on how he sees the world or himself or how others see him. If you're writing a historical, race will probably have even more of an influence than it does most places today.

So part of writing the character will definitely be figuring out how that character fits into his setting. If you're writing a contemporary novel with a character whose racial identity is a big part of his life (for better or worse), you'll need to do some research. Don't think of black culture as a monolith - figure out where your character is from, how he was raised, and who he spends time with, and then do some reading (fiction or non-fiction, poetry, lyrics, whatever) produced by people with similar backgrounds. What influenced those people, and how will those same influences affect your character.

Writing from a different POV needs a bit more thought, but I think it's really rewarding and worthwhile when done right. Good luck with it!

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Maybe this will help: I, a middle-aged white man, once wrote a story narrated by a 24-yr-old woman. I did that by writing her as just a person. My readers pointed out things that made her sound male, and I tweaked those, but I didn't go to any great effort to make her sound like a young woman, I just wrote her as a person.

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