Writing As An Act Of Aggression

Where is the line between homage and appropriation? Between artistic/creative license and cultural aggression?

Though the blonde I’m currently sporting is fake, I’m about as white as white can get, and I live in one of the whitest states in the US. And I like to write characters who aren’t, because the range of human experience goes far outside the lines drawn by skin’s melanin content.

And because a lot of both reading and writing for me is like travel: I do it and I love it for the perspectives and alternate views of the world it provides.

As a child, I was terrified of offending anyone. I haven’t outgrown that as much as I sometimes pretend, and this is one area that is a minefield of offenses. In writing especially viewpoint characters of color, I am guaranteed to offend. And I don’t mean to! But in this, intentions count for nothing.

If I get it wrong, I want to know. I want to have that conversation so I can try to get it more right in the future.

I majored in cultural anthropology. I want to learn and experience, and help others do the same. Fear that I’ll screw it up isn’t enough to make me stop.

We pick up so many bad habits from our environments – our societies and our cultures. Part of the process in writing a character who is “other” to us requires unpacking those bad habits. The preconceptions need to be taken out and dissected, analyzed, to find what makes them problematic so we (hopefully) don’t continue to make the same mistakes over and over.

This will make you a better writer. It takes away the shortcuts of generalizations and stereotypes. You have to approach the characters as real people, not game pieces to move where you want.

In an embarrassingly recent draft of the current novel, I described things like houses and clothing as “traditionally Japanese.” But that didn’t tell the reader anything. It drew no pictures. Someone without knowledge of Japan would have no clue, while someone else might wonder what era and region I based that on. It was a shortcut and it weakened the story.

Many of us use these shortcuts (stereotypes) without thinking, and readers without connection to those peoples or cultures might never pick up on it. But it is sloppy, inauthentic storytelling. Awareness is the first step towards fixing that.

But I am co-opting that culture for the length of the novel. The very act of me, a white woman, writing a character who is most certainly not white, is horribly presumptuous. I’ve never lived in another skin, so there will always be some level of inauthenticity. Add to that the history of white aggression and oppression in America alone (and I believe that context cannot be separated), and the very act of writing that story can become appropriation.

I wish I knew how to find and navigate that line.

Please share your thoughts, opinions, or any links to similar discussions in the comments! This is a topic that needs so much more dialogue. In the meantime, I’ll be reading Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.

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