Race and Queerness in Romancelandia - We Need to Be Better at This

I've had the great opportunity to work with some absolutely amazing people and presses who see my various intersecting identities as an asset, but too many people and places--from presses to editors to fellow authors to readers--still don't see the value and strength in diversity, much less how their individual actions--and inaction--can affect that.

Please, especially those in the romance/erotica landscape, take some time to read and ask yourself what you can do to help advance these goals:

"Dear Romance Community,

Recently some painful truths have come out about the publishing industry’s perception of our value and how that continues to hinder access and visibility for authors of color who write Romance. In the last week, the queer Romance community has experienced some rough moments. This is a time for introspection, and it seems very clear, some changes need to be made.

We are here, and we are a legion. The stories we have to tell matter and will make Romance a better genre and more vibrant community. We have devised some actionable steps for those in the community who would like to join us in making more space in Romance for authors of color. Here they are..."

READ THE REST HERE

MY NAME IS IN A ROLLING STONE ARTICLE!

Truth time: I am drunk right now because my company had a bonding event today and booze was most definitely involved.

I get back to the office and I see this:

I am not sober enough to handle this.

Rolling Stone is tweeting about an anthology that I have two stories in?! This is crazy!

Then I read the article: "Trump Erotica: How Smut is Getting Political Again."

And.

They.

Mention.

My.

Name.

That's my name! Right next to names like Debra Hyde and Chuck Tingle. 

What is happening right now?!

I can't.

This is amazing!

Available Now On

Your Choice of These Digital Stores

And Listen to an Excerpt

A Reminder As We Go Forward

A reminder to those trying to comfort minority friends who are distraught at the moment: For those who wonder why all these stories of hate are coming out now and wonder why you haven't heard about them before, I can't speak for everyone, but most of us don't like to talk about the things that hurt us. As much as we've been told it does, it often does not personally help us to share our pain with others.

Because, by retelling it, we have to relive it. Because we often meet disbelief or scrutiny even when we do. Because often we end up having to comfort the people we tell our stories to because they didn't know the world they lived in and are now shaken by its unseen reality. Because often the people we'd like to tell are so overwhelmed or desensitized to these kinds of stories that adding ours to it seems pointless or even cruel. Because, even after all that, we still have to live in this reality and it can be exhausting.

I don't talk about the details of most of the harassment I get about my race or gender or religion or sexuality. I'm a child of abuse; I've learned from childhood that letting others see my weak spots could be used against me. 

I tend to share the "cute" discrimination, the "cute" kind of hate with you. The kind we can laugh at. Because they can't hurt me with that.

The stuff I cry about, you will likely never hear about it.

Because I can't.

I, personally, just can't.

But I am proud of those who can. Because those are stories we all need to hear. Just remember the likely reason why you're hearing about these stories now from those of us who are hurting is that, even though it personally hurts and exhausts us to go through it and then relive it to tell you about it, is because, even though we're bleeding from our wounds now, we're hoping our pain prevents someone else's.

So thank you for the support, lord knows we need it, but just always keep in mind that, for every story you do hear and are shocked by, there are countless that you will never. We know we have been through this before and survived. And we will again. That, more than anything else I've personally seen, is--for better or worse--the enduring American story. 

Just give us a moment of weakness before asking us to find the strength to do so again.

A Friendly Night of Porn – 2016 HUMP Film Festival

So I wrote about my first HUMP two years ago. I didn’t write about it last year, even though it was still loads of fun, because I just didn’t have time.

But I figured this was a good year to do another write-up.

This year, I brought a huge group of friends, most of whom had never been to an event like this. And frankly were both a little titillated and trepidatious about going to one now. Not really sure of what they were going to see. Not really sure they'd want to.

But the beautiful thing about HUMP is how inclusive and welcoming it is.

From the beginning opening statements and rules, which were an adorable musical number—aww, the image and sound of Dan singing about getting humped will be with me forever now—you can tell that this porn festival is not going to be like anything you’ve ever seen before. Like Dan sang, we saw people, body types, pairings, groupings, and kinks that aren’t commonly found in mainstream porn.

Take the very first film, “Hysterical Bullshit,” where a presumably fully clothed woman sits at a table with Mike Huckabee’s Gods, Guns, Grits and Gravy while a vibrator drives her to orgasm. This black and white video was such an odd and quirky start to a porn festival. Other than some deep breathing, squirming, and the occasional moan, it just looks like a woman reading a ridiculous book. In fact, I bet if you showed it to Mike Huckabee without context, it’d take him most of the video to even figure out what’s happening. Like I said, this isn’t your mainstream idea of porn and this was an interesting, subversive way of starting things off. By giving us almost the anti-porn porn.

“It Kind of Feels Like...” the mid-point film, felt a lot like a return to this kind of film. The shortest film by far, it started out with close-ups of a woman’s face while she inhales sharply and makes soft, sweet, orgasmic noises. Right before she sneezes. Again, an interesting reminder that things are not what you expect here at HUMP.

“Hotels & Haircuts,” like many other films included, goes into the category of straight-up sex montage films. Each had details that made them special. “Hotels & Haircuts” showed a poly relationship. “Art Primo” featured an interracial couple and fuller figure woman. “Hey Man” followed a gay man seeking refuge and serenity from the chaos of modern dating. “Pachisi” again featured an interracial couple with a more female-dominant slant. “Lipstick” featured an Asian spy posing as a sex worker. “Two Boys and Some Rope,” starring two sexy men, and “Wild Lovers,” starring two beautiful women, were my favorites of this group while we watched them have sexy bondage sex. While there was little that was that remarkable of each of these films individually, what I do like about them as a whole, is how wide a range “straight-up sex” is today. The different kinds of bodies, that used to be so invisible, we see now. The different kinds of relationships, that used to be closeted and taboo, we take for granted today. That’s kind of amazing and subversive in and of itself.

Strictly speaking, “Blown” might fall under the same category as these films, except for on difference. Instead of music playing in the background of the sex montage, this film gave us an absolutely fascinating peek into two trans men’s minds as they talked about the struggle and pleasure of getting blown now that they’ve transitioned while we watch them blow each other. It was sexy, just like the others, but it was also...poignant and intimate in a way that the others didn’t quite feel like for me. Because we got to hear their stories, I just felt so much more connected to these men. So well done. And, seeing as it was produced by Buck Angel, I’m not surprised at all.

“Cake Boss” involved a couple making a quite unconventional cake. The best thing about this film was the fact that in both last week’s and this week's Savage Love podcasts he and Mistress Matisse and Cheryl Strayed talk about the fact that too many vanilla people, when they want to get a little kinky, add food and sweets to sex. To which Dan said, “Don't dessert fuck.” Well, this was the ultimate dessert fuck. In fact, it reminded me of one of my first drag king shows, where, for one of the performer’s birthday, they had him and two very sexy ladies dance to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” while they played with cake mix ingredients. Hilarious. Sexy. But a big ole mess. This one had the added factor of sex and nudity, which had the germaphobe in me internally screaming “YEAST INFECTION!” But, if I had to comfort myself with one thought, it’s that at least they were equal opportunity infectors and hopefully Risk-Aware and Consensual about their kinks.

“Lube Dispenser” and “Unicorn in the Castle” were also films that tripped kinky bells in my head. Again, each of them had interesting parts of them. “Lube Dispenser,” with its masks and woods location, was filmed almost like a horror film. And while it made it visually interesting, it’s also, maybe, what made some of the breath play aspects in the film feel problematic to me. Watching a man in a plastic bag breathe heavily as the bag puffs in and out of his mouth was concerning, even if they cut a mouth hole in the bag by sticking a knife in his open mouth. As was watching the couple grab each other by the throat while they had sex. “Unicorn in the Castle” was great because it starred a kinky elderly trio, proving that porn, sex, and kink all don’t have age limits. That said, we never got to see the negotiations and much of it...looked dub-con, if not out and out non-con. Especially, the last scene, where the Dom uses flash paper right next to the two subs’ mons, catching their pubic hair on fire. I don’t do fire play, but I’ve seen competent tops do so and, every time I have, I’ve seen them shave the area and make sure to keep it far from any body hair to avoid causing painful burns. It just kinda took me out of the scene and made me not...feel good about watching it.

And it’s not that these aren’t my kinks, I don’t think. This year, a lot of films, like “I Fist a Grrrl,” had a lot of things, like analingus and water sports, that I personally don’t find sexy but I didn’t have a problem with watching them, the way I did with “Lube Dispenser” and “Unicorn in the Castle.” I also wasn’t really a fan of “Porn Star of the Year” which was about Fuck Rogers, a fictional bad porn star, nominating himself for porn star of the year. Mostly it was all puns and mugging to the camera. “Level Up” also kind of fell into this problem for me too. While I didn’t dislike it, it just felt like it was trying too hard to be feminist that it felt mocking rather than empowering.

“Cuckold” almost felt the same too. Almost. “Cuckold” was actually really good; a story about a married couple who invite a man back to their place to play out a cuckolding scene. They hint at all the work that should go into a scene like that: talking about it between primary partners, meeting the third in a sex-free context to discuss expectations, and consent at every point. The thing that left me a little iffy on it was the fact, at first, they weren’t really addressing the race issue that was implicit in a story where a white married couple invites a black man into their home to cuckold the wife. In a medium where you can’t really go into the individual characters' internal thoughts easily, it just left too much room for exploitation, reminding me too much of too many negative stereotypes. Not helped by the fact that, when the husband panics about the whole cuckolding scene, he says, “What was I thinking bringing some strange, black man into our house to fuck my wife?” It did leave me feeling really uncomfortable. The difference, I think, is that this film ends well with the wife talking the husband down from his anxiety and joining their third in a more inclusive scene that made their special guest feel like more of a partner than a prop.

“Dick” felt the same, where it started off as a man singing forlornly at a woman who is ignoring him. Then we find out that his sorrow is less about the fact that she doesn’t see him and more about the fact that he’s a man who closetly LOVES dick (but he’s absolutely not gay, of course). While funny and quirky—completely with him riding a psychedelic, spinning dick pinwheel, that a woman sitting in front of us laughed at every time it came on screen—it was just really strange. But what made the film was the end, where we find out that the woman ignoring him is reading a book about the wonders of lesbian love. Great end.

But there are four films that really stood out for me. “Orgies Happening Tonight” really surprised me. When it started, it just felt too much like a normal porn with really amateur acting. Then we got to the orgy, which felt a lot like many of the sex parties I’ve been to. Complete with the Domme and her submissive being really welcoming, including offering to give our star the wifi password, before slipping seamlessly right back into scene. It just felt so fun and enjoyable, I’m willing to forgive the obvious plot and over-the-top acting.

“The Collector”... What can I say about this? A story about a man who collects come. From Tim Allen’s Santa Claus stunt double to the whole state of Delaware, this film was a documentary-style story filled with jars of spunk. But what made it really great was that it also showed his girlfriend who, after being called his favorite “come dispenser,” gets livid over her boyfriend’s obsession and starts dumping his come left and right, even eventually throwing a bucket of it out the door, accidentally hitting the poor mailman in the face. Not to mention, I love that it was gender-inclusive come, including an impressively full jar from Hillary Clinton. You go, girl.

But my favorite two have to be “Let’s Try to Fuck” and “Film Bonoir.” By far.

As a huge fan of 1950’s television shows, “Let’s Try to Fuck” felt absolutely charming. Done in the style of 1950’s PSA educational films, Young Billy runs around town trying to learn how to get laid. Meeting fit hula-hooping girls and smart girls and pretty girls. And learning helpful lessons like “the mouth: the fuck hole of the face.” It was just...charming.

Then there was “Film Bonoir.” There is nothing—nothing—better than seeing dicks dressed up in tiny hats, wigs, and googly eyes. Plus I love the premise of two guys role playing private dicks with their private dicks. It was innovative and creative. Well-planned and well-executed. Complete with a come-shot murder of a flaccid member mobster. But my absolute favorite part was the fact that they did a making-of special at the end of the film. It made my day to see penises being shot in green screen and dressed up in tiny dick-sized costumes.

All in all, it was a great night, filled with laughs and “oh mys.” I love that my HUMP experience started with two of us not knowing what to expect and evolved into a group of seven friends having an incredible time. More than anything, I think that’s what makes HUMP so special. That, no matter how unsure you are at the start, by the end, you're guaranteed to have an uncommonly fun experience here that you can’t get any other way.

I can't wait to go again next year!

The Unexpected Sexy - Body Diversity in Erotica

So I’ve been talking a lot about race and beauty, but beauty of color isn’t the only kind that too often goes unappreciated. Any beauty that doesn’t fit the very narrow and exacting definitions we’re too often fed get dulled down and pushed aside.

Too often we praise authors who write stories about vague and ambiguous characters that readers can project themselves into. I never liked that kind of writing. Because, like I said before, what we look like matters. It affects how we move through the world. It affects how people think of us. How we think of other people. How we think about ourselves. People treat people differently based on looks. It is a sometimes unfortunate but always unavoidable truth.

What a character looks like matters. Because, for a lot of us, we cannot simply insert ourselves into vague mainstream stories. How can a woman of color honestly insert herself into a mainstream story where no one ever registers her race? How can a plus-sized woman be expected to easily insert herself into a story where no one even acknowledges her body size? As a plus-sized woman of color, that kind of world feels more like science fiction than erotica.

When I was younger, I yearned for stories that felt more honest, more real. Where the women whose stories I stepped into looked like the women around me. Women who could really exist. Whose bodies and stories held weight and took up space.

I didn’t want characters so open they could be anyone.

I needed characters so full they felt real.

I wanted characters who reflected my world. Who were so beautifully unique that they could be no one else but themselves. Who were of all different shapes and sizes. Different races and cultures. Different orientations and different expressions. I wanted to see all kinds of beauty, celebrated and embraced. I wanted to see the kind of stories that celebration could breed.

And, I get it. I do. That ask is easier said than done. For all the momentum of the body positivity movement, that acknowledges that everyone has the right to be beautiful, we still don’t feel quite comfortable talking about beauty in any kind of detail. Especially the further from the mainstream, socially accepted standards of beauty someone seems to be. Too often minority beauty—from BBWs to women of color to characters with more androgynous features—is fetishized, coming pre-packaged with all manner of heavy, problematic baggage. And it’s hard—if not impossible—to determine where the lines of appreciation are. Am I celebrating “one rolling midsection and tameless will” or am I creating a fetishistically dishonest distance by treating a body I don’t know how to desire as “a landscape (…) a palatable vastness?” Do terms like caramel-colored or café au lait skin embrace diversity or are they part of the problem? Do cliches reduce people to offensive stereotypes or can cliches sometimes profoundly speak to people?

Too often, there seems to be no right answer. It seems easier, in the face of all that, to stay safe in ambiguity. 

After all, when we leave things vague, the reader always has the option of imagining whomever they want as that character, right? In the face of all that controversy, it seems better to place the burden of diversity in the hands of the reader. After all, diversity seems too heavy and lofty an ambition. Especially for some smutty erotica book, right?

But, when we make minority beauty optional, when we rely on readers who’ve been raised on a very specific and limited vision of beauty to see what they’ve been taught doesn’t exist, we erase it. We erase people. We live in a world where, as Little Bear Schwarz in “My Right to be Sexualized” says, “terms like ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ have been dropped on us, like rigid, rubric lead weights, without our having any say in what defines them.”

When we don’t talk about minority beauty, when we don’t explore it, it’s not as if those of us outside the expected standards become exempt from those rigid weights. We’ve just been quietly pushed aside. Been silently but surely shown our place. Because no one shies away from something worth celebrating. No one covers up that which they find beautiful. When description of us is minimal or nonexistent, it always makes me think of the adage “If you can’t think of anything nice to say…” Is that why so little was said? Because we, as Schwarz says, “are deemed too old, too fat, too dark, too disabled, too modest, too religious, too depressed, too anxious, too oily, too curly, too scarred, too lumpy, too flat, too tall, too short, too shorn, too pierced, too inked, too queer, too saggy, too colorful, too gray, too bald, or too hairy to be sexy? It’s not because we are seen and respected as dimensional, thoughtful beings. It’s because, ‘no one wants to see that.’”

When we refuse to—when we celebrate authors who don’t—describe us in our entirety, our beauty becomes unspeakable. 

After all, as Lillian Bustle said in her brilliant TED Talk on weight and beauty, “Nobody says to a tall person, ‘Oh, you’re not tall.’ And nobody says that because tall is not a dirty word. We as women are programmed to tell each other that we’re not fat because, to many people, both men and women, fat is the worst thing that you can be. Society has turned the word fat into a synonym for ugly. But that’s not what fat means.” Or as Jes Sachse, a model with a rare genetic condition known as Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, states, “So many people are trying to come to my aid and protect me from being exploited” because, from childhood, she was told any recognition of her condition must be a kind of slight against her, something best left unsaid or unacknowledged. She was “taught to deny that she was different. But over the years she instead developed pride in her body.”

We need to change how we as a society see minority beauty. We need to find ways to recognize and describe it without awkwardness or shame. Without fetishistically overvaluing it or dismissively undervaluing it. We need to be allowed to discover and delight in it, to allow ourselves to see it and be surprised by it. Because it may not be what we’re used to, but being met with, being challenged by, the unexpected can be good. It is the only way we can learn to see more. See better.

This is not to say we can never tell stories about traditionally pretty, able-bodied, heterosexual, white people. But if you’re going to tell a story about a pretty, white woman, tell me her story. Tell me who she is. What makes her special? What makes her different than any other pretty, white woman?

Does her hair make you think of sunlight you can touch? Do her eyes hold daydreamed worlds in their depths? Does the color of her skin put into mind the bared flesh of an apple bitten into, sweet and dewy from a shower, as it tempts your tongue?

Tell me about her. Let me know her.

Think about everyone you’ve ever dated or admired. Everyone has parts of themselves that are uniquely them. Things that make them different from everyone else in the world. Often, it’s the odd qualities about a person that become the most attractive features. A gap in their teeth that shows every time they smile honestly. The left breast that is slightly smaller than the right that she obsesses over and convinces herself makes her ugly but fits perfectly in your hands. Hell, it could even be the Donald Duck tattoo that she has on her ass that she can’t remember getting but doesn’t have the heart to get removed. These are the things we remember. These are the details that not only tell us what a character looks like physically, but who they are as a person.

And, I know, looks are not everything. Believe me, I know. My looks are not the whole of me.

But, as a plus-sized, queer woman of color, they are still valuable parts of me. They tell you a lot about me. They are worth seeing, worth speaking about. I am worth my weight in words, because, like Bustle, “not only am I not afraid to be seen, I’m worth looking at. (…) And, if seeing my body struck you so hard (…) mission freakin’ accomplished.” My looks have profoundly shaped me. Have indelibly colored my experiences. They have left marks on the whole of me that, without them, would leave me not just vague but vacant. Stripped down and hollowed out, I would no longer be me.

At that point, I could be anyone.

Personally, I’d rather showcase the unexpectedly sexy. Instead of hiding it, I’d rather highlight beauty that too often goes unseen. As writer Your Fat Friend states, “Fat holds so much power over so many people. When I use it to describe myself, I take back a simple, small, important thing: the ability to name and own my experience. When I talk about being fat, I take control of what that means. Instead of being forced into reductive conversations about weight loss and shame, I get to talk about my actual life.” It’s a treasure within ourselves to find beauty beyond the standard, to seek it and embrace it where we find it. In each other and in ourselves. Studies have shown, the more variety we see and are exposed to, the wider our vision and definition of beauty becomes. The more we begin to believe that beauty exists beyond the limits we’ve been taught so, like model Jillian Mercado who has spastic muscular dystrophy said, “people who were hesitant (...) because of the way that people might perceive them (know) there is a place for them.” 

And, hopefully, once we do, the more beautiful and sexy and desirable we all get to be. Because, as beauty writer Sable says, “Beauty doesn't have to be a sort of institutional ranking to live up to — it’s equal parts armor as it is your utility belt to showcase exactly how you feel and who you are at any given moment. My own grasp and autonomy with beauty helps to make me feel awesome about lots of stuff that often has nothing to do with beauty — but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The transformative properties (internal as well as external) of taking your image into your own hands is not to be underestimated. The decision alone to do so is a power in and of itself.”

My Beauty is Not Unspeakable - Part Two: Searching For Solutions

So yesterday, I talked about my thoughts on the need for us to develop more and better language for race in our fiction.

But, to be fair, “I literally don’t know any other way to describe dark skin that’s neutral or positive as opposed to problematic.” Personally, I think part of what is impeding this progress is often the very same people asking for it. Too often, we ask for it as if it’s a simple request. But it’s not.

A quick Google search or stroll around Tumblr will tell you that writing or creating characters of color is a damned near impossible task. There are so many rules and regulations, so many lines to be toed and landmines to avoid.

Look simply at how we describe race in literature. How we talk about the mere existence of characters of color in the medium of words. Or, more to the point, how we’re told we can’t.

The Objectification Argument

As a person of color who writes stories featuring characters of color, I’ve been criticized because I use descriptions like “chocolate” or “caramel” or “almond-shaped” and those terms are assumed to always be problematic. According to the argument, characters of color—and people of color, in general—are too often described using objects, which feels dehumanizing or fetishizing. Especially, considering that most of those objects are tradeable goods, like coffee or almonds or chocolate, which equate people of color to sellable goods. Made worse since many of those goods, like chocolate and coffee, “drove the slave trade. They still drive the slave trade. So comparing your Black character to these foodstuffs? You can see why it’s cause for offense.”

They see “referring to darker skin tones as specifically chocolate was about aggression and appropriation and has links to colonialism. Think about it, what is the best way to show dominance? By eating someone - like in the animal kingdom. It’s a disgusting practice.” It makes it seem creepily like we’re ingestible, literally looking good enough to eat. “See how often these comparisons are connected to some sensual desire? As if people of Color are food to consume?”

To be fair, I get the argument. I understand the logic and intent behind it; I do. And I respect individual taste and think, on an individual-level, it should be taken into account. People have the right to be offended by what they find offensive. If individuals, like the blog-posters I reference, are offended by those kinds of descriptions and don’t want to have those terms used in reference to themselves, that’s fair and they should be allowed that right. If one person doesn’t want a term to be applied to them, they can tell people that and make that known. And I honestly do believe that people ought to not use those terms for them. Like I said, I don't speak for every person of color. But neither does anyone else. On an individual-level, paying such close attention as to not offend is nice and very much appreciated, but I think the difference between being a nice, polite person and being overly PC is thinking that one person’s rule—whatever it is—is universal. Because making terms blanketly off-limits or automatically labeled offensive in general because of that can be in and of itself offensive.

After all, my—and a lot of people’s—question inevitably back, when I hear this argument, is then, if there are certain terms that we can’t or shouldn’t use, what terms should be used instead.

To which there really isn’t an answer.

Or rather there tends to be a lot of answers, but none of which seem like viable solutions. More like barely fleshed out brainstorming that does precisely what these proposed solutions rail against—or sometimes worse—just in different words.

How We See The Unseen

What I find most odd about this whole debate are the mixed messages we get. Finally—FINALLY—the world is starting to realize that there’s a gaping hole in the market for things like lingerie and makeup for women of color, all with helpful, useful names using understandable visual clues to describe how we look like honey, mocha, cocoa, toffee, and espresso to match our previously ignored tones. These are often products by people of color for people of color using terms that we’re told shouldn’t be used for people of color.

Except, as we've already talked about, how do you talk about a product—or a story, for that matter—with people of color in mind without being able to talk about color?

But, well, it’s just makeup, right? It’s not exactly an industry one equates with the fight for equality or identity or social justice, right? The names are just some marketing ploy to sell more product. It’s not as if they’re some powerful force for change or anything.

Except makeup and the beauty industry, like literature and media in general, affect how we see ourselves and how others see us. For better or worse, they have a huge influence over our concept of identity and self. “When you watch Michelle Phan or Zoella applying cosmetics on camera (…) you are watching someone become themselves (…) And, even though that process involves a lot of talk about product and color and shape, there’s also this other, largely unspoken, talk about the self—its elusiveness—and how this stuff might be able to help you track it down.”

Growing up a theatre and dance kid, I remember being younger and having to buy three or four different foundations and powders—often from different brands with drastically different hues to rather dramatically disastrous dermatological results—that only matched me after a mad and expensive, Frankenstein-esque mix of products meant for “dark,” “medium,” and “light” skin, none of which on their own looked much like me. After all, how diverse and precise can you really get when you’re limited to only three options?

Last night, I looked through my makeup case and noticed that my foundation and powder and bronzer all have names like “cappuccino” or “almond glow” or “caramel.” At some point between my childhood and now, a wide range of colors cropped up on the cosmetics shelves. Suddenly, they had shades made specifically for people with my skin tone, because someone in the industry realized that “dark,” “medium,” and “light” just couldn’t cover everyone. Marketing ploy or not, it makes sense and creates an “I see you” kind of identity. It shouldn’t be—it’s just makeup, after all—but that’s a big deal to women of color to have companies and brands remember that people like you exist and are relevant enough to cater to. That we’re significant enough for them to see.

It’s a concern most white girls never have to think about. Looking at some makeup sites now, white girls have always had products to match them with names like “nude” and “natural.” Most of the products have many, mixed-up iterations of each: “creamy natural,” “nude beige,” “natural nude.”

What the hell do any of those even mean?!

It may be problematic but at least when I read “caramel-colored skin” I know what that looks like. “Natural nude,” what color is that?

Except we know what color it’s supposed to be: skin. After all, with names like Sephora's “Flesh,” how could it mean anything but that? “When the image of the perfect woman is coded from childhood as Snow White, the fairest and most sunburned in all the land, the idea becomes that all the rest of us are just donning costumes to imitate true beauty.” Historically, “makeup maintained an association with purity. It was only the clean or pure wearer who, through the application of cosmetics, could obtain true beauty. Which was largely associated with the idea of ‘natural beauty,’ that you might imagine comes packaged with all sorts of troubling ideas about race. Some of which we’re still working through today, given the West’s fair-skin centric global domination of the beauty industry.” Those names—those labels and descriptions—seem to imply that skin has one true color: white. And everything else is just a variation, a deviation, from that. As if white skin is real skin and ours is…something else.

I don’t know, but I would think that, of the two types of description, this seems more offensive to people of color than any word or object anyone could ever use for our skin. At least, I know which, between the two, makes me feel more dehumanized.

Would object-based descriptions feels so objectifying and offensive on their own if they weren’t juxtaposed with this? After all, if white skin is described as flesh and everyone else’s skin is described as objects—food, minerals, plants, animals—yeah, it’s hard not to feel like the world sees you as less than human.

So where does that leave us?

We could let ourselves be seen, if only in the worst context. Daringly describe ourselves in all our “I see you” beauty and risk it being seen as cliché and offensive and trashy. I understand why that would make readers and publishers and, yes, writers uncomfortable. I understand that stories like these come with a context that can be easily misinterpreted and that must always be cautiously handled and explicitly explained with disclaimers. Race is inevitably encoded with centuries of history that make it so diversity can never just be enjoyed.

But, for those exact same reasons, I think saying you can’t or shouldn’t use those terms doesn’t solve the problem either. Or rather it solves it rather problematically. Again, I just don’t think its proponents have thought the theory all the way through. We need and deserve to be able to use understandable visual cues to describe ourselves. We need more language, not less, to allow us to be seen.

Because, clichéd and trashy as those descriptions seem, I’d still rather they exist than not. Because they serve the same function that descriptions of white characters do. To give the reader a detailed picture of what those characters look like. In the same way, in my stories, I tell the reader that Peter’s eyes are hazel or Max’s hair is red, I tell them that Kat’s eyes are lotus-shaped and Hayato’s skin is golden. Because they are.

And, as for it being clichéd or overused, I’m sure if we looked in the vast history of English literature, hazel eyes and red hair—as well as emerald or sky blue eyes or ivory or cream-colored skin—I would guess, appear far more often than lotus-shaped eyes and golden skin. Only, we never notice because hazel eyes, unlike lotus-shaped ones, are normalized in western culture. We take them for granted as a given. As normal. It’s just a color to us. In the same way, Kat’s eyes should just be a shape.

I should be able to say that my character has “almond-shaped eyes” with the same ease and acceptance as I would say that my character has “blue eyes.” I should be able to say that my love interest finds the color of my black character’s skin attractive with the same nonchalance that I would if he admired my redheaded character for her hair. They’re just adjectives, meant to give a reader a more detailed image of what my character looks like. If one is unacceptable then the other should be as well because neither one, in and of themselves, says anything politically charged. Neither one is more normal or more deviant than the other. On their own, without value judgement or cultural baggage attached, they’re just shapes and color.

But I suppose that's the problem, isn't it? How do we detach all that baggage? We can't exactly ignore the centuries of fetishization and discrimination against people—particularly women—of color. We've been devaluing beauty of color for so long; that's how we got here in the first place! Are there people who dismiss and denigrate people based on their features or skin color? Are there people who don’t so much appreciate as fetishize the color of skin? Absolutely. Believe me, as a woman of color, I know—I know—they exist. But their dismissal or fetishization shouldn’t be used to erase others’ appreciation. There is a difference between describing or even appreciating the realities of how a person looks and fetishizing or dehumanizing a person based on their looks. And we owe it to each other to make and acknowledge the difference. The two exist. Simultaneously in the same world. To the same people. I promise you, I have experienced both in my lifetime. Why do we too often seem content to rail against one while ignoring the other?

By doing so, it makes it seem like our love must always come packaged with bad intentions or ulterior motives. That the only way to visually appreciate us is to do so unhealthily. That, by seeing us as beautiful and attractive and desirable, that is an admission of guilt. A stain of prejudice. The sign of a racist. We “can be, and often are, hyper-sexualized — and in seeing (us) as overly sexual, and only sexual, (we participate) in that stereotype. But while (we) can be sexual things, (minority women) are not allowed to be glamorous or lovable.” We can only be lusted over, dissected into stereotypical parts like big asses, sassily swaying hips, or submissively bowed heads, but never truly loved.

Is that the world we want to live in? Is that a world, if given the choice and opportunity as writers, we want to create?

Often, having to address race in such an overt way, after dealing with the weight and heft of it, it makes touching the topic feel tainted. It makes every mention of the way we look feel more meaningful now. Like the specifics of us are suddenly too significant. It makes our beauty no longer feel very beautiful. How could it be, if it has to be justified and rationalized—if it is only allowed to exist—in very specific and limited contexts? Because treating that kind of love as if it’s not something that needs justification seems to always demand some kind of defense from someone.

And, after talking to a partner once, I suppose the wider world is more like that than I’d like to believe. Because, while he’d often tell me that he thought me beautiful, he did confess to me that he never felt like he could admit that attraction to anyone else. Not without it being scoldingly misinterpreted as a fetish or objectification. I hadn’t realized that my race actually did made my beauty unspeakable in polite company. That it was something that needed very specific contextual spaces to be acknowledged, to exist. That only in private moments, away from the prying gaze and judgment of the rest of the world, did it feel appropriate. Otherwise, it was best, was safer, left unsaid. I didn't know that. I didn't know I was only allowed to be beautiful sometimes. In some ways. I’d always thought that so long as he loved me for who I was as well as what I looked like—the way most people do—the world would be at least forgiving if not understanding. I thought a love like that was what defined it as more than a fetish.

I want to believe that. And defiantly choose to.

I like to tell stories in which, like in the world I live in, people of color exist. If I’m going to create worlds, I want worlds where, like in the world I live in, diversity in all its complexity is something real. I want people who look like me, who look like my friends, to all be seen and be given voices. I want to show diverse people living together. Loving together. The way they do in the world I live in. The world we all live in, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. The existence and normalization of stories like that are important to me, as someone who grew up not really having a whole lot of that.

And that is my problem with these arguments and theories. They focus so much on how not to describe us, how not to portray us, how not to look at us, and precious little on how we’re supposed to exist at all.

The Plainspeak Argument

Never compare us to objects; it’s objectifying.

Okay.

Fine.

Then what do we use?

The Plainspeak Argument suggests using “words that actually ‘mean’ their color”, like gold or ochre or fawn, instead of “these same ole descriptions that go out of their way to say something other than brown.”

Except color and shape are visual mediums built on comparison. “Communication theory suggests not knowing the word for a thing makes that thing invisible to the larger culture. It’s called linguistic relativity. If you can’t describe it; it doesn’t exist.” We can only know what green a green is by comparing it to something else. How do we know if a green is green like a pine tree or green like a celery stalk unless we're told?

Even with those helpful colors that mean their color, their meanings only mean something because they refer to the objects that share their name. The color gold exists because it is the color of the object gold. The object always and already preceded the abstract concept of the color.

The same applies for shapes. We can only know what a box looks like if we already have a concept of what shape a box is. In the same way, it’s often helpful to describe the shape of eyes using already known shapes, like almonds and lotuses, because we understand what those shapes are. If an object is the only the shape or color of itself, how can you, in a medium that paints and sculpts solely in words, describe that shape or color to a person who cannot see it? If we have skin that is the exact and unique color of our skin and features that put into mind the thought of our features, I suppose that is incredibly and obviously accurate but, in a world made of words without an outside visual reference to linguistically relate to, it makes us really inaccessible. In print form, it leaves us undefined, unsettled and strange. It will have solved the issue of us being compared to almonds and lattes by making us oddly sound like an unknowable something lurking in some Lovecraftian story.

Okay, so, say, we stick to modified but still more nondescript terms, like brown and beige. Currently, yes, many readers still read terms like “dark beige” skin as white skin with a tan but, if we continue to use it to mean skin of color, it’ll eventually become a non-offensive, plainspeak, ethnic signifier. We just need to give it and our readers time to acclimate and adjust.

Never mind that, in our nondescript, non-offensive efforts to avoid clichés, we would have just created a new, rather othering cliché that doesn’t so much describe us as people of color—doesn’t describe or even attempt to capture the beauty and individuality of us—but rather exist solely to distinguish and differentiate us as not white.

Usually, I’m a fan of plainspeak. But beauty feels less beautiful when confined to plainspeak. While certainly useful, it’s also thoroughly non-emotive. As one of my friends remarked, “dark beige; that’s the color of my living room, not a person.” It simplistically and non-specifically tells us something fairly vague but doesn’t show us anything. It’s flat and lifeless. And, if that was the aim, why not use very useful, very exacting Pantone codes? Then your character can be the precise shade of “Pantone 45-C” or the exact color of “Pantone 75-6 C”. Because who wouldn’t want to be described in such precise and breathtaking prose? Even the creator of the Humanae project that I’m referencing understands that kind of description, while visually stunning, is lyrically…unhelpful. Listen to her talk about race in her TedTalk in terms of “dark chocolate tone” and “porcelain skin” and “vanilla and strawberry yoghurt like tone.”

We need more and better ways to be seen. We need to be visible. Not just in opposition to the accepted norm—not just as “not white”—but as uniquely and independently ourselves. We cannot afford to limit our language and expression just because it might feel problematic to some people. That feels more like a step backward than anything else. That claim, that some people’s offense justifies making their comfort level the norm, hurts us by allowing our continued erasure, while we wait for some perfectly unproblematic solution that very well may never come.

The Natural Argument

So, okay, then maybe the problem isn’t that we use objects to describe people of color, but rather the types of objects typically used to do so. I mean, sure, all right, specificity and context make a difference. So just not food or tradable goods then, because after all people of color aren’t sellable and consumable goods and Lord knows we have a horrific history of too often being seen as such.

Okay, that’s fair.

But what brown items are we left with? The bark of trees. Except lumber is a tradable good. Stones and gems? Definitely, tradable goods. Mud? Clay? Still tradable goods and good thing they are, because I really don’t want people to look at my skin and think of the color of mud. Well, many social justice activists seem to be okay with “Natural Plant-life” or “Spices”. Which seems strange since, I’m sure the botanical and culinary industries will be surprised to know they don’t deal in tradable goods and I think several stores owe me refunds because I’m pretty sure I’ve paid money to obtain these items.

Not to mention, there are tons of natural plants, like fruits and vegetables, and spices, like cinnamon and clove, that I’ve ingested as or in food, so why are food items sometimes non-offensively acceptable and other times not?

Maybe it’s because I write smutty, sex-centric erotica, but I don’t find the food analogies all that offensive. Not on their own. I mean, sure, if you overthink it or authorially overwork it, there is certainly a “the better to eat you with, my dear” creepiness to it but, as a writer who also loves speculative fiction, I know that, if you think too hard about anything, you can find a creeptastic spin on it.

And, in a genre like erotica, that depends on sensuality—on the playful embrace of your senses, sight, sound, smell, texture, and taste—it seems strange, arbitrary, and off-putting to shy away from these descriptions just because there exists people out there who read, willingly or not, cannibalism into sex.

And, again, I get it. There is something inherently visceral and carnal about the way writers—particularly erotica and romance writers—describe characters. Because there’s often something inherently visceral and carnal about the way we as people experience attraction and love. We obsess and wax poetic about the size, shape, color, texture, and taste of thighs, breasts, hips, shoulders, asses, vulvas, and cocks. We touch and taste and savor and swallow. We eat out and go down. We tongue and suck and lick and bite. Call me crazy—or racist or offensive—but food analogies exist and make sense because of this. If you want to eliminate writers using these types of descriptions, you’re going to need to eliminate this “feast of love” part of human sexuality.

But, okay, so if food and inanimate, tradable goods are creepy and dehumanizing, what about animals? Fur and hide and scales comes in a wide variety of browns. But then couldn't the argument be made that to compare us to animals makes us seem animalistic? And, even if “fawn” has somehow become an acceptable description of skin, this isn’t really helping people see us as more human now, is it?

The Heritage Argument

Well, perhaps we can only describe ourselves in comparison to each other, to other humans who look like us. So, while white people can have eyes as blue and deep as the ocean or skin as rich and smooth as silk, we can only have the skin of Barack Obama or the eyes of Lucy Liu. And, if you don’t have an easily recognizable celebrity who looks like you, perhaps the world isn’t yet ready to see you.

Or perhaps we are just ethnicities and nothing else. All Asians are just Asian. All black people are black. All Hispanic people, Hispanic. It certainly makes describing people easier, since, within our designated race, it would be assumed that we then all look the same. That we are some big collective without individuality or distinction. A practice that has not been historically the best.

Besides, what exactly defines each designation? What does, say, “Asian” look like anyway? Who decides that? Ming-Na Wen, Ariana Miyamoto, and I are all Asian, but none of us look the same.

Perhaps more specificity is needed then. Maybe we could say characters of color have “Korean skin” or “South African hair?” Would “ethnically typical shaped eyes for a South Pacific Asian” and “skin of a shade that is not of European descent” feel more accurate and socially acceptable? It ought to feel less offensive, right? I mean, you’re simply stating the ethnic heritage of where those features came from. Except that just feels so othering. Especially since you would never hear someone say “French-Canadian eyes” or “Scottish skin.“

Besides, as an Asian-American, a daughter of an immigrant, and a citizen who has rarely left the states, I would feel uncomfortable and it just frankly feels odd and illogical to be defined by a region of the world that I’ve never been to or seen or experienced outside of a magazine or textbook.

So how would you describe a person who looked like me? What words am I allowed to exist within? Would I have the skin of a people I have little connection to beyond my genetics? Or the eyes of an island I did a cursory report on in fifth grade? And, having said that, what color does that make my skin and what shape are my eyes, when through a description like that, even I have a very detached, National Geographic-inspired relationship with my own body now? And is it any wonder that we don’t see more characters of color when we have to ask these questions?

An Impossible Balancing Act

And that’s just with the way we look. We also can’t be too ethnically stereotypical personality-wise, but don’t make us too white either. Also be careful where you place us; don’t relegate us to colored-only places and plots, but don’t make us the token piece of color in places and situations that are stereotypically white. Always acknowledge that racism exists—go in-depth on socially conscious subjects like objectification, racial profiling, and cultural appropriation—but don’t make all our stories afternoon-special-esque stories about race.

Where and how are we supposed to exist in that then? And should we even exist in a medium that clearly has a clearer picture of a world without us? Because if we can only be defined in the negative, by what we’re not allowed to be and only what we are in highly selective, not always true, impossibly Goldilockian not-too-hot-not-too-cold kinds of ways, our negation seems to make more sense than our inclusion. And perfectly explains why we are so very rarely seen, because why would anyone bother to include us when there seems no right way to do so?

Which, since most of the people touting this philosophy are trying to get more diversity in literature, defeats the purpose of proper and respectful representation. Because I—and many other authors—hear these objections, that as I said often feel logical and reasonable if a bit murkier on practicalities, and feel like it’s so much easier to just write white people then. Because in a world full of white people no one ever has to talk about race ever. It’s really the only way to solve the problem they present.

It’s just also a solution I don’t want. But, in a medium and a world that too often doesn’t know what to do with us, is it any wonder why it feels easier and more right to just do away with us?

So What Do We Do?

Honestly?

I don’t know.

That's why this is titled "Searching for Solutions" and not just "Solutions."

But I think, whatever we do, the first step is going to be letting go of the idea of some perfect answer. Some unthought of invention of language that will solve this issue.

I think we need to admit to ourselves that it’s not going to be that easy.

We will offend someone.

We will mess up.

But we need to try.

We need to do something.

If it were up to me, I'd want to normalize the description of skin and features. For people of color and for white people as well. In the same way that white people are often described as being “milky white” or “creamy” or having “emerald eyes” or a million other descriptions, that never get questioned because we hear them so often, we need to de-stigmatize descriptions of people of color. Because, as long as these characters are “presented as different, unusual, weird, and deviant, there are going to be (people) who single that deviance out”, who see us as different and other in ways more problematic than words.

Right now, we don’t hear descriptions of people of color often, since we appear so infrequently in print stories, so when we are featured, they sound weird. It feels odd and off-putting to hear these things because, normally, we never do. Personally, I think most of the time it’s an issue of frequency, not fetish. I wonder if, the more we hear descriptions of ourselves, the more we use it, the more context over it we control, the more normal it will become.

If anything, I think we should get more creative and precise with how we describe everyone, white people too. It may sound weird to compare white skin to the color of pancakes and strawberry yoghurt, but again is it because it’s actually weird or just that we’re not used to hearing it? And, if that is more accurate than “ivory” or “creamy,” why shouldn’t we embrace that? Especially, since, when we fail to be more specific about white people, we perpetuate the idea of white skin as the default color of flesh.

Of all the arguments against terms like “chocolate eyes” or “coffee-colored skin,” the fact that that trend “tends to strike me as corny and tired just from a writer’s craft pov” is the one I find most compelling. I’m almost always more of a fan of and than or so, sure, I’m all for having more, rather than less, ways to describe ourselves. Instead of having characters with “blond hair,” maybe characters have rich strands the color of baked nadalin. Maybe characters have skin the shade of saison ale. Or eyes the tones of shifting silt.

Creativity is born of bravery, not fear. Of looking at our world, closely and intensely, not shying away from the uncomfortable bits. Personally, I firmly believe that, if we encourage people to pay closer attention to how we describe our characters, the context we portray them in, the spaces and roles and depths we give them, rather than just policing—arbitrarily yes-ing and no-ing—the usage of certain words, we might not only see more characters of color in our fiction, but better characters of color.

As women, we already have such troubling relationships with our bodies and I think that’s even more complicated for women of color and other minority women, because we know in a way I don’t think many white girls can that we will never—no matter what we do—be able to fit what we’ve been taught is acceptable or beautiful. And, to have opportunities to see ourselves as beautiful—to see other people see us as beautiful, to see the many, many, many ways we can be beautiful—is powerful. And something that I wish I’d had when I was younger.

It’s a legacy I want to be a part of passing on. I want to bring inclusion and diversity and body positivity into erotica. Into our fictional landscape as a whole. I want to use every word at my disposal to describe that beauty, to explore all that it is and all that it can be. For women and for men. For people of color and for white people. For those of us that work hard to fit society’s standards of beauty and those of us who defiantly flip those standards off.

As writers, we paint worlds with words. We use those words to breathe life into mere letters. There is magic in that. And, like any spellcaster worth their salt, we should be both careful and brave with our words.

I want to give everyone, whatever body they embody, the opportunity to feel beautiful. As they are. As they want to be.

Because, even if it’s not possible, don’t you want it to be? Isn’t that an idea, whatever stumbles or missteps in front of us, that’s worth exploring?

My Beauty is Not Unspeakable - Part One: The Problem

“Lil’ Kim, like millions of dark-skinned women, has been socialized to believe she is ugly and unworthy because she is not white or light. And like many, she has taken on the racism that surrounds her, and subscribed to what we’re all told is the ‘ideal’ image of beauty: the fairest skin, the blondest hair. (...) Perhaps the saddest thing about Kim’s transformation is that it reflects a look that is very much celebrated and applauded — just not on her.”
Zeba Blay

So Lil Kim recently posted pictures to her Instagram that many found “unsettling not just because of how unlike her former self she looks, but because of how light she seems to have bleached her formerly cocoa-brown skin.” And I know that I’ve talked and talked and talked and talked and talked about it. A lot. But, boy, does the beauty industry—and the general concept of beauty as a whole—have a complicated relationship with race.

And, I agree with Blay’s article, I think the story here is less about Lil Kim and more about a society and system that made her feel like she had to transform herself in order to be considered beautiful. I mean, how could she not feel that way, when companies like Dove do things like the “normal to dark skin” self-tanner screw-up where, intentionally or—more often—reflexively not, our culture portrays white skin as the norm and skin of color as a less desirable other.

And I agree that is a problem. A big one. I just also think we’re looking at this problem wrong. We’re too often too quick to claim overt and malicious racism and demand boycotts and public shaming. And, mind you, these just my personal thoughts. Lord knows, I am not qualified or claiming to speak for all people of color in any way, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here and I really don’t think that that’s the solution. 

I think we ought to examine why people like Lil Kim and, if I’m being honest, me when I was younger—and certain days at my current age—think that being white is the path to beauty. And take a good look at the system and powers in place, like Dove’s marketing, that shape that belief. I think we need to take a moment and address the issues of how we look at and how we talk about beauty of color.

The Problem

Personally, particularly as a woman of color who writes erotic romances featuring characters of color—especially as a WOC who is currently in an interracial relationship and often writes erotic romances featuring interracial relationships—I find the way we talk, or rather too often don’t talk, about race and beauty in this country disheartening and disappointing.

We’re at a strange point in time, in literature, where more and more readers, writers, and publishers are demanding more diversity in their media but, in many ways, we still lack the language and means to deliver. We’re trying to deal with diversity in a still very white-centric medium through a hypersensitive, easily triggered, politically tumultuous lens. Which too often ends with us drawing arbitrary and contradictory lines in the sand while we chase an elusive and quite possibly impossible standard of perfection that seeks to please everyone and offend no one.

A lofty goal, to be sure. 

It’s just one that I’m not sure is possible or even something we ought to aspire to.

And, to be fair, a lot of these well-intentioned, if deeply problematic theories point out the perfectly legitimate problem that, as it stands, we’re not good at describing characters of color, but offer no practical solutions beyond “Let’s commit to using the fast-changing breadth and width and depth of the English language to describe a diversity of characters with integrity and imagination.” Again, truly admirable sentiments, but not exactly helpful.

Since pleasure and offense are such personal things. What pleases one person, often offends another. What seems innocuous to me may insult someone else. What they see as a perfectly politically correct solution may feel like an awful disservice to me. 

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in political correctness but, while I do think it gets the direction our culture needs to shift in right a lot of the time, it often gets it wrong too. There are times when, by attempting to not offend by being so politically correct, their efforts and arguments feel incredibly offensive in and of themselves, when thought all the way through to their inevitable conclusion.

So let’s break some of the arguments down:

What The Colorblind Argument Doesn’t See

The Colorblind Argument thinks that we should avoid being too specific about description of skin and features to sidestep the controversy altogether. After all, skin is skin and color shouldn’t matter, right? That’s the equality movement in a nutshell. So, just to be safe, why not simply take out ethnically specific mentions of color and distinguishing features entirely and stick to more generic terms, like “soft” and “smooth” skin or “bright” or “wide” eyes, which could apply to anyone? Then any reader of any race could insert themselves into any story with ease, right?

Except, while in theory that’s nice, that’s not how the real world works. Because colorblindness in print doesn’t actually promote equality; it just erases any race that isn’t white. 

Especially since we would never think to do that with white people. We would never think “blond hair” or “gray eyes” were even remotely problematic or in need of censoring or toning down. Yet “almond-shaped eyes” or “cinnamon skin” makes a lot of people uncomfortable. They’re terms we’re often told to shy away from or consider rephrasing. Which inevitably means that, if we are not allowed to know characters of color visually in print, a character of color can only be physically known in a tangible sense, such as “soft” or “smooth,” while a white character can have “soft hair the color of sunshine” or “pale skin smooth as cream.” We, as people of color, would then exist only within the lack of color we are described. How does that make sense?

By just straight-up deleting all descriptions, race now exists in stories as almost an intellectual exercise rather than the visual and physical reality many of us live. You’ve not only thoroughly bypassed the very real and very impactful politics of it, but also any claim to language that could appreciate it. “It’s simply counterintuitive to argue that problems related to race can be fixed by ignoring race altogether. In practice, colorblind casting isn’t a form of acceptance or progress: It can just as easily be erasure wrapped up as benevolence.” The path to equality isn’t ignoring or blindly painting over our differences, but by understanding and embracing that which makes us the same and that which makes us unique.

If I can’t describe a character’s ethnicity through skin color or features, if I can only say they have skin and features, the effort to make race not matter just erased my character’s race entirely. And, without those same ethnic differences that feel cliché and offensive to some, my character simply becomes the default race in western culture: white.

That’s how dominant culture works. Unless otherwise specified, the dominant culture is automatically the default assumption.

Even when authors try for racial ambiguity, “I know intentions are (often) good when writers purposely create racially-ambiguous characters, but it’s hard to undue a lifetime of defaulting ambiguous to White, for those who have been submerged in mainstream, White-dominated media all around the world. That’s just fact.” Even toning race down to say things like “dark beige skin” or “tanned olive skin” is problematic because, people can and often do interpret that as being white with a tan. Making our race ambiguous literally makes us invisible.

It is not enough to just not talk about or play down race. To just let the audience assume what it will. Let their imaginations fill in the blanks. Because, realistically, typically Western audiences just aren’t very good at mentally inserting diversity when given the option. That’s why people get so upset when actors of color are cast as characters in movies based on books, even when those characters were specifically stated to be, if not often specifically described as, characters of color in those books. Not to mention, also, like in the Last Airbender film, or, of course, the current Ghost in the Shell and Dr. Strange controversies, times when movie casts get white-washed to make the movie more sellable at the expense of the ethnic experience inherent in the story. Even when we find ways to diversify our traditionally, and out-datedly white-dominated stories, there are still too many people who, for too many reasons, have way too many problems with it. Who would prefer tradition over diversity. You know, those good ole days, where, for no real good reason beyond good old fashioned racism, everyone important was white.

Except, those days are long gone—welcome to today’s world—and, as I said, an all-white world doesn’t exist; we can no longer realistically pretend that it does. To present such a world is to depict, despite the intended genre, a fantasy-based dystopia in which the shocking lack of us needs to be addressed. Were we wiped out by disease? By war? If we are never characters of significance, if we never speak or act in ways that move the plot and by extension the world, why is that? Have we been silenced? Have we been pushed to the furthest margins of society? What happened in the story’s history to make our exclusion make sense?

And, if there isn’t one, if there was no mass genocide, no biological catastrophe, no sociological upheaval—if that’s just the story you have to tell—I have to wonder why that is. I have to wonder why, of all the worlds you could create, that was the one you chose. I would hope, at some point in the writing process, you would take a moment to wonder that too.

Because this colorblind practice unfairly and illogically erases us from the landscape. Instead of embracing the beauty of diversity, it makes it something to hush up. People of color have enough trouble being seen in this country—much less being seen in a positive light. And that type of archaic storytelling reiterates and reinforces “that white is normal. But white isn’t normal. And the more role models and representation otherwise, the better humans do.” No one race is “normal;” normal is the existence and recognition of all races. And we need to acknowledge that. The more diverse our media is, the more representative of the diverse reality we already live in, the better we all are for it.

For being such a melting pot and for having made such strides toward accepting and celebrating diversity in our real lives, we are not good at it when it comes to our fiction. We need to be explicit about it. After all, “if you the author have a specific race in mind for a character, what is honestly the harm in noting what they are?” We should treat race as if it’s, at the very least, conversational. Normal. Something we all, one way or another, live with. Because, white or not, that is our reality. That is the world as we know it. And it’s been that way long enough for us all to realize and accept it and, I promise you, it will not change anytime soon.

Ideally, we’d get to a place where we can celebrate it, in ourselves and in each other. After all, “Audiences empathize with people who aren’t like them all the time. (…) Because we empathize with fully realized characters in good stories even if they’re living lives that are different from our own, even if they don’t act like we act. In fact, that’s one reason why we seek out works of fiction, to experience life from other points of view that we could never live ourselves.” 

As a writer who uses them, I’ve been told that terms like “coffee-colored skin” or “lotus-shaped eyes” are discomforting or even racist; I think it’s racist to willfully refuse to see—to act blind to—parts of who we are. For making completely benign things, like the mere presence of skin or features, racist just because you deem them so. Just because they make you uncomfortable.

Please, understand, I’m not saying that we should use or be okay with racist language or imagery, but intent ought to matter. Context should factor in. Because to go in the complete opposite direction and say all mention of color is always and already racist is just another form of racism. It makes zero sense to avoid talking about color when it comes to characters of color. Because in order to talk about the color of someone’s skin, one must inevitably and unavoidably talk about color. To find it automatically offensive makes any description of a very important part of who we are off-limits. Not just to those who would use it against us, but to us as well.

To say that there’s something wrong with acknowledging a person has color in their skin tone, whether that’s porcelain, coffee, or chocolate, feels a lot like saying that there’s something wrong with having color in your skin. To not allow us to describe the color of our own skin, you make not only the words unspeakable, you in turn make our existence unspeakable.

Because good things, things a person can and should be proud of, are never unspeakable. Never censorable or limited. Unspeakable things are always and already shameful.

I don’t think the way I look—I don’t think I as a person, the mere existence of me—should ever be treated as shameful. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that of themselves.

We, as a culture are so PC-ly afraid to talk about people of color in a physical sense. Even outside of fiction or the written word. For example, I had asked people to describe what I look like once, while discussing among friends the current social taboo of using these kinds of terms, and got answers like “diminutive but sparky” and “slyly intelligent.”

Both of which I like to think are accurate—thank you. But that only gives insight into who I am as a person and very little about what I look like. After all, a white person—or a black person or a Hispanic person or any person of any race—could be those things as well.

I am more than what I look like—no one will argue this louder than me—but I am still what I look like. Like it or not—accept it or not—I take up a physical presence. I exist in concrete, tangible terms. To say that it’s not appropriate to comment on my looks is to tacitly say that there’s something wrong with how I look.

White characters are allowed full dimension and depth, unfettered existence in worlds built by words all the time. While authors are continually asked to pull back and strategically tiptoe around the descriptions of characters of color for fear it might offend someone. This practice places limits that, by trying not to be offensive, are offensive, by saying that descriptions for white characters are limitless but descriptions for characters of color—no matter how benign—need censorship because they are always and already problematic for someone.

No matter what we want or wish, race and appearance matters. They affect how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how others see us. “Race informs everything we do. Not because it exists—race is a construct; there is only one human race, homo sapiens—but because we are social and visual beings.” Race and appearance inform our experiences and worlds. It’s dishonest to erase or be blind to that information. We all see it. We are all affected by it, in some way or another. As an Asian person, I know that, “Whether you like it or not, being Asian has a big impact on who you are as a person and it will continue to have an impact on you in the future. (…) And I think it’s because it’s one of the first things that people notice when they see you.”

And that’s okay.

I am Asian. I am not white. What’s so wrong with people noticing that? So long as that acknowledgment doesn’t come attached to value judgments or cultural assumptions, I promise, I don’t mind. It’s part of who I am. A part I can’t hide and, at this point in my life, one I wouldn’t if I could.

In fact, I’m far more offended when white people tell me that they often “forget” that I’m Asian. That I’m not white. What does that even mean? Look at me. Are they blind? No one looks me in my coffee-colored, amber-toned face and just forgets that I’m not white.

What they mean is that I don’t act like a cultural stereotype. That, to them, despite my looks, I “act white.” What they want is to be applauded for their colorblindness.

But I’m not going to applaud that. Their effort to not offend me—to compliment me on my lack of Asian-ness, to erase the otherness we’ve been taught is polite to blind ourselves to—offends me.

Because, I promise, I wasn’t trying to trick anyone by somehow defying racial tropes. It doesn’t and should never make me less Asian because of it. I’m okay with—I would far prefer—you acknowledging my Asian-ness. “Yes, this isn’t a disguise; it’s pretty obvious, right? But my point is that people will always identify you as Asian.” And, if you’re Asian—and if you believe there’s nothing wrong with being Asian—why shouldn’t they? Why would we see that recognition as rudeness?

So What Do We Do Now?

If we can and should recognize race in stories, the question becomes how, right? Which is a harder question than I wish it were.

A SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS HERE