Good stories treat the experiences of their characters seriously, and for minority characters, that more often than not includes treating their experience *as* someone of a minority seriously. Perhaps that isn’t the same thing as tokenism, but I think it’s just as much a flaw as tokenism is. And of course I’m not only restricting discourse to black characters, if I implied that, it was mistaken.
Not all stories need to ‘treat the experience of black characters seriously’. That’s like saying a character can only be black if the story calls for it. A non-white characters story doesn’t have to revolve around their race. And it’s not just black characters. You don’t write Asian, latino, Middle Eastern either. There is no reason you couldn’t write a story about an office worker or a cop and have them be another race.
Published
Bracken's Corner 