A Word or Two on Cultural Appropriation

In the series of books I’m working on, African American characters play central, point-of-view roles. I’ve already published one years ago, and the second in the planned series of three is coming out in July 2022, so I’m stuck with them at this point. It’s not like that should be a problem because I like them a lot. In fact, I’m damn proud of them.

But the push-back has already been significant. Before I gave up the enterprise and signed on with a hybrid publisher, I sent out many a query letter for the second of the three and attended agent fairs at writers’ conferences, and in the rare instances when they were willing to share, several told me they wouldn’t consider a story told from the POV of characters of color written by a white guy.

I’ve been educated on the subject, and to an extent, I get it. Cultural appropriation is a real thing, and people have real feelings about it. I don’t want to dismiss those feelings in any way, or claim any special right to portray someone else’s culture, which I’m sure to get wrong in many respects. I firmly believe in my inability to fully put myself in the shoes of a black man or woman, no matter how hard I try or how much I educate myself. We live in a society with a long and bitter history of discrimination and oppression, shameless and severe, and we are loathe to acknowledge it either in general or detail. What’s more, examples of horrible current practices, both structural and individual, abound. The little progress made in the last couple of decades has been met with a widespread and deep backlash, from the censorship of racism education in our schools to blatant violation of voting rights aimed at people of color.

The resulting atmosphere would seem to leave even well-intentioned white authors no way to write stories with a diverse set of characters, other than minor ones, and that seems like a shame. The answer, to publish more writers of color, is laudable, but I’m not sure it’s happening. And adhering to the prohibition also reduces the number of stories featuring characters of color, only perpetuating the impression that our world is far whiter than it is, that regular folks are white folks, and I think that would be a shame.

My solution has been to hire a sensitivity editor, the estimable Dennis Norris III, to find and flag the worst of my errors and help me understand my characters’ worlds a little bit better. Today, I regret neither the stories I’ve written and continue to write nor the education I’ve received in the issues my writing them has created. And of course, being an obscure hobby writer minimizes any damage I might create, and ensures that I’m not crowding out writers of color. To the extent my work garners any attention, perhaps it can stimulate some constructive discussion from pointing out its limitations my own understanding This is not to deny the reality of the issue or to downplay its importance, but it is an issue without an obvious solution and with downsides involved in every strategy I’ve seen to address it, including freezing out stories like mine.

And I can’t claim that my sin of cultural appropriation is the only reason I was unsuccessful in securing representation; it’s a tough marketplace with lots of competition, and it may not have been a major reason for my failure. I’m going ahead and will get the books out there either by myself or with the help of a hybrid publisher’s connections. A few people will read them and life will go on.