Writing the other

I'm currently part-way through reading Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race.  I've also been reading a lot of tweets recently about writing the other.  For me as a white woman, the other is people with a disability and BIOOC - Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour characters.  

One of the things I get hung up on is trying to describe skin colour in my writing.  In my books there are always people of colour with very dark skins and some with lighter brown skins.  Trying to show that diversity always ties me up in knots.

It's not just a problem for characters with darker skins though.  My so-called white people have many  different shades of skin too.  There are the pale-faced Berengeris, whose distant ancestry is probably Inuit.  There are people with what I'd describe on Earth as a Mediterrnean complexion, and all shades in between.  I have just as much problem describing white skin colour too.

I've seen discussions recently on Twitter about not wanting to see the only black people in books be ones in relationships with white people.  I have done that with my male main character in the book in writing now.  But that black man is closely related to a Great Family Captain.  He comes from a position of as much privilege as my white character.

And he isn't the only black person in the book.  I have seven Great Families, and two of them are headed by black Captains.  That's not equal representation, but I chose the skin types to match the places they live in.  

In the second book which I'm writing now I'm trying to even things up a little.  My characters will visit a lot of prestigious art institutions, and that gives me the opportunity to introduce BIPOC characters and characters with disabilities as museum directors or curators.

The original drafts of these novels go back more than fifteen years, when my exposure to diversity was much less.  Until a decade ago, I rarely saw a black face in my local area. Trying to think myself out of white privileged mindset has been a challenge, and it's still very much a work in progress.  But embracing that diversity makes my stories so much richer - and far more representative of the real world.