Writing colorblind

I'm piggy-backing on a very interesting conversation that's been happening on Scalzi's blog here, as it got me thinking about my own writing. "Writing colorblind" means the writer does not give any racial identifiers to any of their characters; it's up to the reader to fill them in themselves. The argument against this is that for nearly all readers, the default is all-white. Which leads to the debate: who's the racist, the writer or the reader?

Yeah, I don't write colorblind at all. Quite the opposite. There are a couple of reasons for that. I have very clear ideas in my head what all my characters look like, for one. In order to write characters with no tip-offs as to their race, you'd have to leave out any mention of their appearance, wouldn't you? I couldn't do it.

But mostly it's because the culture my characters come from is so integral to who they are I couldn't possibly leave it out or try to be oblique and let the reader guess what background I'm referring to.

I think this is one of the ways that fantasy is different from science fiction. To have people in separate cultural groups in a fantasy novel is the default setting. But science fiction looks to the future, and the majority opinion seems to be that in the future we'll all be mixed. No one will be Asian, European, or African anymore; we'll all be sort of tan and not really have any cultural identifiers at all. We'll all eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and of course no one observes any religion.

I find that vision of the future really dull, frankly. Give me Tobias Buckell's Caribbeans, or Ian McDonald's India of the near future.

This is going to have to be a half-formed thought for now, as school beckons. I'll just close by saying one of the things I find really cool about YouTube is watching how other places around the world reflect American culture back at us. Take, for instance, hip-hop and in particular the "pimp walk". When you take it to Taiwan:



Or to India:



What you get back does not look to me like a melting together into one meta-culture. It's an exchange of ideas where what you get back is a thoroughly Chinese take on it, or a thoroughly Indian one. Cool.