Science Fiction Weekly: Nalo Hopkinson uses SF to probe the inner and outer worlds of alienation
Before I put fingers to keyboard, I must first figure out how to express the race of my characters, if they are non-white, because I have to think about how I’m going to perform that task of wrenching the center over to the margins. I’ve had white writers tell me that they don’t feel they have to think in those terms when they are creating white characters. Often they don’t think about the fact that the characters are white. I suspect that most writers of color in this part of the world are quite aware of the ethnicities of their characters of color.Great stuff. Thanks formica via wood s lot.
When white writers write almost exclusively white characters, that usually passes without comment. When writers of color create mostly characters of color, it’s seen as something remarkable. I try to write from my center. In order to do that in a literary milieu that presumes ground zero to be white middle-class experience, I have to shift the reader’s vision over to the margins. Even if that reader is from a marginalized community, the worldview they will have been used to seeing reified in literature, in popular culture, in the media, is for the most part the “normalized” one. By performing that shift, I’m not moving and I’m not taking over the privileged position; I’m wrenching the focus over to my context. I just tell my story.
