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My Black Characters Make the Prospect of Traditional Publishing Even More Unlikely.
Several years before I reached the point where I could complete a manuscript from beginning to end, I was in contact with an old friend of mine, who was about to move to China. They are the kind of friend where you could not talk to for months, even years, but when you reconnect, it doesn’t feel strained or distant. In the conversations leading up to her departure, we talked about writing, stories and characters, and they told me something that I hadn’t even considered at the time. If you are a reader, especially one born and raised in the United States, you assume the characters in the novel are white.
I remember having to pause to think about their words. I was stunned to realize that they were correct. Unless the description specifically says otherwise, I automatically assumed that the characters are white. In case you all don’t know, I’m not white. So, it bothered me that this was the case. But it only takes a modicum of thought to understand why. Everything that I have absorbed in television, movies and print for the majority of my life has been dominated by white people. They have always been the default, so why wouldn’t that be so ingrained in me that whenever I picked up a novel by Stephen King or Dean Koontz, I assumed the characters were white, and most of the time, I’d be 100% right.
