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is this racism?



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Wed Jan 04, 2017 8:41 am
maisewriting says...



Hello all, I have a question about the way my story works.
In my novel that I'm working on, Fae (the "good guys") have white-blonde hair and sea-green eyes, although their skin colour and ethnic features vary, if that makes sense. Basically depending on what part of their nation they come from, they could look, say, Chinese in all ways except for the colour of their hair and eyes.
On the other hand, the Elves (the "bad guys") have brown hair and golden eyes. This works the same way as it does for Fae.
My question is, is this racist to have the good people with light hair and the bad people with dark hair? Two of my three main characters, although Fae, are POC. The main antagonist, who is Elf, is white. Does anyone, or could anyone, take offense to this? It's very ingrained into my story and although I've taken certain measures to try and make this non-racist I'm still worried it could be viewed as such. I don't want to offend anyone.
  





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Wed Jan 04, 2017 9:07 am
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Mea says...



Does anyone, or could anyone, take offense to this?

Yes. I guarantee you that with almost anything you write, someone, somewhere, could be offended by it. Do your best to be respectful, balanced, and well-informed, particularly when writing about real-world issues, but don't worry yourself sick over it, in the same way you should strive to use reader feedback to better your writing, but at some point recognize some readers are just not going to like what you've written because it doesn't appeal to them.

As for this instance, I'd say a firm no, that isn't even approaching racist. I mean, for one thing, pretty much any ethnicity can have dark hair. For another, real-world race relations should not be automatically imposed on your fantasy world. The race relations of your world are entirely what you make them to be, independent of how their skin and hair color relates to the real world. Just because a race in your story shares a skin tone with a race in the real world does not make them analogous to that race.

The only thing I'd say is to try to show through your story that the Elves aren't all evil, and this isn't so much out of a possibility of racism as that it just makes your world more interesting and well-rounded if you can see it from their side, too. All-evil races aren't very realistic unless they're an army of clones from a dark lord or something.
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Wed Jan 04, 2017 9:39 am
maisewriting says...



Mea wrote:
Does anyone, or could anyone, take offense to this?

Yes. I guarantee you that with almost anything you write, someone, somewhere, could be offended by it. Do your best to be respectful, balanced, and well-informed, particularly when writing about real-world issues, but don't worry yourself sick over it, in the same way you should strive to use reader feedback to better your writing, but at some point recognize some readers are just not going to like what you've written because it doesn't appeal to them.

As for this instance, I'd say a firm no, that isn't even approaching racist. I mean, for one thing, pretty much any ethnicity can have dark hair. For another, real-world race relations should not be automatically imposed on your fantasy world. The race relations of your world are entirely what you make them to be, independent of how their skin and hair color relates to the real world. Just because a race in your story shares a skin tone with a race in the real world does not make them analogous to that race.

The only thing I'd say is to try to show through your story that the Elves aren't all evil, and this isn't so much out of a possibility of racism as that it just makes your world more interesting and well-rounded if you can see it from their side, too. All-evil races aren't very realistic unless they're an army of clones from a dark lord or something.


thank you, i'm glad you've cleared that up! and to answer your last paragraph, not all of the Elves are evil of course, but as far as the protagonists view them, they are :)
  





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Wed Jan 04, 2017 1:04 pm
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Omni says...



I agree with Mea about your original post having no inherit racism, but you do have racism in your story, from what it seems. That's not necessarily a bad thing (well, I mean it is, but from the standpoint of having a more well-rounded story, it's not.)

How your races are born does not equal racism. Just because your elves are born with dark hair and your Fae are born with light does not make this a race issue. But, that doesn't mean there isn't a race divide in your story, which you said there was in your second post.

I suggest you make the racism a very real thing in your world, since the protagonists already view the elves as being "bad." Racism is not good, by any means, but that doesn't mean it exists. Some questions you should ask yourself about this divide between the two races:

-Why do they hate each other?
-How long has this been happening?
-Has one side ever suppressed the other? If so, how long and how severe? (Supression is probably the quickest way to have racial divides)
-If there was an elf living in a Fae city right this moment, how would they be treated? And vice versa.

There's a lot more to this, but those are some of the basics. Racism has a story, it has a history. It doesn't just pop up out of nowhere, especially if it's as bad as one side hating the entire other side.

Hope I helped :D
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Thu Jan 05, 2017 12:05 am
Tenyo says...



I wouldn't say this was racist, especially if it's only hair and eye colour.

The idea of good and evil represented by light and dark dates back to (off the top of my head) at least 8th century BC. Religious narratives and mythologies are full of it across many nationalities and races.

Generally accidental racism comes from laziness- people using an idea that makes most sense without actually thinking about it, and in doing so default to a basic cultural or environmental stereotype that they probably don't even believe in except in some vague subconscious post-it note in the back of their brains.

If you have made a conscious decision and have a reason to colour your characters the way you have then you won't really have any issues.
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Thu Jan 05, 2017 12:30 am
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Rosendorn says...



So you might want to look into colourism.

Colourism says dark= evil and light= good.

While yes, people will take offence to everything, you have to do much, much more research than just stopping there. When you end up with such an obvious dichotomy between light and dark, there is the potential for some deeper problems. Namely, one that has PoC be ranked by "beauty" where the most beautiful just so happen to be the palest. Colourism and light/dark symbolism is a very loaded topic and should be treated carefully because of how deep the roots are (even if it shows up in stuff that's millennia old, colourism is about that old because people who worked in the sun were usually lower class, and people who could afford to not work were paler).

There are also many many many tropes about how PoC often have "weird" hair or eye colours to make them "special", because people find it "boring" to have brown eyes. I would also look into these to prevent any sort of exotification.

I'd take a look at Writing With Color's Black and White Symbolism Guide as a start and really, really make sure you're not falling into the trap where dark is bad and light is good, fullstop. It has many racist undertones, and it's something you do have to undermine (by balancing out skin tones on both sides). There's also a colorism tag you can look at.

If it's just hair colour, you're probably okay, and if you have some super dark people on the "good" side and some super pale people on the "bad" side you're balancing it out and making it genuinely about hair colour. But if you notice that in general, people on the "good" side are paler than people on the "bad" side, yeah, you're being racist. You can pretty easily fix that by just making that statement no longer true!
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Thu Jan 05, 2017 3:55 am
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Kale says...



I begin with a question: which racial groups do you associate light-colored hair and eyes with?

And the answer to that question is why I agree with Rosey on the colorism aspect being potentially racist.

With that said, there historically were blonde, blue-eyed Chinese peoples. China is an incredibly diverse nation when it comes to ethnic groups, and there are literally hundreds of ethnic groups that are officially recognized by the Chinese government, each with their own distinct features.

Basically, when you say "look Chinese", you're probably referring to the Han Chinese (which is the current ethnic majority).

I bring this up because looking "Chinese" is a very strong stereotype that doesn't necessarily reflect reality, and since you're concerned about coming across as racist, it's an area I think you should really look into. Asia on a whole is incredibly diverse, and the homogenized stereotype of "all Asians have yellowish skin with coarse, black hair and dark, slanted, monolid eyes" is terribly inaccurate.

I think this is important to consider because if the base you're building your story on is affected by racism, then the result will also be tinged with racism.

You can try to compensate for the unfortunate racism by justifying the stereotypical traits in-story (which seems to be what you're trying to do) or avoiding the problematic angle altogether.

At this point, I think it's worth asking why you feel it necessary for the Fae to have light hair and eyes while the Elves have dark. Depending on your answer, I'll have different suggestions.
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Thu Jan 05, 2017 10:52 am
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maisewriting says...



Kyllorac wrote:I begin with a question: which racial groups do you associate light-colored hair and eyes with?

And the answer to that question is why I agree with Rosey on the colorism aspect being potentially racist.

With that said, there historically were blonde, blue-eyed Chinese peoples. China is an incredibly diverse nation when it comes to ethnic groups, and there are literally hundreds of ethnic groups that are officially recognized by the Chinese government, each with their own distinct features.

Basically, when you say "look Chinese", you're probably referring to the Han Chinese (which is the current ethnic majority).

I bring this up because looking "Chinese" is a very strong stereotype that doesn't necessarily reflect reality, and since you're concerned about coming across as racist, it's an area I think you should really look into. Asia on a whole is incredibly diverse, and the homogenized stereotype of "all Asians have yellowish skin with coarse, black hair and dark, slanted, monolid eyes" is terribly inaccurate.

I think this is important to consider because if the base you're building your story on is affected by racism, then the result will also be tinged with racism.

You can try to compensate for the unfortunate racism by justifying the stereotypical traits in-story (which seems to be what you're trying to do) or avoiding the problematic angle altogether.

At this point, I think it's worth asking why you feel it necessary for the Fae to have light hair and eyes while the Elves have dark. Depending on your answer, I'll have different suggestions.


oh yes, I did mean Han Chinese, I'm sorry, I should have clarified. I apologize for being so rude.
As for your question, it's mostly because I always imagined my protagonist Axylia as having white-blond hair and being Fae, and that's become so ingrained in my mind. My novel has gone through many incarnations and so in this one, where all the Fae have the same hair colour, it became white-blond. And I guess I chose dark hair for the Elves because I wanted something to contrast with the Fae.
In-universe, it's because of their mythology. The Fae are descended from the Day deity, while the Elves are descended from a Night deity, so their hair and eye colour reflect that (white and green for the light and the plants, dark and gold for the night sky and the stars). I should mention that neither of these deities is inherently good nor evil, and they are simply opposites of each other (in the mythology, opposites are very important).
  





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Thu Jan 05, 2017 11:03 am
maisewriting says...



Rosendorn wrote:So you might want to look into colourism.

Colourism says dark= evil and light= good.

While yes, people will take offence to everything, you have to do much, much more research than just stopping there. When you end up with such an obvious dichotomy between light and dark, there is the potential for some deeper problems. Namely, one that has PoC be ranked by "beauty" where the most beautiful just so happen to be the palest. Colourism and light/dark symbolism is a very loaded topic and should be treated carefully because of how deep the roots are (even if it shows up in stuff that's millennia old, colourism is about that old because people who worked in the sun were usually lower class, and people who could afford to not work were paler).

There are also many many many tropes about how PoC often have "weird" hair or eye colours to make them "special", because people find it "boring" to have brown eyes. I would also look into these to prevent any sort of exotification.

I'd take a look at Writing With Color's Black and White Symbolism Guide as a start and really, really make sure you're not falling into the trap where dark is bad and light is good, fullstop. It has many racist undertones, and it's something you do have to undermine (by balancing out skin tones on both sides). There's also a colorism tag you can look at.

If it's just hair colour, you're probably okay, and if you have some super dark people on the "good" side and some super pale people on the "bad" side you're balancing it out and making it genuinely about hair colour. But if you notice that in general, people on the "good" side are paler than people on the "bad" side, yeah, you're being racist. You can pretty easily fix that by just making that statement no longer true!



thank you for your input! this is super helpful!
the hair and eye colour are only indications of magic and I have human POC who look entirely ordinary, is that still exotification? I can't judge that really well, as I am white and I don't face that.
additionally, the main protagonists (who are Fae) are mostly POC. I think all of my antagonists are white? Except for perhaps one.
And of course, not all of the Elves are evil. I'm about to introduce an Elf who is good and essentially helps the Fae ultimately triumph.
  





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Thu Jan 05, 2017 5:55 pm
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Rosendorn says...



Making sure that not all elves are evil and not all fae are good is kind of critical to get the last traces of "dark/light racist symbolism" out of your work. I would suggest having more than one good and one evil on each side, to avoid tokenism.

As for exotification, it's both both "unusual hair/eye colours" and in how you describe people.

Like, always referencing how sexy a Latinx person is and generally treating them as drop dead gorgeous with disproportionate description towards their attractiveness would be fetishization, and generally not a good thing.

Describing PoC skin tones with food would be a form of objectification, and racist.

Having black women be sassy, mother-like, and/or emotionally strong all the time is falling into either the Mammy or Tough Black Woman trope, both of which are racist. Similarly, if black men are big, muscular, and scary, that's falling into "black thug" which... you get the picture.

Describing Asians as petite and fighting machines, focusing on their athletic skill, paleness, etc— also not a good idea. On the flipside, anything associated with Yellow Peril is a bad idea. Once upon a time, Asians were so typecast as villains that "rules for writing a mystery" said to not have Asians so people couldn't have the visual clues.

If Arabs or Jewish individuals have emphasized hooked noses, large ears, and clammy hands, to give them visual coding for "not good" or "morally grey", then you're also falling into racist tropes. The "evil witch" trope is rather literally built on Jewish caricature.

(why yes, fancasting Helga Hufflepuff and Godric Gryffindor as black, Rowena Ravenclaw as Asian, and Salazar Slytherin as Arab can hold racial bias.)

Honestly just browse through writing with color in depth. It's one of the only resources I know that comes from PoC discussing their experience. Their ask box is currently closed, but there's a lot there— including description guides.
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Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:54 am
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CarryOnMrCaulfield says...



Personally, I do not find it offensive. While it could simply be because I am a white male, I just have a hard time imagining that someone with a rational mind would be offended. Tolkien did the same thing. In my fantasy universe, every single POV character is white, but that is because it is based on medieval Europe. It is not racist to have a whitewashed world. If people are offended, that is on them, unless you are going out of your way to be racist or offensive towards minorities. Any rational human being would not be offended by this. A little bit of diversity is not bad, but there is absolutely no harm with what you are doing.
  





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Fri Jan 06, 2017 2:31 am
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Megrim says...



I'll drop a quick post since I haven't found time to go through this thoroughly, but want to chime in.

It's a fun coincidence this came up, because in my WIP hair colour plays a prominent role, and this EXACT this is one of the issues I'm working on in this round of edits. The capital planet of the galactic empire is an ice planet, so more urban & wealthy people come from there and are pale and have white hair. The MC has black hair, which provokes a lot of bigotry, being from a rural/poor planet out on the fringe. There are POC around but I didn't make them super obvious, and my agent was concerned that it seems like a galaxy full of all white people (consider, the MC is still white, with black hair). So I've done two things now: 1. explain the genetics, that it's a dominant gene destroying pigment in hair follicles, originating from that one planet, so it's a mark of ancestry there. 2. have more named characters who are POC with white hair. And more POC in general.

The idea is that hair color is a stand-in for whatever discrimination you want it to be. In-world, it's a stereotype of urban/wealthy vs rural/poor/uneducated. Actual ethnicity is completely unrelated, not a subject of prejudice, and ethnicity is also NOT correlated with culture, because everyone's basically spread out everywhere, like earth multiplied a bajillion. There aren't good or bad people on one "side" or the other. The MC experiences "racism" as one of the obstacles he faces in life, because of his hair color--which allows good scenes and character tension without me having to directly use some real-world controversy like ACTUAL racism against POC.

To address what MrCaulfield said, it's not really as much about offending people. Whitewashing really stands out to anyone who doesn't live in a whitewashed community, and it can turn readers off, for sure. But I think the most important aspect is simply representing people, and it's summarized nicely by this section of my agent's comments for my novel:

Since skin color is entirely incidental in this world you’ve built, I think it’s both easy and important to make sure there is clear representation of all skin types so that readers, who live in a world where skin color is not incidental, see themselves represented.
  





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Fri Jan 06, 2017 10:56 pm
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CarryOnMrCaulfield says...



Megrim wrote:
To address what MrCaulfield said, it's not really as much about offending people. Whitewashing really stands out to anyone who doesn't live in a whitewashed community, and it can turn readers off, for sure. But I think the most important aspect is simply representing people, and it's summarized nicely by this section of my agent's comments for my novel:


Although in this instance, whether or not it is acceptable to whitewash depends on the setting. Of course you wouldn't have ethnic diversity in a historical fiction novel about "the Anarchy" unless it served a justifiable purpose. 12th century England was not exactly racially diverse.

If you were writing a novel set during the French and Indian War, whitewashing would detract from the realism.
  





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Sat Jan 07, 2017 3:35 am
Omni says...



@Rosendorn to be honest (we talked a bit about this one to one) but I never thought about colorism. In retrospect, that is a core of racism in general, so therefore the original post was in fact an example of racism.

@maisewriting I'm actually really glad you asked this question now. Not only are you asking for enlightenment on a subject you don't know much about, but the people who reply to this are also being enlightened. I hope this at least partially helps you get a clearer answer on your original question! :D
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Sun Jan 08, 2017 12:11 am
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Kale says...



maisewriting wrote:oh yes, I did mean Han Chinese, I'm sorry, I should have clarified. I apologize for being so rude.
As for your question, it's mostly because I always imagined my protagonist Axylia as having white-blond hair and being Fae, and that's become so ingrained in my mind. My novel has gone through many incarnations and so in this one, where all the Fae have the same hair colour, it became white-blond. And I guess I chose dark hair for the Elves because I wanted something to contrast with the Fae.
In-universe, it's because of their mythology. The Fae are descended from the Day deity, while the Elves are descended from a Night deity, so their hair and eye colour reflect that (white and green for the light and the plants, dark and gold for the night sky and the stars). I should mention that neither of these deities is inherently good nor evil, and they are simply opposites of each other (in the mythology, opposites are very important).

"Rude" is not the word I would've used, and I think you may have missed my point.

"Thoughtless" is more accurate, and my main point was that if you're really concerned about things coming across as being racist, you need to do a lot of examining of the concepts you're going to be referencing, with the disparity between the popular conception of Chinese appearance and the reality of the multiple ethnic groups being one example. Not doing so leads to the thoughtless inclusion of racist concepts.

I do wonder why there's only a singular hair and eye color for each group. Why aren't there variations? What about incorporating "unnatural" hair colors (like purple)?

Also, having one side prevail over the other implies that one side is "better" than the other, so you've got a bit of a mismatch there between "neither of these deities is inherently good or evil" and the conflict between the designated good Fae and the designated Evil Elves.
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