Stop.
Wait a minute.
Realize we can’t fill your cup for you.
Wanting to stop bad representation is all well and good. It’s noble! But just as fetishization can turn “I love this culture” into a negative because you actually love your idea of the culture, wanting to save the world from bad representation can also turn very negative.
Why? Because you want to play saviour to PoC.
We don’t need a saviour. Chances are, we’ve already written about the issue you want to write about. In your valiant effort to give accurate representation, tripping over yourself to ask what’s okay, what to avoid, how you can properly write this situation, how you can be a Good Ally and get cookies and generally stop being a White Person that’s discussed whenever PoC talk about racism… you add to the burden of emotional labour instead of detract from it.
You’re putting your own desire for immediate knowledge above everything else.
Instead of turning to Google and educating yourself, instead of going through our guides over and over again, instead of educating yourself across an extended period of time, instead of searching for authors of colour you can lift up, you want answers to your questions right now so you can stop being a White Person and just be a white person.
You won’t stop being a White Person overnight. You will not go from 0 to Passable Representation thanks to one question and one conversation. Even if we were to give you a list of what to avoid (which, honestly, our blog is a very large list of exactly that), it would still take you years of noticing your own behaviour to change.
Take for example our most recent correction: using a Chinese example when the ask was about Tibet. Despite a fair chunk of education and several posts about how much China has taken over lands that do not want to be taken over by China, that mistake was still made.
And that’s with education. That’s with knowing, intellectually, the context of China/Tibet relations. If you’re jumping in from scratch having only taken in enough racism education— enough to know you should be representing diverse cultures, not enough to know where to start— you’re going to make even worse mistakes.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t start learning! But recognize it is a process, and that wanting to save the world isn’t a sustainable reason to educate yourself and write good representation. You probably shouldn’t jump straight into the deepest depths of representation right away.
So What Can I Do?
Write stories you think are worth telling because they’re interesting stories, not because you want to “prove” how good/interesting they are. Write stories you are curious about, instead of picking the most under-represented group you can think of. Make sure your drive is from curiosity, not white saviour. You shouldn’t be trying to prove to everyone these stories are worthwhile; you’re very likely to fall into model minority because you don’t want to show anything “bad.”
Signal boost stories PoC have already written. You are not the first person to write about an issue, and chances are authors of colour have done it better. You can use your white privilege to lift up PoC narratives, bringing them to a new audience. Look through #OwnVoices or #WeNeedDiverseBooks as a starting place. Give value to authors of colour writing about their own culture, their own world, instead of thinking the value comes from your outsider take on it.
Realize you’re going to have to start small: background characters, adding diversity to friend groups, having more than one of any ethnicity to avoid tokenism. If you do fantasy writing, start by learning about trade routes such as the Silk Road and add in references to other countries’ trade links, while also realizing “exotic trader” is a very toxic trope.
Also, realize you’re going to be in this for the long haul. If you are interested in a fully immersive story set in another culture, you’re going to be spending years, perhaps a decade, learning enough about it to do it justice.
You don’t need to ask us to get the basics (food/clothing/religion/trade relations) of a culture. We can tell when you haven’t researched it.
Writers are renowned for our research ability. How long will you spend looking up the weather in 1600s England, the process of learning how to be a swordsman, the average medical knowledge of a farmhand? The same applies to learning about PoC settings. You might be starting from scratch, but simple searches like “clothing in 1500s China”, “goods that traveled on the Silk Road”, and “Native American cities pre-contact” are starting places. It might be a little more basic because of unfamiliarity, but remember that you didn’t know stuff about Europe once upon a time.
Learn the definitions of appropriation, fetishization, and white saviour. Realize they all come from the same roots: a person’s ideas about a culture over the actual reality of the culture. Instead of assuming you know what there is to know, research to find out if you “know” a fake thing. You might “know” how horses work, but do you know the Disney version or the horseback rider version?
The research we are asking you do is the same research. It’s the same steps of searching for a particular fact and building your story based on the details you uncover. It’s not some murky waters of hard to find information— especially as the internet is ever-expanding, and sometimes a few years or even a few months down the line you discover the information has been made available (“weather in India” wasn’t a wikipedia article 12 years ago, for example).
Learn you and your ideas are secondary. The facts are first. It will take time to learn that you are secondary, because whiteness by nature puts itself first. It is not an instant process because you don’t realize how deep it runs. You will mess up. You will get corrections.
Apologize (genuinely— no “I’m sorry if I offended you”; say “I’m sorry I made this error”), admit you were wrong, and do better. Research more, take more time, maybe even edit the previous work with your new knowledge so it really sticks. This is, after all, a process!
You just have to do the work. You can’t come to us and say “how do I represent this group”, because we can’t tell you in a reply to one ask. You have to dive into the history, current situation, and culture of the people you want to represent.
You have to fill your own cup of knowledge, and willingly drink all parts of culture: sweet and bitter alike. Drink from cups we have offered you already instead of trying to build your own. You can’t just take the sweet (finding it a fantasy world) or the bitter (the trauma of racism) and think you have enough.
—WWC
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