I’ve started this post maybe a hundred times, and I’m getting nowhere.
The truth is, I have way more to say about diversity than I care to distil down to 1,000 or 2,000 words — especially after reading Kameron’s eloquent, provocative and drop-dead brilliant rant — one of the most important things I’ve ever read about writing science fiction — Why Writing Colorblind is Writing White. If you’re too lazy to read it, God(dess) help you, but from its most important takeaway for me is that white authors who claim not to think about race in their fiction, or that race doesn’t matter in their universe, or that characters not physically described could be “any race,” are misportraying the experience of reading in order to preserve (as I would put it) a form of white privilege. To my mind, they’re abdicating a central responsibility of the fiction writer.
I would add a few things to that, and to Kameron’s extremely cogent observations.
First, I think white writers who make such claims as “I write colorblind” are often doing it because thinking about race, for them, is uncomfortable and icky.
Hey, who can blame them? I’m white, and thinking about race is uncomfortable and icky for me (which is probably why I do it so often — I’m like that).
It’s so much easier if we white people can just reassure everybody, “You’ll never meet a person less racist than me!” and get on with our lives without having to fuck around with all this bellyaching about privilege, disadvantage, prejudice, and experience.
But it’s only white privilege that allows white writers to see things that way.
White privilege says that there’s a “baseline” human experience in fiction that can be mercifully free of racism — the myth that “escapist” fiction is fiction liberated from social responsibility. In my view, it’s not. White privilege says if you don’t mention a character’s skin tone, then he or she could be of any race, and it won’t matter. But in my view, it does matter what race a character is — concepts of race and ethnic origin suffuse everything that happens in the world, and everything that a character experiences. White people just aren’t aware of it as often. (more…)
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One of the biggest wake-up calls I had at Clarion was not so much with respect to diversity as it was making me face some of the blind spots I had in my own writing. I remember reading plenty of stories that I thought were good—and they were in many respects—only to have basically all of the women call the author out on an issue that, well, women would be sensitive to. Guys acting like ass holes, guys thinking with their dicks, women who would never act that way in real life. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t notice the issues in the story as it was my insensitivity to how a woman would react to it. I was not only new to the craft; I was new to plenty of issues that I should have been more aware of. Women’s issues was just one of them. Sexual orientation, culture wars, issues of race, and more were brought front and center in some of the stories that were written, and to evaluate them in any honest way, you really have to dig deep within yourself and figure out what you believe so that you can pass along, if not advice, at least your opinion from where you stand as a writer, as a person, and so on.
Call me naïve, but when the veteran female authors of my acquaintance all told me that gender bias was alive and real in the world of SF/F publishing, I was shocked. I’ve spent my life in a male-dominated field (electrical engineering); heck, even my high school (which specialized in science and technology) had a ratio of 7 guys for every girl, and these days I still attend meetings in which I’m the solo woman in a room with fifty Dilbert-clone white guys…yet not once in my career have I ever felt discriminated against based on my gender. If anything, it’s been the opposite: when I got into Caltech and MIT, they paid my plane fare to come visit, and wined and dined me in hopes of improving their male/female ratios. When I looked for jobs after graduation, technology companies fell over themselves to hire a female engineer with a degree from Caltech. My company would LOVE it if I wanted to climb the corporate ladder; I’m the one who balks and insists on sticking with the fun algorithm work.
The Death of the Necromancer, published in 1998, was my third novel, and my first with a new publisher, Avon Eos. Everything went fine through the editorial process, right up until I received the copyedit, and found that one of the major supporting characters, Captain Reynard Morane, had been all but removed from the book. And it happened that Reynard was gay.