When a white creates a black character: the challenge

The difficulty of writing about black people and/or creating good black characters, when you're white

As a writer, I quite honestly think that creating black characters might be one of my biggest, and most stressful challenges. At times, I'm not going to lie, I have started to think it has downright ruined me as a scribbler, or at least, my ability to write stories from my own perspective, as an American in 2018, living in a rather densely populated multicultural city, thats about 65% black.

Why is this? It is simple: Writing about black people and especially creating black characters is not something that white people seem to have often done, in the past, in terms of much literature. For the most part, the vast amount of literary history is fairly void of the black versus white "drama" that I have lived with and been heavily aware of, my entire life, as an American. The list, for example, of novels that feature an interracial relationship, is a very tiny list. The same can also be said about films , shockingly enough. I can literally count on one hand the number of films I have seen where an interracial romance occurs.

A lot of people often think that the result of the lack of black characters in films and books is --what else?-- immediately and always the result of a racism. I agree that it is probably 70% of the reason. However, speaking as a white writer, I also can't help but think that many authors might feel that same tinge of discomfort that I have often felt, when trying to create black characters. In some sense, trying to create a character whose of a different race than you, is a bit of a loaded gun.

 There is absolutely the idea in our society that this is not to be done, in my opinion, especially because, as a writer, you'll be putting words and actions into said characters mouth -- totally against their will. In some sense, to put it bluntly, the characters that a writer creates are almost maybe even a bit like slaves. After all, they don't seem to have much free will. I can make them do things no one in their right mind would ever want to do. Literally, I can have them walk up in the morning, aftre living 50 years as a normal person, and suddenly douse their wife in gasoline, and light her on fire, for no good god damn reason at all. Get what  I mean?

Hence, if I want, I can go about writing legions of black characters who conform to every negative black stereotype thats ever been. I can also of course do this with, say, white southerners . Et cetera. Since people are aware of this power that a writer has, many times it has become the case in our culture that only certain folk should write for certain folk. In other words, only Italians should write films about Italians, only blacks films about blacks, only Irish films about Irish, etc. Speaking as an Italian, I would never cease to stress the major importance of a culture taking control of its own narrative (I would be very offended, for example, if it had been an Irishman, instead of Francis Ford Coppola, to direct The Godfather). Nevertheless, it's still inevitably the case that, as an American writer, if I want to write stories set in America, eespecially in places like where I came of age,  i must be able to write black folks, Puerto Rican folks, and so on. Otherwise, I can't write stories about where I'm from.

Yet still, the barring of my full ability and expression as a writer goes somewhat onward. The discomfort is still there. I can hear the howls of despair, in some sense, every time I put pen to page. "Someone will inevitably tell me I have destroyed the good image of the black race, by creating this foolish black character who appears for one scene at this Sunoco gas station". I'm literally mortified, in a way, to write either good or bad black characters. But especially bad ones.

As a result of all this, its obviously the case that many writers probably just think its best to avoid the black character completely, or if they do decide to include them, what often might happen is that they'll create someone who is, perhaps, beyond moral.

 Notable examples of this include a big slew of books that Stephen King, who lives in Maine (where I Have heard not many black folk roam), has put out. I have read many articles for years now, since I was a teenager in fact, about just how racist some people consider the black characters King has created, and keep in mind that many of them aren't even negative characters. They're merely, as the black director Spike Lee of NYC tells us, "magical negros". King seems to have a habit of creating black characters that do literal magic time and time again, often in the hopes of -- what else-- saving somebody white. In some sense, King, who generally writes his stories set in the real world and in the USA as a rule, uses the black character as a sort of wizard . This was most notably done in that film The Green Mile , which, although I know the main black character who gets executed is what Spike Lee calls a "magical negro", I stil lcannot help but love. The "magical negro" was also put to work in a film Bagger Vance, which I watched as a young boy (not by King), and which has to do with the most absurd plot imaginable, I now realize as an adult. The film is literally about a magical black ghost , played by friendly Will Smith, who keeps appearing to a white character, to ....help him achieve a higher golf score. The film is beyond ridiculous.

At any rate, the reader need not worry, because typically speaking, these are not the type of black characters I'm interested in creating. The truth about my black characters is that, more often than not, they're strikingly similar to the white characters I create. Whats that mean? Well, to put it bluntly, it means they are, yes, gangsters, criminals, tricksters, thieves, and abusers. They are not unusually moral characters, in the same sense that my white characters almost never are, either. They are people who have a trick up their sleeve, who can't wait to get paid, who are , again, devious, and looking to get as much money as they can, any way they can.

Now, naturally, when I tell my reader this, I'm not saying that all my characters are like this. Like anyone else, I too create good hearted, kind characters, who do kind things. This especially tends to be the case when I go off on my tangents and start writing JRR Tolkien style fantasy about actual dwarves and actual wizards in different worlds. But.... when I come back to good old American reality, and when I pull up the sewers and cities of my youth and even my today, where drug dealers, felons, domestic abusers, and addicts roamed far and wide, I can't really help but create characters the way I know they actually are, and the way I see them.

Therefore, bad people tend to come spilling out, and these bad people are of all types, shapes, colors, and sizes. The problem alas, as I explain, is that, after I'm done, I often want to change them all to merely being white --- or just never get started on them at all, because I'm so frightened of how I'll be told I've created some evil black character who, as I say, will somehow destroy the entire image of the black race and set race relations back 400 years. In a way, I'm actually almost convinced that my entire obsession with fantasy, and particularly with setting stories in other, faraway countries or places, is all because I'm mortified to address the black character, who is simply not possible for me to ignore in reality. If I write a story about VIkings, I don't have to think of it. I especially don't have to think of the dreaded "ebonics slang", which is actually another major problem for me as a writer. Especially when you consider that almost all of my friends growing up, white, black, Spanish or otherwise, spoke in. Where I come from, pale faced white girls from working class families used the ebonics slang as often as the black folk do. Do they say nigga? No, not necessarily. But they do use all of the other slang that is so often associated solely with the black folk. Words like 'ratchet" and "wylin" and "mo fucka". Words like "dis shit fire" and "you comin to scoop me in the whip, dawg?" et cetera.

Of course, once I'm writing, I feel a bit ridiculous trying to type in such slang. What on earth am I doing, I wonder to myself? Why am I writing like this? My mother would look at me and wonder what is happening. "I thought you were a writer, my son, and I thought that meant you would write tales of politicians and senators. Yet what is this? Tales of street thugs!"

After all, in reality, I never used much slang of any kind, though I always did use a few sparkles (and certainly vulgarities I drop constantly, as do most urban Italian-American men). Then however, I always remember the first man who ever decided to take the original black American slang to the page, far back down there in the past, in the 1800s. You might know his name, as it is pretty famous: He was called Mark Twain. 

In some very bizarre sense, what Mark Twain did all the way back then in the 1800s, is still very much the case, somehow, of what is happening today. He wrote a character, black Jim, who is incredibly hard to read, not because of his intelligence, but rather because of how bizarre and "uneducated" his manner of speech is. Jim is, to put it simply, an incredibly confusing character, and perhaps even, if you are impatient, an aggravating character, to interact with. In some seriously bizarre sense, Jim is literally just as difficult to read, for some people at least, as it would be to read the words of ahighly advanced mathematician. Lack of knowledge and correct grammar, in other words, is actually just as difficult to work through, sometimes, as something very complex. This is because it has its own complexities and challenges. There is a scene in some Edgar Allan Poe short story, in fact, where he is also writing a black character who speaks the 1800s style "slave slang", and the main white character is desperately trying to explain something to the black fellow, who is his friend, and he gets , unfortunately, about ready to kill the poor fellow, because the man just can't understand precisely what he's saying. He wsa too uneducated. The main white character becomes impatient and frustrated. "Why can you not understand me! Why! I am speaking plainly." Alas, it's the year 1840 or some such time, and the black man has never gone to school, he has never read a book, and he was never taught any proper language.

In our culture, we look at this as all some frightening and terrible thing, which it was, but we also forget there is something simple and even innocent there at the same time. What is it? It's easy: It's merely another language that this black man spoke at that time. Thats all. 

In other words, instead of thinking of how black Jim in Mark Twains book spoke as a "lesser version of english", why not merely think of it as another style of english, or even another style of language altogether? After all, is not the modern ebonics, in many ways, another language, which one must learn in ones own way? I doubt, for instance, that a 30 year old white lawyer fellow, would be able to write as convincing black slang as I feel I can, at times at least, since he probably hasn't listened to as many black songs and talked with as many black folk, as I have, throughout my life. It's actually pretty easy for me to write in black slang.

Tell you the truth, it might be easier for me to write dialogue like that, than it is for me to write "regular" dialogue! Yet still, the deep anxiety persists, that I have no business writing this type of dialogue, and that I will be defaming an entire population of people, if I allow myself to let these characters come to life, on my pages. And ...i just cant help but think all the time...if this anxiety exists for me, someone who has always lived in quite close proximity to black American culture, then how on earth must it feel for those writers who sit on Mount Olympus and have all that money?? You see what i mean??? When I thikn of this, I am not surprised that black characters don't pop up on our screens or in our books more often, as i write. I can sense the anxiety that these wealthier people feel. They are not excluding black folk because they hate the, and nor are they, as Stephen King did, turning them into rathe ridiculous characters when they include them, because they are racist. They are, in my opinion, doing all of this because of this anxiety. "Who am I to write a good, or bad, or any black character? Who am I?"