parakkum

A little while back, M posted a link to a Pam Noles essay on race in SF, along with some of his own thoughts and observations.

These days, when I write something I'm generally inclined to put in a fair range of ethnicities and to pretty much split my character distribution by gender. For example, the protagonists in Inhabit are a white girl, an Asian boy, an African girl and another white boy (this was targeted for a certain magazine originally, or I probably wouldn't have had two white folks...). The characters in my SF pitch Pathfinder are a mixed Indonesian-Dutch group, with the two leads on the ground being Sutiati and Hans. All the characters in the fantasy pitch Righteous are sort of Asian-esque, though I admit this one does have an actual princess as the only real female protagonist. ...and the leads in the future-superpowered adventure story Atopia are white and Philipino (and a guy and a gal).

I caught myself today thinking about a new fantasy pitch and deciding that all the characters would be black, then coming up against a biological limitation -- in that long-standing agricultural communities tend to pale out (probably from malnutrition, lack of vitamin D). Then I thought, "Well, I was going for a fairly fantasy-esque idea with some fantasy physics in there, so there's no reason I can't ignore that little bit of biology as well." Of course, the immediate follow-up thought was "If I really, honestly did a story with all the characters black, how much of a barrier would I come up against in trying to pitch that? As a comic series? As a book? As a movie?"

The unfortunate thing is that producers might just say, "Sure" and go ahead and make everyone white. This makes me sad, for the obvious cultural segregation and disenfranchisement reasons and because it's so boring. Having such a tight limit on non-whites in entertainment means that (1) it's all white folks, all the time and (2) it's all the same non-white folks, all the time. It's silly and stupid that I can say, "Oh, it's the generic Asian old guy" and M knew exactly who I was talking about.