So with the staff meeting and everything yesterday, I only finished the introduction (which is amazing) and I am reading the first chapter now!
I am thoroughly impressed so far, if I’m honest! They’ve included some great quotes form black voices such as Maya Angelou and I love that we share a goal of providing affordable (the book is just over $3) advice to people who can’t afford to pay for formal proofreading, editing and sensitivity reading!
I have mixed feelings about the fact that the introduction is written by a white writer, but I think I resolved them pretty nicely: While it is frustrating to me that black voices and ideas so often need to be “introduced” by white authors to make them more palatable to white readers, I think that it makes it easier to swallow for the people who need this book the most. Plus, the rest of the book – the meatier information – is all written by loads of black writers, which is great because it shows that, as the books says, “blackness is not a monolith”.
That being said, I think the writer of the introduction did make one small mistake: I think she used the terms “white guilt” and “white privilege” too early on in the book. She beautifully described the blissful ignorance that can come with being white and not experiencing racial marginalisation when she told her personal story of realising that the publishing world isn’t as diverse as she thought is was.
Then, she followed that up with an aside in brackets in which she used the two aforementioned terms. I think that could possibly run the risk of making people shut off – and the people who are prone to shutting off when they read things like that are, as I said before, the ones who need this book the most.
The first chapter is about the top 10 most prevalent stereotypes of black characters in the media, which I think is a great way to start! They break down the most pernicious tropes and then build you up again with the advice in the later chapters! Plus, they go into detail on what each stereotype is and then give you a little bit of advice at the end of each description on how you can start to avoid it in your own writing. Awesome!
The advice so far is gentle and easy to read (probably easier to read than this “short” review) and I seriously love the fact that they called it the “Incomplete Guides” series, as I think that perfectly highlights the fact that you can’t just read one book and become an expert on portraying black characters!
So far, I highly recommend! To be honest, I’m really surprised that it took as long as it did for a book like this to come out! I’d read another book about writing diversity before:
Writing Diverse Characters for Fiction, TV or Film
However, this one was super vague and didn’t provide much advice on how to get diversity and representation right. It focused more on the why we should expand the representation of our stories. So, I pulled some great ideas from it in that respect, but not much else! Plus, some of the Twitter users and websites they recommend are no longer around, which is a little bit frustrating.
I much prefer the one I’m reading now!
@Writers
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I think the same can be said about writing black characters for RPs and SGs!