Thanks for the link. I'm reminded of Anansi Boys now, and sheepish all over again that I mostly failed to notice the ethnicity of the characters most of the way through.
Though it does sort of bring up that old question: if one includes people of a variety of colors in their work, is that tokenism? I do have characters of a variety of colors, and they just walked onscreen like that; but the problem is sometimes I don't mention their color, because describing characters in terms of color isn't always part of the natural flow of the narrative. I've used the term "dark-complected" because "black" sounds anachronistic amongst the horses and swords. (Not to mention that some of my nonhuman people are black in the charcoal-colored sense, and it's an important distinction from the shades of pink and brown my humans are.)
It seems to me that if I talk too much about it, it's tokenism. But if I don't talk enough about it, it's easy to get the impression that everyone is white. :-/
You saw her follow-up, right? About some of the responses that "Shame" provoked. (http://andweshallmarch.typepad.com/and_we_shall_march/2006/01/the_shame_of_ea.html)
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Though it does sort of bring up that old question: if one includes people of a variety of colors in their work, is that tokenism? I do have characters of a variety of colors, and they just walked onscreen like that; but the problem is sometimes I don't mention their color, because describing characters in terms of color isn't always part of the natural flow of the narrative. I've used the term "dark-complected" because "black" sounds anachronistic amongst the horses and swords. (Not to mention that some of my nonhuman people are black in the charcoal-colored sense, and it's an important distinction from the shades of pink and brown my humans are.)
It seems to me that if I talk too much about it, it's tokenism. But if I don't talk enough about it, it's easy to get the impression that everyone is white. :-/
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http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Features/Cheney_BestOf2005.html
Brava!
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