Of course, you can dissociate the author from the work as much as you want, I’m sure these people writing books denying that the holocaust ever happened might as well be open minded progressives too, but somehow I don’t think that’s the case. That being said I think that Darius’ transformation was really hot, and I wish that your stories included black people in some scenarios that did not revolve solely around racial abuse.

Well, one example is hardly a signal of a trend, but I have tried to do that in the past: http://wesleybracken.tumblr.com/post/75937293788/when-had-you-noticed-him-there-where-had-you-first

But you’re right, overall. Still, to tweak your analogy to be a bit more on point, the inclusion of a holocaust denier character in an short excerpt from a book doesn’t necessarily mean the author denies the holocaust, especially if the rest of that book goes on to subvert that character’s belief system. That would be more analogous to what’s going on here, which is where the story was intended to go (i.e. using those characters’ fight against their racial caricature TF personas and assert themselves as well rounded whole individuals beyond those roles would be central to the plot and development of the story). It was never finished, of course, so who knows if it would have worked out that way.

I generally shy away from race entirely in these stories, which results in white washing, which is also a form of racism. I shy away from race because the easy alternative is “tokenism” (i.e. coloring a character even though that color has no bearing on their story; the character who just happens to be black/Asian/Native American etc.) which I find disingenuous, and just as bad as racial stereotype TF’s. But, to avoid that tokenism requires a depth of treatment of POC experiences which I don’t have easy access to. I wrote this section of “Hick Frat” several years ago at this point, and this scene was one of those pieces of writing which I still wrestle with, and is one of very few scenes I have written with non-white characters. Whitewashing isn’t a solution of course, but as I sort through my own writing and this genre and try to find a place for race which isn’t insulting/traumatic/damaging that’s the choice I’d rather make.