Impartiality

This might be a bit rambly and a touch personal, so I do apologize in advance.

Here we go...

A little while back, a good friend of mine asked a question about my own personal writing that I thought I was prepared for:

“Why ARE your characters anthropomorphic animals instead of humans?”

Really, it’s an extremely fair question that many writers of anthropomorphic animal fiction have no doubt run into. I’ve seen it posted up on webcomic and author FAQs at least several times. Yet somehow, that day, it tripped me up a little more than I was expecting. My knee-jerk response was probably the one that was the most true, as I responded “Well, my characters are animals because that’s what they are.”

It’s a bit circular in logic, but I feel it is true enough. Why are any characters in some novels human? Their species doesn’t have to be their primary identity, right? Honestly, I feel some old-fashioned fantasy fiction is kind of mocked for having Dwarves always ‘act like Dwarves’ and Elves always ‘acting like Elves’. Typically the characters that break from the molds created for their races are celebrated and memorable. Why else does the culturally unheard of friendship of Gimli and Legolas feel so strong and honest by the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Of course, me being the type of fellow that I am, I couldn’t just let such a simple statement be the end of my answer to my friend’s question. I actually quickly backed up on my statement and tried to make a more solid and professional one that took on a different angle. My response was something of a mix of an answer I’d heard before from an author I can’t quite recall at the moment:

“My characters are animals so as to bypass racial stereotypes and to focus on how different types of people can get together despite their obvious differences. I can use my characters to make a statement about diversity and racism without calling out specific races and maybe make people think differently about the issues.”

Before some of the more cynical of my reader mutter “Yeah right…” on my somewhat canned statement, I actually feel there is a modicum of truth to what I said, though I wasn’t quite honest with my feelings on the matter and what really irks me about such a question sometimes.

I’m tired of race as being ‘a point’ in fiction.

After my answer, I was told a bit about how many publishers in the industry are looking for more diversity in literature, looking for stories about minority cultures and races that aren’t often represented in popular literature. While looking at publishers to contact for my own work, I actually saw something like this pop up several times where publishers were looking for works primarily focusing on ‘minority culture’ and a rather amusing statement I heard from that angle was ‘aliens don’t count as diverse cultures!’

It actually makes me a little angry that publishers and much of the media is clamoring for minority representation. This is not because I want women and people of color to continue to be under-represented and wrongfully stereotyped, but rather because I don’t think the people who publish and ask for this sort of focus really know what they’re asking for or how offensive it really is when they say they want something with a clear focus on ‘minority culture’.

When people are asking for stories about African Americans, they’re not really asking for stories about people who are black. They’re asking for stories about people who SHOW they’re black. They don’t want a black young black man named Jonathan Reed with a successful mother and father who live comfortably in upper-middle class America with dreams, problems, and ambitions of their own that have no bearing on their race. They want a story about a boy named Miles “Hoops” Jordan who struggles in a poverty-ridden neighborhood with his divorced mother as he fights to rise against the gang and drug culture and the ‘walls’ created by the color of his skin as he tries to prove what he can do.

I’m so tired of reading stories telling me that my race is the only major identity I have. Good at music, good at art, honors student, professional public speaker… all of these are subcategories that go under the heading of “He’s black, but…” and it seems to be all folks want to see when they want to read about ‘minority culture’. In fact, I remember a book called ‘Anansi Boys’ I read where the race of the character actually shocked me. He didn’t have a stereotypical ‘black’ name, he was successful and spoke well and never once was his race an ‘issue’. I only realized he was black when someone commented on his African heritage as it related to the mythology that was being referenced at various points in the story.

It actually shocked me that this well-spoken man I was reading about was black, and I feel like that’s a BAD thing. You know what’s also funny about it? Anansi Boys is not labelled in any fashion to suggest it’s primarily focused on characters of color, and yet I see publishers and readers looking for ‘black fiction’ and ‘minority fiction’ and putting lovely labels on them like ‘urban fiction’ and ‘urban romance’, just so folks don’t get confused about what they might pick up.

When I hear that publishers are looking for more ‘diversity’ in their books, I get the feeling they just want to pad out the ‘urban’ genre or the ‘women’s fiction’ genre. I do not get the feeling that they want to see new and interesting characters or strong, unique stories, but rather that they want stories they can put into their box in order to draw certain attention to themselves.

I don’t think that’s right to do to readers, and I feel like it’s poisoning our literary culture and culture in general. Rather than focusing on people, stories, and ideas, we’re focusing on covers and categories. We don’t need more stories about ‘black people’, we need more stories about ‘people, who also happen to be black.’

Of course, I don’t mean to undermine the wealth of wonderful literature about civil struggles. I feel they’re incredibly important, especially for historical purposes and showing the evils of society and how we can stand against them. In a way, such stories are fantastic accounts of what it really means to be ‘human’ in the fullest sense, and that’s really the idea that anthropomorphic literature was meant to bring into focus too. I’ve loved reading many stories about civil rights and I feel like they are still relevant and can be written about issues facing us today.

However, and bringing this back to the question that started this, I am tired of civil rights being the only place we see racial diversity.  I don’t write and draw stories about anthropomorphic animal characters in order to subvert or attack racial ideas.  I write about these characters because I love the worlds and ideas that they bring to the table, and also because I want to bring the focus away from the color of skin and towards who these people are as characters.

Yeah, folks may always associate raccoons with thievery and cats with wanting to take over the world, but I feel like, once readers see traits in these characters that they can identify with, they’ll more readily take to them and their stories and won’t be afraid of whether or not these characters are appropriately representing their race.

I do apologize if I went on a bit of ramble here, but I actually felt this was pretty relevant to the topics we’ve covered in this blog. Next week I’ll try to hop into something a bit more light-hearted, I promise!

For those who want a bit more 'cute' with their rant!
This is what I get for starting trouble...

Until then, happy reading, all!

-Chammy