My post and snippet from yesterday evoked a very thoughtful comment about how easily the concept of the character being an African and brought to Victorian England as a child when his village is decimated could go “very badly wrong very easily.” The commenter also pointed that, “If you’re trying to evoke the casual racism of that era, I’m hip deep in it from just what you’ve posted.”
This is my reply and thoughts on the matter, slightly expanded:
Yes, I realize just how quickly this could go oh so wrong. I am trying to evoke the casual racism of the period in this opening, and I realize I may well be stepping into a minefield, but…
One of my chief complaints with Steampunk as literature, fashion, and fandom cos-play/role-play is that we do shy away from examining racism, classism, sexism, and the rest of the dark and seedy side of empire and colonialism. The story I’m writing— while at its heart a mystery— will also examine some of those various –isms I just described. They need to be acknowledged and have light shone on them. It would be easier to pretend they don’t exist in this fictional world I’m writing in, but I think that would be worse than trying (even if I fail) to look at the reality of the period and incorporate it in a manner I hope is reasonable and sensitive.
That said, I know I’m walking on dangerous ground, and by walking on that dangerous ground I have to be prepared to face the fact that I might, even with the best of intentions, screw up. And if that happens, then I have to accept the criticism I will come in for, try to understand where I went wrong, learn from that, and do better in the future. The sort of comment the blog reader posted is just the exact reality check I need to make sure I am approaching this subject matter in a way that is both respectful and unblinking.
No matter how you write this, you’re going to upset people. They’re going to get upset because you got it wrong, or because you got it right and this offends their opinion of how the past, or because you got it right but didn’t take it too far.
Forget ’em all. As long as you’re not _glorifying_ it, you’re bringing attention to an aspect of reality, of history, that we should remember.
Some authors do draw attention to it. In “The Parasol Protectorate,” characters are casually bigoted against other Caucasians. Carriger, I think, does a good job of showing how foolish the bigotry is. But she also glosses over it quickly. This is not a main aspect of the story. It turns up once or twice in a book.
I think it’s great that someone is looking at giving the topic a more direct treatment.
We had a discussion about this in a writer’s holiday session. One person in the group was writing a novel set a few decades ago and featured racial issues very heavily. She was concerned that she would be accused of racism if her book described characters using terms that would have been common at the time but which are seen as offensive now. We didn’t reach a real conclusion but I think Sam is right that someone’s going to get offended no matter what – either it’s too harsh or it’s not accurate enough. You can walk a middle ground to some extent but those issues were (and are) real and you’re not going to please anyone by ignoring them.