adiva_calandia

It's easy to identify prejudices in another's work, though -- that's why we have editors, because it's too hard to find our own problems in our own work. Which is why, I think, the representation problems in Milliways go largely unnoticed. It's our work. Last night, Coalhouse Walker from Ragtime entered and summed it up: You travel beyond the reach of the sun, to whatever world lies beyond, and it's full of white people.

I'm as guilty of it as everyone else. I was thinking this morning as I walked back from getting coffee, composing this in my head, Why didn't I cast Epimetheus as Greek? Well, because I'm playing off Prometheus' PB, who's white, and whose music partner is white. So why is Prometheus white?

For that matter, why are all of the mythical, seperate-from-general reality characters in Milliways white? The only exceptions I can come up with off the top of my head are Coyote and, on occasion, Raven (

varadia talked about that a lot). Why are these pups that are half personal canon white? Why did I assume Tom would be white? Why are none of my pups in The Wasteland non-white?

I don't feel that I can use the excuse that I'm white, and that I therefore can't write a non-white perspective. I'm female and I write guys fine. I'm straight and I write lesbian okay. I'm young and I write middle-aged or immortal okay.

And to be fair to myself, I play two non-white characters: Carmela Rodriguez and Nirupam Singh. But I still come back to that question -- why are the characters I create white?

Not like I'm going to change my PB selection on Epimetheus and Tom and Russ and Journey all of a sudden, but it's worth keeping in mind when I write.