: Re: Is it wrong if I kill off a black character? He is one of two supporting characters that die in my screenplay. My wife says I shouldn’t make him black if he’s going to die. Would it

@Shanna875

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I agree with several of the other answers that we should not contribute to the huge amount of racism we already have in western media and should try to counterbalance that.

That said, I have this hypothethical solution if someone wants to create truly gender/race/sexuality/etc-neutral media by avoiding their own biases. I'm talking about technically gender/race/etc neutral writing as opposed to public perception which is a complicated and entirely different matter.

When having written the script on some level of detail (might be a rough sketch or more detailed), just random roll the gender and race and sexuality and such of each and every character. Best if you do it by assigning weights of probabilities based on census results of your story's location.

So e.g. according to claims in another answer here USA black population being roughly 13%, then you wouldn't want 70% of your characters black (unless that's really what happens to come out of the random generation).

In my opinion this would technically absolve the writer of any possible racist/sexist/etc bias (really only in the case where all of the story was written before these characteristics were applied). In reality probably most readers would not even hear about this technique having been used and would develop opinions about the writing's racism/sexism/etc subjectively on their own. For those readers who would hear of this but desire proof - live-streaming the dice roll could potentially be used as a method of pre-committing to results before seeing them and proving that there indeed only one random rolling session.

Hope this helps someone. Criticism very welcome!

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