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Writing POCs

@Blossom_Utonium Heck Yeah! forum 4 comments schedule
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@Blossom_Utonium

I am including three POCs in my book and as a white person, I am very concerned with how to write them in a respectful and not accidentally racist manner. Specifically how to describe them and how to avoid stereotypes. If anyone has any tips, that would be awesome.

@Snowmirror

To be honest, there's no simple way to writing POCs, especially since for a lot of people POC just means anyone who isn't white. Which means you are covering black people, Asian people (from Japan to India and everything in between) and Latinos (which, as a latina myself, is a lot) and Native races. For broad strokes, here are some tips

  • Research what POC want to see in writing. It's not like they aren't authors and readers, and plenty of them run blogs. Read stuff written by POC to see how they represent their own race and identity.
  • Be aware that some moves can be progressive for one race and not so much for another. For example, the strong and lonely black woman is one I see people complain about a lot, and in film they are rarely allowed a level of vulnerability. On the other end, East Asian women are depicted as submissive to an extreme degree. They have to be looked at as individuals and not just broad POC to get some good writing in
  • Just write people. Forget about the race if you can, and just write people. I write fantasy, so I don't leak modern cultures of these races into the writing and just make my own. In contemporary, write people, and be aware of what makes their culture. "Colorblindness" doesn't work when it comes to race. It never has.
  • As far as describing how they look, google! Look up pictures of people and work from there. There are blogs dedicated on how to write descriptions of characters and what to avoid. It's different for every race.
    Don't be afraid to mess up. We all do. Just learn from mistakes and keep it moving!
@garbage-owo

Check out this blog- http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com (It's very helpful)

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@Starfast group

^ I'm seconding writingwithcolour. They are great!

One tip that I came across that I find super helpful is to look up "How to not write a _____ character." I've done this with a lot of my LGBT characters, but it can work for POCs, and literally any other minority group that you're not 100% familiar with.
In my experience what typically comes up is blog and forum posts written by people who belong to whatever group you filled the blank with outlining things that they see in media that they can't stand or just want to see less of. Since you specifically mentioned wanting to avoid stereotypes, I'd recommend giving it a try since that seems to come up quite a lot in these searches (in my experience at least).

Another thing that I do is just to google stereotypes for whatever group you're writing about. For me, I find it helpful if I can familiarize myself with stereotypes so that I can avoid them in my characters.