A Note on the Color of Characters

I’ve been posting to this site for a little over a month. Most my essays have characters in them. It’s part of how I try to simulate that something is happening.

I’m not gonna go back and count how many people I’ve mentioned…wait, that might not be a bad idea…nope, not gonna do it. Gotta get this post done before work.

I’d guess maybe 15 people in specific and then a bunch more sort of in a general way.

Only three times (if I remember correctly) have I come close to mentioning the race of any characters in my stories.

  1. I mentioned that the fellow who commiserated with me about getting puddle-dumped was Indian. Now this isn’t a race per se, but it does insert some reasonable assumptions as to skin tone into a reader’s imagination.
  2. I mentioned that Giovanni and First Mate spoke Spanish…again, obviously not a race, but still a clue.
  3. And I posted a picture of Douglas, so that gives a hint.

With every other character, I’ve left the melanin in their dermis unnoted.

I’d like to say that this is for some high-and-righteous reason, like color-blindness or something. What?! I didn’t even notice that guy running down the street in his underwear was albino! (This is a made-up story to give an example of my made-up color-blindness.)

Unfortunately, it’s not.

I suppose that if someone’s race becomes relevant to a story, I’ll mention it. Until then, I’m gonna keep it to myself simply because you can’t really say what color a person is without giving the wrong (and probably offensive) impression to someone.

I like to avoid conflict.

The downside of this is that most readers are probably misimagining what color most characters in my stories are.

For instance:

Who can know these things? If your imagination is pigmenting folks—whether randomly or based on bias—I can guarantee that it’s mistaken.

But I have the solution for you readers who need details, details, details.

I don’t know anything about math or biology (except for that which wikipedia has seen fit to make known unto me). Nevertheless, here’s my best attempt at a formula to determine the race of any given character in one of my little tales:

  1. Take the color you assume they are;
  2. Assign a whole number to that color randomly. (Or not randomly. You can use your favorite number if you want.)
  3. Multiply it by how guilty you feel (on a scale of 1 to 12) for assuming that they’re that color;
  4. Then divide by the number of other characters in the story whose race you didn’t think about because you assumed they were white.

If this number is an integer, you can assume that the person is probably not the color you assumed they were, but maybe they are.

Sorry, it’s not an exact science. Thanks for reading anyway!