Which is exactly my big concern. You are so over-conscious of the whole thing it’s damaged your work, in that you were unable to communicate to your satisfaction that some characters are not white. Sure it’s a puzzle for authors to solve, but I really hate it when it paralyses them.
There are two reasons why I think this is a good idea (although probably not for every single character, that’d be overkill. Hopefully a few key cases, carefully chosen, including major, minor and scenery-only NPCs, should suffice). First, everyone has a default in their head - I suppose a black person would have a black default (though since for so long the default has been “white male”, as Maga pointed out, a black person’s default might actually be white, which is rather sad and, I suppose, the whole point of this discussion), and suddenly Atlantis is populated only by black people . That’s no what you want, either. If you want diversity, you do indeed have to spell it out somehow.
Second reason, you wouldn’t necessarily be giving anyone any extra screen time, as it were; you wouldn’t really be drawing attention to their race. I know it’s harder in CM, where the narrator is a character, so if a character points out the race it might sound race-conscious… but it doesn’t have to. The narrator isn’t blind; people do are of a different colour, however little that might mean in the long run. It’s not just colour, either, it’s features - it’s very easy to tell an Italian from a Norwegian from a Mexican (ethnicity, as you were saying). Again, in a fantasy world it’s hard to tie in real-world ethniticities, but all those different people MUST have come from different places. So you enhance the feeling of huge diversity and acceptance by making it clear that all those people are there, without giving any specific character any extra screen time.
I suppose you could focus on particular features as they become available. Pale skin and blond hair can easily be described in an outdoors environment as reflecting the sun, dark eyes and eyebrows can lend extra power to a stare or a frown while blue eyes can be particularly quizzical or particularly penetrating. Narratively, you could say that a certain character reminds Alex of some and such people, because of, among other things, their colour - their specific colour, as there are very many ranges. From pink to white to orange; from brown so light it’s almost caucasian to pure deep sunburnt black. Not to mention having the features of a race but not having the colour, which I find absolutely beautiful - a white face with all the features of african ethnicity; a deep dark face that it otherwise completely european; a dark face that is also asian, or an asian face tinged with colour, or with an european nose, or any other mix. Beautiful.
It IS a distinctive feature of the characters, is what I mean. It saddens me that you were so aware of the problem, so self-conscious, that it forced you to release your work in a state you’re not entirely happy with, and that’s what really worries me about the whole thing, even now that I’ve seen that there probably is a problem whether or not I’ve encountered (or recognised) it.
I mean, if you don’t describe any of it, it doesn’t exist. This is something I learned a long time ago in Dramaturgy, and I find it holds true to any work: if the work doesn’t specify something, it doesn’t exist. If the work doesn’t specify, directly or indirectly, that a character is white, or black, or polka dots yellow, then they’re not: they are the most likely default for that period and that time. If that default historically allows for a different colour, fine; otherwise, no. Grace Bumbry, one of the blackest opera singers in the world, famously became ghostly-white for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth - in that period, a black Scottish lady isn’t just unlikely, it’s almost preposterous (and I should add Bumbry had already done become famous for being the Black Venus in Tannhäuser in Bayreuth, which was a scandal at the time for the most racist of reasons, and yet she gained over all her naysayers. I don’t remember if she was actually just black or painted completely gold; she’s known as the Black Venus nonetheless, be it by actual makeup or simply being African-American). This holds true for everything; is a character’s age is not specified, that character then must fall into a default, the one most likely to have been the author’s intentions. If the historical context and the actual play allow for a different age, or race, or gender, or whathaveyou, of course you can extrapolate and change; knowing full well, of course, that that doesn’t change the fact that the author probably had something else entirely in mind. It’s fine to read something else into the work as long as you keep in mind what the work was originally about. It’s fine to have a black Hamlet in French (I saw that, actually, staging by Peter Brook, and it was brilliant), as long as you remember that that’s historically impossible, in play and author’s mind; it’s an interesting diversion, it’s a Hamlet, a valid Hamlet, but it can’t possibly be the Hamlet. And I’m comfortable with saying this because, barring Derek Jacobi’s, Peter Brook’s Hamlet (dunno if it’s been filmed), with all I say about not being a “proper” Hamlet, is one of the very best I’ve ever seen.
(EDIT - it HAS been filmed. Here it is in English, though; I saw it on stage in french. Same actor, I think. youtube.com/watch?v=skNMOIvMSfQ. Peter Brook was very intelligent, it’s not “Hamlet” but “The Tragedy of Hamlet”. Meaning, it’s the STORY of Hamlet, not necessarily “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” as it was originally written and imagined. This opens a lot of doors. Well done, that man)
(to be fair, this has made me insensible to some things which the author DID mean to imply, but did so too subtly for me to pick up on. For many years I thought the “gay undercurrents” of GK2 were a preposterous claim, I saw only a male bonding that need not necessarily be homosexual. I stuck to that until I saw JJ herself say it was intentional, and then I felt a right fool)
I digress; if you don’t describe diversity, it isn’t there, and your world is populated by defaults. If that’s not what you want, you actually have to indicate so.
An aside - sometimes I look around me and I see so many foreigners, or so many Portuguese black people, I get the overpowering feeling I’m in another country, or that I’m an interloper, a stranger in my own land. I have that feeling because Portuguese people are generally white - or were, until the aftermath of the Colonial Wars. A lot of black people in Portugal nowadays are 100% Portuguese (European, if you prefer), but the previous generation carries a lot of their culture with them, visibly. I feel like I’m in Angola or Mozambique sometimes. This is not bad, simply something that does happen, because though I might not be race-conscious, I’m not blind either, and I can recognise a different culture when it’s all around me. In the other possible case, the non-Portuguese European people, I just get the feeling I’m severely dislocated. In the middle of a German group of tourists, for instance, I feel positively barbaric, like I was a little savage being visited by the Royal family.
What I mean to say is: race and ethnicity do matter, they carry a hell of a lot of weight, because we’re not blind and we’re not completely dissociated from human history and cultural baggae. We shouldn’t try to hide that away, surely - it’s not negative in itself.
Oddly enough, or not, going back to the original discussion of gender equality, I don’t feel anywhere like this in the middle of a group of women. Gender leaves me completely unphased.
I should take my own advice from a few posts back, “if I’m so full of great ideas why I don’t write agame myself?”.