Novel with a black man as main character (in 3rd person), written by a white male

I'm wondering what readers might think if they came across a novel by a white male writer that was about a biracial family (with a main character who is black). Would his fact affect whether or not you'd purchase the book? Would you be fine with it since the book is written is third person? Interested in people's opinions. Thanks in advance.

On the assumption you are referring to a book you have either written or want to write I have moved this to the Writer's Room.

Welcome to the forum.

As long as the characters are well written and authentic - what difference does the race / gender of the author make?

Faulkner did it with great success.

Women have written books from male POVs and men have written books from female POV's. Books have been written from animal POVs. As long as the story is well told and genuine there isn't a problem.

Chris Tusa said:

I'm wondering what readers might think if they came across a novel by a white male writer that was about a biracial family (with a main character who is black). Would his fact affect whether or not you'd purchase the book? Would you be fine with it since the book is written is third person? Interested in people's opinions. Thanks in advance.

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I take it you've written such a book?

James Patterson is White male and has written a Black main character (Alex Cross) to great success.

I published a historical novel, "and Remember that I Am a Man.", about three years ago. It's based on an 1843 narrative, "The Life of Moses Grandy" who was a slave in my area of the country. Since no one seemed to know about him, I wanted to write a book for middle grade students. None of my black friends in my school system wanted to co-author, so I went ahead on my own. It grew into two novels, one mid-grade and one for adults. I researched it thoroughly and have had many white readers tell me it gave them new insights on slavery and could now imagine why racial tensions persist in the black community. It also shows how slavery was not just a problem for the south, but was perpetuated by the attitudes of the entire world of the time, i.e., northern abolitionist churches who traded in cotton in the mill towns of the north, and European countries who abolished slavery but continued to enslave entire countries as colonies. Any slave who managed to escape to the north was not treated as an equal by the Yankees. There was a lot of hypocrisy going around.

Most people, black or white, had no problem with the novel and I sporadically give talks at museums and historical sites. It got great reviews, except for one reviewer with Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest, who knocked me out of the finals with a scathing review that I had no right to write about him. It didn't actually say it was because I was white, but it was obvious. And she didn't bother even commenting about the actual book or the writing, just my rights.

Don't worry about writing about a black person, but be sure you don't use any racial stereotypes or derogatory racial remarks. William Styron's novel about Nat Turner won a Pulitzer Prize, but was criticized by many as containing racial stereotypes.

Good luck with it.

JohnB

I for one, can testify that JohnB succeeded in his endeavor. I would read it before embarking on such task.

Use a pseudonym. Let the readers assume what they want about you.

If people only wrote from personal experience, there would be no fiction worth reading. The issue of including people of different colours and other characteristics is something many authors never consider. I applaud you for recognizing that there are many different people out there and being willing to include them. The default for most people in North America and Europe when a character is not described is that they are white, heterosexual and able bodied. Don't worry about offending anyone, the greatest offence is in not including any of us with greater amounts of pigment in our skin or other ways groups of people differ.

To me the easiest way for you to start doing this is to write your characters and story, and then make some of them different colours, ethnicities, orientations, abilities, etc. A black man born and raised in Chicago has more in common with a white man from the same place than he does with a black man born and raised in Kenya. A man and a woman who are deaf have something prominent in common, but in other ways they can be vastly different.

Don’t be afraid of descriptions. The colour, type, size and age of a car is routinely mentioned; why not the same for people? You can have a light blue, four door, and five year old door sedan driving down a busy street. You can have a dark brown, thin, 45 year old New Yorker going down the sidewalk in his wheelchair. There is nothing offensive with stating a person’s appearance.

The characteristics don’t have to impact the story. E.g. Police Detective Henry Grange kisses his husband goodbye as he leaves to investigate a triple homicide- The fact that Detective Henry is homosexual may never come into play in the story. So why put it in? So someone who is homosexual can see something of themselves as a strong character and someone who is not homosexual to see that they can do the things heterosexual people do. The same goes for colour, gender and other characteristics.

In the book The Shawshank Redemption the character of Ellis Redding (Red) is white, in the movie he is played by black actor Morgan Freeman. Did it matter what colour he was in terms of how he behaved, no. It mattered in that he was included. People, especially youth, want and need to see themselves represented. If you want to contain cultural references for those characters then do a little research, talk to people and find some that are realistic for your characters to have or do. The same goes for any issues you want to have in your story.

My feeling is if a person wants diverse people to read their book, it would help to have diverse characters in their book. The harder task is incorporating the description into the story in a way that feels natural. Good luck with your writing.