: Re: How far I can write about a protagonist with a different ethnicity of me? I am planning to write a book about a life of a person. However, the protagonist is a black person. The main plot

@Moriarity138

Vote Up Vote Down

I'm not theoretically opposed to a white author writing a black protagonist, but I've rarely seen it done well, and often seen it done badly, even by people of good will and intentions. It might be worth taking the time to ask yourself why you're choosing a protagonist so far outside your own experience. Unfortunately, most of the black characters I've encountered in white authors' books are what you might call "black-for-white" characters. They represent something symbolically (perhaps authenticity, street credibility or style, on the good side; primitivity, pathos or social dysfunction on the bad side), but they are imagined from the outside, and have little to do with actual black people as we exist outside the white imagination.

If you were to convince me that you were going to do a credible job with this, I'd want to know what qualifies you to write this book, not out of some imagined standards of political correctness, but strictly from a practical point of view. Do you have close black friends you've had long conversations with? Have you interviewed a large number of black people (or even one)? Have you read a lot of books by black authors? In short, is there anything at all you're basing this on other than your own stereotypes and preconceptions?

If your answer to all those questions is "no," then don't do it. You're going to write a bad, culturally appropriating book (although that, of course, doesn't mean it might not also be critically acclaimed and popular, although almost certainly not among black critics and readers). And the reason is because you'll be really writing about yourself (because that's what you have experience of) but presenting it as something other than what it really is.

(0)

Login to post a comment!