I have always enjoyed writing fictional characters who are very different from me in age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and culture. It is a challenge that thrills me. I have written many Latinx characters and though I speak Spanish, I am very much a product of the North American Midwest. I have written Black characters though my genealogy tells me I am 99.7% of Northern European background. I write lots of heterosexual characters though all indications are that I am homosexual. I have written a transitioning FTM character though I identify as cisgender. I have heard other writers express that they would never presume to write a character of a different race/ethnicity. A former editor gave a novel I wrote with lots of Black characters to a Black sensitivity reader without telling my background. Apparently, I passed and she wanted to proceed with the book. I don't plan to stop writing diverse characters, but I always keep asking myself if I am being authentic.
My latest project is to write a Young Adult novel with the protagonist being a fourteen-year-old of mixed race. Here's a little sample: "Josh said we should go over to Target to check out the latest video games like Jedi: Fallen Order or Outer Wilds. We found the cabinets where they keep the games and Josh’s eyes got as big and shiny as the game discs we so treasured. He whispered that they forgot to lock the cabinet. We looked around and saw the salesperson had a line of people at the register, but a security guard had his eye on us.
Josh put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Cole, why don’t you take a walk a few aisles over to the…whatever…hardware section?”
“Why?”
He nodded his head slightly toward the guard. “To get him off our asses.”
“Why me?”
Josh tilted his head down and looked out of the corner of his eyes. “Dude.”
With one word and a sly look he communicated everything. Josh was white, blond, blue-eyed, the whole nine yards. Though Fer was Mexican, he wasn’t so obvious, and I don’t mean to sound racist. He was taller than most of the Mexican kids at school and had lighter skin because one of his grandparents was from Galicia, Spain. But me, I was Black. Half-Black to be precise. I had the kinky hair, medium dark skin, and facial features of the surrogate mom who had me for my dads.
Josh’s plan worked like a charm. I walked toward the sports section and picked up a basketball. The guard stood at the end of the aisle and none too subtly watched me. I went to the automotive section and started looking at the cell phone holders. Yeah, like I had my own car at fourteen. There he was down the aisle. I glanced at him, and he picked up a bottle of car wash, examining the label. Getting back to what made that day different, that day strange, was the racism. Sure, there had been other examples in my years on this planet, people making racist comments either deliberately or out of ignorance. But what happened in the Target store hit me up the side of my head and said, “Hey, man, you’re Black and this is your life.” I had this tingling feeling going up and down my spine and my face felt hot. There were three of us in a public situation, but I was the one they followed, and Josh recognized it as a given. “Fuck it,” I mumbled and walked a couple of aisles down, drawing the security guard further away from my friends like my skin was a magnet."