Young Writers Society

Hey guys! I feel like I've been asking a lot of writing questions lately so I hope someone benefits from them besides me.

My question today is how do you introduce a characters ethnicity without just coming out and saying it? One of the characters in my book has Nigerian and Swiss father and her mother is English. It's already known that she's British (someone tells her to her stop saying 'shag' because she hasn't lived in England for the past 9 years) and I want to come up with a clever way to say her father's Nigerian.

I'm actually partially basing this character on a real person, Ashley Madekwe. My character looks similar to her so I've included a picture.

Thanks in advance for your help!

First off, avoid comparing her skin tones to food within the prose. If a character does it, that's one thing. But food comparisons have a lot of critique.

The first thing that comes to mind is having her struggle to find foundation for her skin tone! A few makeup brads I know have very limited selection for darker skin tones, and different colours look good on darker skin (I'm waiting for an ad that shows a very dark skinned model with neon coloured makeup).

There are other subtle ways like that I'm thinking of, but most of them involve shopping, clothes, and colour selection.

Hi

I totally understand your struggle. Personally, I think the best way to describe a person's skin color is to use adjectives or similes. Like "her skin was mocha brown" or "her milk-chocolate skin". Those kind of descriptions sound natural and nice, but at the same time not to food-y.
Hope that helped

-Addie

So I'm going to go into a little bit more elaboration as to why you shouldn't compare a darker skinned person's skin tone to food, period, even if it's "not too food-y".

1- White characters basically never get this. The whole principle of double standards applies big time here. When you wouldn't do things to the dominant population (white people might not be the majority, but we are dominant), but do it to the marginalized population, that tends to make the marginalized population feel "othered" in a negative sense.

2- By drawing a comparison to food, you're associating them with non-human things. They've have already had to fight for being recognized as people, so the food comparisons don't help.

3- They often get made "desirable" in other senses based on body shape, morals, and specific traits. By associating them with good tasting food, you're continuing to make them into something desirable.

Call it a shade that isn't food. Medium brown, dark brown, nearly black, ect. Describe them exactly like you would a white character, with traits, a certain skin tone, and features that aren't shorthand.

If you're going straight off description, I'd say her skin is warm medium brown. Somebody like Lupita Nyong'o would look "nearly black" or "very dark brown" to me.

It might be hard at first, because food comparisons are so common, but the more research I've been doing and the more ethnicities I've talked to, the more they dislike little things such as descriptions like food. (Even things like "almond eyes"— Asian eyes have a much broader variety of shape than that)

Thanks for the reply guys! I'm still not sure how I'm going to describe the character but I'm thinking about just directly saying she's part Nigerian. Her last name is Nigerian so I feel like someone could comment on her last name and then I can slip it in there. I still would like to say her mother is English and her father is Nigerian and Swiss.

What about trying to include a scene depicting them having Nigerian food; or some Nigerian slang/words that she mixes in while talking to the dad? Or dad's relatives still living in Nigeria - or how she might have to talk to her Nigerian grandmom in Nigerian? I would say avoid going to describe skin tones, because colours may be present in a lot of other countries as well.

These wouldn't be explicit but the reader would be able to figure it?

That's actually a good idea! I could have her say something like:

"We're going to Switzerland for a couple of weeks to visit my dad's sister"

"I thought your dad was Nigerian?"

"His father is Nigerian and his mother is Swiss. So I have my grandfather Odili to thank for the inability to find a foundation that matched my skintone for years. Thank-god for MAC."

If anyone has any suggestions on how to make this better let me know!