I totally see your points, and where I agree with you, I think defaulting kind of sucks. As what most would probably consider a “white guy” (though like many of us, personal ancestry goes much deeper than this), I probably read stories as the characters looking like me or people I know. I would hope that this is the case for most people, regardless of color. Descriptions of characters are left blank to give readers that “everyman” feel. Kind of sucks that “everyman” is white.

Thank you for this thread. It really got me thinking about things.

Pamela, I think that’s kinda cool about the Margaret Maron books. It works great when we have a socio-cultural background already established, but in fantasy worlds, how the heck do we go about tossing descriptions in casually? There’s not really a background for Latino or Asian in a world without Asia or Latin America. It’s tricky. I’ve seen it pulled off once or twice, but it was very oblique and I probably missed it the first go around.

The example being Robert Jordan’s character, Faile. The second book she was in, he describes her with very Asian characteristics, especially her eyes.

Even trickier are ways of describing characters without touching on our world’s ethic identities (such as African American, Indian, Asian, etc.) without eventually showing what might be construed in the future as derogatory or no longer accepted as polite.

An example of this would have to be Robert E. Howard’s Conan adventures. His descriptions of characters with African characteristics would be considered borderline racist today, but at the time, simply having a black man in a role other than villain or servant was very progressive. It showed a lot of courage, I think. Times are different today, and maybe in fifty years, the terms we consider accepted will be noted as backward and racist.

I’ve already seen this in college, when one person took offense at the use of the term “black people.” They preferred “African Americans” and went on about the plight of the African Americans in Africa suffering under the yoke of apartheid.

Um? What?

I think you’ve sold me on it. XD

It must not have been GG&S, but some other anthropology text I read back in the day. If I find the original quote I’ll post it here; sorry I can’t help more .

Great column, Nora. I loved the Elfquest comics, so it’s nice to see them acknowledged, but it’s your main point that really deserves some celebrating. Thanks for writing this.

Elfquest is fecking brilliant. It’s still in print, available in most bookstores in graphic novel or manga format; I think the manga-sized versions were released recently. You should go buy it. These are elves treated believably as a second sentient species struggling to adapt to an Earthlike world’s environments and native people (the elves in EQ are aliens stranded on the planet). All of them adapt different strategies for survival, to greater or lesser success. It’s probably the best worldbuilding I’ve ever seen, hands-down. And after the first few issues or so, the art is simply a treasure to look at, and the plotting becomes so emotionally powerful that it’s stuck with me all these years…

Whoa. I need to go re-read EQ now. =)

With that in mind, who is to say what characters in fantasy books are necessarily white or black? Many books don’t even go into detail like that anymore. The character is given a name and their traits are more about what kind of clothes they wear or car they drive.

The problem is that in predominantly white societies that have a history of racism, whiteness is the “default” assumption that readers tend to make whenever a character’s race isn’t mentioned (or obviously marked through cues like stereotypical dialect, cultural trappings, etc.). So when a book doesn’t mention a character’s race, I believe that most readers in that predominantly-white society will assume the character is white — even if the author intends for the character to be read otherwise. So since racism has imbalanced the situation by setting the default to white, authors generally have to restore the balance by explicitly mentioning the character’s coloring if they want the character to be seen as something else.

Some authors have deliberately used this tendency on the reader’s part to mess with their expectations — LeGuin’s a great example, as mentioned upthread. But unfortunately (IMO), many authors just don’t deal with it at all, whether out of fear or simply an unwillingness to deal with a subject that makes them uncomfortable. So they simply don’t mention the characters’ races, leave the reader to form his/her own assumptions, and then try to disclaim responsibility when the readers naturally assume all the characters are white. I find this disingenuous, to say the least.

I’m aware that color isn’t strongly linked to equatorial origins, and I didn’t mean to imply that. It is strongly linked to UV exposure, which tends to be strong in equatorial places just because the sun is closer and more intense there, but most of Africa isn’t equatorial, nor are other parts of the world where dark-skinned peoples exist, as you point out. The sun is quite powerful in those places where dark-skinned people originated (Africa) or migrated to and stayed dark (Australia), particularly in savannah or outback climates where there’s little tree-cover. So the link seems strong to me. With the exception of white people and possibly Asians/Native Americans/Pacific Islanders, whose lighter coloring may be the result of random mutation according to a recent study, most of the world’s races that settled in any place for a length of time developed coloring adapted to their local environment’s UV intensity. Those are the theories I’ve read, at least.

I’m also aware that people of whatever coloring can migrate to whatever environment and do quite well there. That was my point about developing seafaring tech; there’s no reason why the elves even in fictionalized Europes should be all white. The people of real Europe weren’t all white; there was the long occupation by the Moors, interaction with Asians via the Silk Road, etc. Medieval Europe was really very diverse, unlike the disturbingly whitewashed medieval Europe that we see in fiction. Why wouldn’t elven societies be similarly diverse?

Now, backing up — I’ve read both Diamond’s GG&S and also Collapse, and I don’t recall him pontificating on why various human color variants developed. Why their cultures developed at different rates, yes, or migrated in particular patterns, but not that. Can you point out that reference to me?