Comments on: On Describing Race

By: Diana

Diana — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:49:18 +0000

Thanks! His name is Tristan Wilds. He started his career on the tv show THE WIRE, and was recently in the film The Secret Life of Bees with Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifa, and is also a regular on the new 90210.

By: Emilia

Emilia — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:15:46 +0000

What is the name of the Actor in the photo? I know you mentioned him in an earlier post, but it’d be quicker to ask you than to look trough the archives….Yur still rockin Diana. My sister has read all of SSG and thought they were cool. Now she’s gonna read Rampant!!

By: Tiferet

Tiferet — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:23:46 +0000

I haven’t read your book (I am following links, sorry) but I think I want to! So I can’t answer the poll. But I’ve written a series of stories where I was absolutely flabbergasted to discover that readers (at this point only friends) liked my story enough to want to draw the characters, but apparently hadn’t picked up that there were only three white people in the whole story (which was set on another planet, hundreds of years from now) and were picturing characters whose hair colour, hair texture, skin colour &c had actually been described as fair-skinned white people, even though I thought I had made it as clear as possible that they were black without using 21st century American racial identifiers. I didn’t know what to do except to thank them for the art (because it was very nice that they liked my story that much!) and try and figure out how to rewrite the descriptions to be more clear!

By: Emilia

Emilia — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:08:18 +0000

I did not picture Giovanni like that at all. When I think of his hair I think of longer than the actor in the photo.
When I think Giovanni, I think Orlando Bloom in Troy with darker skin… almost like the actor in the photo.
On the subject of olive skin, it usually describes people of Mediterranian descent. Fang in Maximum ride has Olive skin, and he is certainly not green!
But then again I imagine practically every guy in every book, who has relatively curly brown it black hair. But that’s partially because I’m in love with Orlando, and u would love to see him in a movie about killer unicorns.

By: Lindsay

Lindsay — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:58:46 +0000

Diana, I really enjoyed reading this post about race and the one about strong women and their stronger lovers. Both were very thought provoking. I, too, did not see Giovanni as black, but interpreted his dark skin to be Italian.

By: Annie

Annie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:14:59 +0000

One of my good friends in Sweden was a guy from Italy, Fabio. He had very dark skin for a white guy, and black curly hair (that was irresistible to touch). When I read Giovanni’s description, my mental image was that of Fabio.

By: Alexa

Alexa — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:42:20 +0000

Interesting post. A couple of books have jolted me about how I think about race and other nationalities recently. And set me thinking about how my son will view the world and how I would like him to view it because I do tend to think of everyone as white, unless told otherwise or if they have a name that I associate with a different race.

If I hadn’t read Rampant and just had the character names and a list of nationalities. I’d have said Grace was the British hunter. That name just seems typically English to me, I see blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin. Which is obviously different from the rest of the commentators here. And I always have a hard time thinking of Cornelia as British for the same reason.

And nope didn’t picture Giovanni like that, but nice casting, seriously sell the film rights soon!

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:44:06 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by dpeterfreund: Interesting @daphneun @maureenjohnson post on describing race in fiction yesterday. My (developing) thoughts: http://bit.ly/8AKeDj...

By: Diana

Diana — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:09:36 +0000

LOL on the olive! I never thought of that!

My husband likes to say that he never understood what people meant by “olive skin” until he met me and realized that sometimes, yes, people’s skin is green.

By: JulieLeto

JulieLeto — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:03:09 +0000

Phoebe, don’t knock yourself for using “food cliches” to describe skin tone. I mean…what is olive, if not a food? It’s perfectly acceptable. Skin can be caramel, cocoa, olive, peaches-n-cream, etc.. Is it cliche? Maybe…bit sometimes, cliches are perfectly acceptable and do quick work of describing something that is probably, ultimately, irrelevant to your character, unless your book is about race. That this author cringed when she read those is just her opinion. To me, they are not the least cringe-worthy.

I do have a hero in an upcoming book who is Indian. I went into my crayons for that one…burnt umber. I love that color. I love that hero. ::sigh::