Difficult Topics: Racial Bias

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Arizela

I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching lately about diversity in fiction, primarily fantasy novels, and especially my own creative works. This is a very sensitive topic, and I genuinely do not intend any offense, but I have always believed that some problems only get solved when light is cast upon them.

Diversity and race is something that I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with all my life. If any of you have been long-time readers of this blog, you might remember a post I did on perceptual bias eons ago. Here’s the link, if you want the full version, but the short of it is, our experiences influence the way we see the world, and the ingrained assumptions and associations we make can only be changed if we find, examine, and challenge them. I’m about to challenge a few of my own biases, and maybe yours, too. I expect that it will be painful for me, and I honestly don’t know, writing this, if I will ever hit the publish button.

So let me start by saying that I grew up in a very rural, very backwards, very White Anglo-Saxon Straight Protestant corner of Appalachia. My entire school system had four African American children, one Jewish girl, and a Jehovah’s Witness. That was the extent of cultural diversity when I was growing up.

And my family was anything but progressive on the issues of race and cultural diversity. My friend Katie wasn’t allowed to come to my 7th birthday party because my mother insisted that “black people leave an odor.” In 1984. Yeah. That backwards.

Despite all that, I remember making such a clatter anytime someone in my family said the N- word (which was pretty often), that eventually they all just stopped saying it, at least in front of me, so I would shut up.

When I was a teenager, despite being a welfare kid with a functionally illiterate, abusive single mother, I managed to be an academic achiever. I was sent to the Governor’s Scholars program at a university for a whole month. I lived in a dorm with other 16-17 year old kids from across the state, and while the group was still predominantly white, I was exposed to a host of new ideas, new cultures, and new people. I ate it up, but it ended up eating at me, too.

I’d gotten the family to stop spouting some of the epithets they were so fond of, but the racism remained deeply ingrained. My mother found out I had a bit of a crush on the doctoral student who was in charge of my program and threatened to hang me “until you stop twitching” if I ever brought home a “colored” boyfriend. By then, the balance of power in our relationship had shifted, and I no longer feared her, but what she said really, truly bothered me, not because of her intent, but because I hadn’t even considered the idea seriously. Erik *dreamy sigh* was 6’5″ of ebony stud (and 8 years older than me and completely uninterested in dorky teenage girls), but aside from looking, the idea of him as a romantic prospect never entered my mind. I found an assumption that I hadn’t even realized was in me, and I challenged it.

I became the kind of person who strove to see every person, regardless of skin tone or facial characteristics, as completely equal. I made a point of treating people as if we were all the same. Looking back on that now, I see how immature my new-found enlightenment was. Rather than embracing multiculturalism and diversity, I simply convinced myself that the only difference between me and a person of color was the color. Black people were just white people + Sharpie.

I did mention this was going to be painfully honest, right?

As much as saying that now makes me cringe, I think that point of view was a necessary step in my own evolution. Today I believe that diversity doesn’t mean ignoring the differences between people, but rather honoring them. I understand that there is no common experience between all people of a particular race or ethnicity, including my own. Race doesn’t define individuals, but the experiences they have had because of their race and the cultural biases they have endured, positive or negative, do influence who they are. I believe diversity lies in recognizing both cultural identity and individual identity.

As much as I try to distance myself from the attitudes that were prevalent where I grew up, they are still part of my history, part of my experience. My exposure to that level of prejudice and my strong response to it are a large part of what informs my attitudes toward race and my perceptual biases today. I strive to make sure that my biases (and everybody has them, it’s the nature of the beast) do not control me. I said to someone not long ago that cultural and perceptual biases are inevitable, but that acting out on them isn’t. I try every day to make that my reality, partly just because I think it’s the right thing to do, and also because my beautiful son is growing up in a world full of insidious, negative bias, of unconscious privileged and prejudice, and I want to show him how to identify and overcome all those things.

And that’s what brings me to this moment.

Well, that and the fact that I just finished writing a novel that doesn’t have a single non-white character in it.

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I read everything as a kid. Everything. I sent off for my first Harlequin subscription at the age of six, while my mother was sleeping off a party weekend. Those little cards in the middle of the book were great. Nobody ever minded that my handwriting looked like a six year old’s. (And don’t worry about the sex thing. I saw my first pornographic movie at age five; it was already too late for me. You could say I didn’t have a model parent.)

I was voracious. I would read a cereal box if nothing else was handy, but my deepest love was for fantasy. I loved dragons and knights, codes of honor, heroes standing against a tide of darkness. I loved an underdog, the simple person who turned out to be the only man alive who could defeat the bad guys and save the day. I loved elves and dwarves and gnomes. I loved paupers who became princes and princes who gave up everything for love.

And when I was growing up in a house with dirt floors in backwater Appalachia, with only the public library and the school library to read from, all those fantasies featured white heroes. Most of them featured damsels in distress. Robin McKinley’s Hero and the Crown was the first story I remember that showed me girls could be heroes, too. Stephen Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need duology was the second.

I genuinely don’t remember a single character from the fantasy novels I read as a kid who wasn’t pale skinned, with western ideas and mannerisms. Maybe my library weeded out the books with culturally and racially diverse protagonists (I read the entirety of the SF&F section) but whatever the case, they were missing, along with protagonists who were LGBT or disabled. I didn’t even get around to finding a book with openly gay characters until Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, and I stumbled into those in college.

Which is not to say the books were culturally one-note. Far from it. The worlds I explored between the dust jackets showed me cultures of pure imagination, each weighted to skew the status quo. They showed the full spectrum of social ills and wonders, from slavery to feminine equality, from prejudice to acceptance. The human (and sometimes non-human) condition is a glorious and terrible thing.

More recently, I have seen a growing trend toward diversity within the genre, coupled with an infuriating tendency for people to whitewash characters of color where they do exist, ala The Hunter Games movie.

I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I used to, simply because nonfiction feeds my own work so much better, but what I have read hasn’t left me completely hopeless. Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains stars a gay protagonist. Mercedes Lackey’s The Serpent’s Shadow features a protagonist who is bi-racial and female. Lots of books have added characters of various racial identities as secondary or minor characters. Still, the books that touch on the subject with grace and genuine thought seem a small minority in a largely homogenous playing field.

Which brings me to my problem. I have been struggling with the issue of adding more racial diversity to my own fiction. It wouldn’t be that hard to add in a handful of side characters who have dark skin. Change a description here, a mention there, viola! But somehow, that doesn’t seem honest.

I find a good number of those books that offer token diversity suffer from my own former trouble. They seem to believe the best path to diversity is with a paint brush. White people + sharpie, which works about as well as American people + accent or modern people – technology. If the only feature that differentiates your character from the pale skinned characters that surround him or her is a bit of ink/paint, that’s doesn’t really seem to honor diversity, particularly in cultures that are otherwise very Earth-like. Tokenism by itself is a whole other kettle of fish, of course.

My recently finished novel consists of people who are all one race because it’s a relatively small population, set in an insular community in a moderately temperate climate that hasn’t had any “fresh blood” in a couple hundred years, plus one guy from the outside, who must be able to blend in for the book to make any sense. As much as I would like to be able to assemble a more diverse cast, this story demands the conditions that it lives within, and those conditions, along with what we know about evolution and human genetic diversification, demand the cast that I’ve assembled. I have plans for a sequel, where the world outside that little bowl of mountains is explored, and racial and ethnic diversity, as well as how disability fits into the world my protagonists created in the first book, play a big part, but My honesty and integrity won’t let me pay token service to a topic as central to my understanding of who I am and the moral code to which I hold myself.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a book my mother would be proud of, by any means. Two of the four main protagonist characters are gay, one of them openly, and the themes of being different and struggling with sexuality are definitely explored. Another is an atheist in a polytheistic world, though that is much less central to the plot. There are a handful of kick-ass women in empowered roles as well, and the topic of treating women as incubators is touched on, though you couldn’t really call this a feminist piece. Still, you won’t find any dark skin or almond-shaped eyes between the pages of this one.

Does that mean this book is a failure? Unfit to be read? Of course not. Neither are the books of those hundreds of authors I’ve read over the years who have avoided the topics of race, ethnicity, and diversity altogether.

Please don’t mistake me. I am not making apologies for my story. I don’t believe in muses or the hocus pocus of mythical writing mojo, but I am humbled by the unflinching honesty I have found within those pages about topics that are important, wide-ranging, and relevant to our modern world. I love the characters and the narrative because they tell the truth. More importantly, they entertain. Fantasy as a genre is about entertaining. Regardless of the importance of its themes, a book that entertains is successful, but I believe fantasy is also growing.

What was once a vehicle for pure escapism and speculation for a predominantly white, predominantly protestant market has grown up to address some of the toughest issues to face us today. I hope that I can continue to learn and grow with the genre, and that the genre continues to evolve into a body of literature that embraces diversity and honors genuine multiculturalism on many levels. I hope that body of literature doesn’t forget that its most basic foundation is to entertain.

~~

I said at the beginning of this post that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever hit the Publish button. Well, after two days of waffling, I’m going to.

I said that the honest in my book humbled me, and I meant it. It humbled me enough to put this post out there, despite my reservations and fears. I hope that those of you who read this post and make inevitable judgments about my upbringing, my personality, my intentions, and my book will keep in mind that I’m just a person, inherently flawed, but doing the best I can.

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On Chance Occurrences

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Arizela

A few weeks ago, I was driving home from the endless errands that fill my days, and the car 5 lengths in front of mine that was going about 40mph was hit by a truck turning left across three lanes of traffic.The elderly gentleman driving was confused and bleeding from several lacerations to his forearm where the airbag had ripped off some skin. I parked my car, grabbed my first aid kit, and tried to get him to sit still. I gloved up, wrapped his arm in a quick bandage to keep him from bleeding everywhere, calmed him down enough that he stopped trying to fish in the floorboard for his hat, and got him to sit still until the ambulance arrived with a backboard and a neck brace.

Under the laws of my state, I am under no obligation to act as a nurse in a crisis situation outside my professional job, but I am protected by Good Samaritan laws if I choose to offer assistance. Because of this, and the fact that I’m a human being incapable of passing by the suffering of others when I can help, I keep a fairly stocked first-aid kit and a fire extinguisher in my car, both of which have come in handy over the years. The fire extinguisher joined the club years ago, after I pulled a woman from a burning car just moments before it became engulfed in flames.

 

~~

My sister used to work for a rural police department. Sometimes they left her alone with suspects who were locked in the town jail. This meant she had to be certified in first responder stuff – CPR, first-aid, crisis management.

Yesterday, one of her healthy female coworkers who had recently had surgery complained of chest pain, passed out, started convulsing, and eventually stopped breathing. She had blue lips and no pulse.

My sister, who had never used her training for anything more than calling 911 and keeping people calm, took charge of the situation and began CPR.

CPR by itself isn’t usually very effective at saving people, but it can greatly extend the window of time during which critical treatment can be delivered effectively. That means those minutes of CPR can be the difference between a live person and a dead one, or a live vegetable and a normal brain. In this case, the ambulance crew was able to establish a heart rate and take the woman to the hospital for further treatment.


~~

My mother-in-law is a nurse, too. When my husband was a toddler, she used her CPR training to resuscitate him from respiratory arrest twice. Once after he drowned and stopped breathing, and again when he accidentally breathed in a large volume of flour and stopped breathing. Thinking about those situations now, I get the shivers at how close I came to never knowing him.

A couple of years ago, she used those same skills to do CPR – along with another nurse – on a man who collapsed in the aisle of her hometown grocery store. They resuscitated him for more than twelve minutes before the ambulance arrived. It only takes about 5 minutes without CPR for brain damage to occur. The man recovered completely, with his brain function intact, and my mother-in-law still gets grateful cards from his family at the holidays.

~~

First aid, first responder, and CPR training can mean the difference between a good outcome and a bad one, and CPR is not hard to do.  I encourage everyone to learn CPR – if not from a training class, at least from the internet. Here’s a link http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/quickcpr.html.

Pro Tips for Handling Crisis Situations

  1. Don’t Panic!
  2. Call 911 (or whatever the universal emergency number is where you live) – or use a bystander to call. If you aren’t sure what to do, ask the emergency operator and follow his/her directions.
  3. Don’t rush into danger yourself The last thing the victims need is for you to divert the attention of the paramedics when they arrive. Don’t become another victim!
  4. Don’t move accident victims unless there is an immediate risk of fire or other life-threatening danger! You could do more harm than good. I had to tell off a helpful guy who was trying to get the old dude from the top of the post to walk to the side of the road and stand on the sidewalk until the police arrived. Accident victims are often confused – try to calm them, remind them constantly that they need to be still and calm. Talk in a soothing voice.
  5. If someone has passed out or stopped breathing, get them horizontal if it’s safe to do so – sometimes people pass out because of low blood pressure, and getting them flat helps the blood flow to the brain better. The other people standing around the lady who passed out at my sister’s office left her sitting up in her chair until my sister took over the situation and got her flat on the floor.
  6. If you do CPR – Go Hard or Go Home – CPR is completely ineffective if you don’t put enough force into it. You want to compress the chest enough to push the blood out of the heart (and into the brain). Otherwise, you’re just bouncing on the poor guy. You may crack ribs. This is OK. Do not stop until help arrives, but if there are multiple people around, switch off who is doing compressions every couple of minutes. It’s hard work if you do it right!
As with just about anything, preparation is the key to success in a crisis. Learning CPR, taking a first-aid class, or just thinking about how you’ll act in a situation all help keep you calm and on task when the crisis shows up. Having supplies like a roll of gauze, a sharp pair of scissors, an a pair of (preferable latex-free) gloves to protect yourself can also increase both your comfort and your effectiveness in a crisis.

 

 

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Closing on the Climax

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Arizela

Over the years that I’ve been writing and talking to writers, I’ve discovered people who think that the beginnings are the hardest part. Facing the blank page can be pretty terrifying to some folks, and while I’ve never minded a void myself, I can definitely see the difficulties in getting started.

Other people seem to think the mushy, mucky, sucky middle is the worst part of writing a book. The middle takes up roughly 50% of the total space, and if you get derailed from the plan (or write without one to start with) it can seem like an endless forest of dangers not just for the characters, but for the hapless writer.

An awful lot of folks seem to have trouble with endings. I know people who have dozens of novels and stories started, but few if any finished. I have struggled with this one myself a few times, as it’s the natural tiger pit at the end of the mushy  middle for writers who work by feel, intuition, and faith. Organic writers often tend to write themselves into inescapable tangles, but I can generally hammer an ending out.

Still others tell me that the first draft is easy, but revisions are hard. Revision isn’t the same thing as line editing. It’s not about changing a few words here or there, making the characters blond instead of brunette, or double-checking that Billy Bob’s eyes stay puce-colored throughout. That stuff’s easy peasy. No, the real work of revision comes from… well, revisioning. Taking a concept you know frontwards and backwards, and rethinking it. Pulling out the gems, the brilliant moments, the best parts of the story or the characters, and stitching them back together into a Frankensteinian monster who is not only stronger and smarter and better, but also hopefully prettier. I can definitely see where people have trouble with things like that.

I have a real, love-hate relationship with revision. The revisions are what breath life into my work, and I don’t think I would be nearly the writer I am without them. And they can be a hell of a lot of fun. Nothing is quite so appealing to me as taking a character I know and discovering new things about him/her. But at the same time, they can be lengthy, painful, irksome, frustrating, and down right exhausting.

I’ve hit my break point with the revision of Hunters a half-dozen times since taking up the torch to make it a better story after getting feedback from a top-notch literary agent in 2010. The feedback wasn’t a revision request, but it resonated with me in unexpected ways and the story demanded to be made better.

After eighteen months of disability, when I couldn’t really work on anything, and 9 months of actual writing that was sometimes more miss than hit, I am closing in on the finish again.  I’m ready to just boot this thing out into the world again and watch it sink or swim. I’m ready to move on, to write something else. To explore something new, rather than something familiar in a new way.

But that’s not really how it works. The revision is miles better, in my opinion, but I’ll finish it, give it a quick line edit, print or package it for my various beta readers, and kick it off to them, and a few months from now, I expect I’ll be making final tweeks and prepping the submissions packages again. If I’m lucky enough to find an agent, there will likely be feedback to attend to before submissions to editors. And if I’m lucky enough to sell, there will most definitely be edits, copy edits, and polishing. Cover copy writing, maybe. Then marketing. Then readings and signings and discussions with readers. Not to mention potential sequels.

I guess the moral of this story is, if you are going to write something, you’d better love it. If all goes well, it will be with you for decades to come, never really finished until it’s in print, post-production, and in the hearts and minds of readers.

Not even finished then, if you’re George Lucas.

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Book Review: The Griffin Mage Trilogy

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Arizela

I’m a sucker for a trilogy. Especially an awesome trilogy by a new writer who really knows her shit.

I saw this shiny cover in the B&N brick and mortar one fateful Thursday while waiting for my favorite sushi joint across the street to open for lunch. My interests were piqued. I read the back cover blurb… sounded good. Then I took the real browser’s test and opened the book. The first page left me salivating, and not just for fish.

From what I could tell, this trilogy was Ms. Neumeier’s first efforts in the fantasy realm, and I’m sold.

The Good

The world is beautifully drawn, imaginative, and unique. The characters are easy to root for, and even the “bad guys” get a good treatment and a lot of depth from this author. She managed to make my allegiance swing in unexpected ways throughout the course of this epic tale. The plot flows, and aside from a few places where I felt the descriptions got a little bulky, nothing dragged. The language is spot-on, tight when it needs to be, and just lyrical enough to feed the soul. Basically, everything was good about this book, except for the one thing that really didn’t work for me, and that was annoying, but minor.

The Not So Good – A Matter of Personal Taste

The names of the characters are… well, let’s just say that Tolstoy has nothing on Ms. Neumeier. I think I would need a mouth full of pebbles to attempt pronouncing several of them. Plus characters are often referred to differently throughout – sometimes by three word monster-sized monikers and other times by just one of the mammoth words – usually the longest. You try saying “Nehaistiane Estrerikiu Anahaikuuanse” smoothly without a stumble. Bet you can’t. And that is not the worst, just one among many that made me stumble repeatedly while reading. Even worse, I know that one’s a griffin, but I have no idea which griffin, which is a problem when trying to paint their personalities. (And the human names are just as bad about half the time.)

The Verdict

This book may not make my all-time-favorites shelf, but it’s very, very close. I really enjoyed reading it, despite having to take a break two-thirds of the way through the omnibus in order to save my eyeballs from the constant name-scorching.

Anyone who’s read one of my reviews knows I don’t pull my punches, but when I find something I like, I love to share. Go read this. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

 

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I Am Not a Platform

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Arizela

I’ve been reading a tremendous amount of stuff lately, mostly linked off Google+ and Twitter, about how writers should safeguard and create their platforms, how they should temper their opinions, withdraw from having any meaningful discourse in matters of politics or anything that might be considered controversial, and homogenize their online personas into a brand.

Call me crazy, but I think that’s completely bass-ackwards thinking.

As an avid reader, an opinionated person, and a human-being, I think that writers of all stripes should first be true to themselves. See, I have the PC route down cold. It’s kind of required in nursing. You divorce yourself of your opinions and your personal truths at the door, because every day you walk into a situation where your needs and wants and concerns DO NOT MATTER. The patient is the total focus, which is exactly as things should be. Doesn’t matter what their political leanings are, who they worship, how often they wash their socks, or even who, when, and how often they put their body parts into other people’s body parts. They are my patients, and I treat them with respect and dignity. That’s not to say that all nurses practice this way. I’ve been proselytized to when in the patient role. I’ve been judged, and I’ve had my needs put on the back burner so a nurse could tell me all about her shitty assignment and how my needs are interrupting her work flow. That, my dears, is unprofessional. As a nurse, I would never proselytize religion or politics, never prioritize my workflow over patient needs, and most importantly never judge based on our differences. That’s what it means to have a therapeutic relationship.

To me, writing is a completely different sort of profession, requiring a different sort of relationship between writer and reader. Rather than being a caretaker for my reader, I am a guide, showing them the world through a different lens.

I write fiction, and telling a great story is the most important consideration I have when writing, but it is not the only consideration. The characters I create, the worlds they find themselves in, the situations that put their feet to the fire – those are all born out of passion. My passion to tell the story, my passion for what I see as injustices in the real world, my passion for showing the best – and the worst – of humanity.

If a reader decides to avoid my fiction because my blog has the occasional post that displays my belief that people of all genders, all faiths (and none), all sexual orientations (and none), and all racial and ethnic identities should have equal rights in our modern society, well, that person is maybe not going to like what I have to say in fiction either. A lot of the political and controversial ideas I take a stand on through this blog are also represented in my fiction, because those are the things that are important to me.

When I read, it is with the intent to experience something new, to see the world (or fictional worlds) through someone else’s perspective, to give them a chance to influence the way I think, feel, or see problems around me. Most of my favorite books are not on my list of favorites because of the plot lines or the gimmicks their writers employed. They aren’t there because they won awards or the author’s marketing strategy was the bestest. They’re there because the authors had unique, interesting voices that showed me a little slice of their perspectives. They are there because the authors wrote with passion, and even if that passion is something I don’t share, I respect it.

If anything, I believe that when I write I have a duty to shine a light on the truths and the could-be’s of the world, to show things from my own unique point of view, to say them in my own unique voice. I think my duty to be honest with my readers trumps the marketability concerns of a PC platform. If I don’t like something, I’ll speak to that. If something pisses me off, or moves me, or makes me happy, I’ll blog about it. If I love something, I’ll share it with you. Call me crazy, but I believe that my target audience can handle the truth. After all, it’s just my opinion.

I do not create homogenized, bland, flavorless worlds or characters who avoid confrontation. I refuse to create a homogenized, bland, flavorless online persona to represent them. I am not a platform.

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What are your thoughts on platform and branding for authors?

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