Interesting discussion on reddit.com about writing from the perspective of someone other than your own racial background. Specifically the writer asked, as a white woman, how does she authentically capture the persona of a black female character. My answer? Race is not a persona. You cannot authentically write about a black person based on the color of their skin any more than you can a white person. Experiences, exposure, economics, education, geography, love, pain, pleasure etc., in other words, life makes us who we are and how we are.
Like this young writer, the characters in my novel-in-progress, Provenance, similarly struggle to know each other and themselves without the convenient utility of race. Using art as a theme throughout the story, they ultimately discover that people, like art, have a provenance. As my character Dottie Lee Davis says,
“Folk wear their provenance on their faces and carry it in their hearts. Sometimes
they try to hide it but its all there. Where you were born, who you come from,
who you loved and who loves you. Who hurt you and who you’ve hurt, where you've been and sometimes where you’re going. Just don’t need a ten dollar word like provenance to describe it when a dollar word like history will do. History works just fine, for everyone and everything, art and people, all got history.”
So to the writer that posed the questions as a black woman and a writer I suggest you write about the glorious sum of all that a character has experienced. That is as authentic as you can make any character; black, white or indifferent.
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