There are More than Enough White Men

“Unless it makes better sense, or is required, for the sake of a story for a character to be male, then they’re not. There are enough stories about men.”

That was the thought as it first occurred to me, and was spoken aloud shortly afterward to my sister, and it is a belief and practice which I have since held to in my work.

I’m a writer. Some of my writing, like this, is nonfiction. I think it’s healthy for any writer, whatever their primary skill and focus, to write in a variety of mediums and genres. The majority of my writing is fiction. Novels, short stories, scripts: I make shit up. For all of us who write fiction, who make shit up, who might draw from reality, or have some basis therein, for their work, but for whom most of the content is invented, it is worth examining why we make the choices we do. In writing fiction, everything is a choice. Every detail is included at the discretion of the writer, and there is a level of intentionality in every choice.

That being the case, why are the majority of protagonists, characters in general, in fiction male?

For that matter, why are the majority of characters in fiction white men?

While race is a secondary concern in this topic, it is worthy of acknowledgement.

These are the thoughts that led me to the realization I reached and the decision I made, to first, whenever doing so didn’t somehow hurt or not fit into a story, write characters as female, and second, to write them as non-white.

This is not a revolutionary concept, nor is it difficult to do. You don’t have to be a woman to write a woman character, and you don’t have to be of a particular ethnic background to write a character that is. This is the case for the majority of stories, the bulk of fiction has characters who, to an extent, need not be a specific gender or race.

If a character’s gender and/or race is a focal point of the story, that is a very different matter. Not every story is for any writer to tell. If a white male writer feels a yearning to write the story of a black girl in the antebellum south, they’d best do a great deal of research, be very careful, or accept that they’re not the best person to tell that particular story and just not do it.

But in all stories in which a character’s race and gender are not pivotal, fuck it, the writer’s gender and race shouldn’t determine that of their characters.

I wrote a novel, the first in a contained series, The Last Queen of Hell: Gwen goes to Hell, about a character who embarks on an Orpheus-esque quest to rescue their dead lover from hell. That character could have been a man. We’ve seen iterations of that story in which the protagonist is a man, starting with Orpheus. Any reason that they should be a man and not a woman? No. So I wrote the character as a woman, Gwen. Rarely was I in the habit already of specifying a character’s race or ethnicity, so it didn’t necessarily occur to me to make my character a white woman or otherwise, but when I did think of it, how I thought of Gwen and described her in my book, there was nothing very “white” about her, so I decided she wasn’t. I did not assign her a specific race or ethnicity by name, rather I described her physical features, and so leave it to the reader to form their own picture of her and decide “what she is,” if they care.

Similarly, I recently wrote a screenplay about a pair of roommates, one of whom takes a job for an agency that takes on questionable and extralegal remote tech work, starting with outsourcing of employment decisions and graduating to extrajudicial killings, contracted by corporations and government organizations. A high concept buddy-comedy. Could my protagonists have been men? Of course. Could they have been women? Of course. So I went with the latter. In that particular script, only one character is specified a male. All other characters are either female or unspecified, to be casted as whosoever sees fit, with whoever best fits the role.

There are those who will take this all to be woke posturing or value signaling. That’s not my intention, but I can see it giving that impression. I don’t have the following for either accusation to matter, and frankly I don’t care. What it comes down to, more than anything, is that the status quo lacks variety. There are more than enough white guys. Too many. It’s boring. Doing things differently makes them more interesting.

There is a contingent of people, white males, who will rail against concepts like this. So threatened are they at the idea of being “replaced” that they oppose any inclusion of non-male non-white characters. This is not a contingent for which I have any respect, one which I happily revile. Fuck them. Their misogynist and racist mindset blinds them to the facts that it would take a far broader-reaching movement to even match white male representation with that of any other demographic, and that the inclusion of different and diverse characters does no harm to anyone.

But maybe it can help.

Inclusion is important. Representation is important.

If you’re a white male, you have a plethora of iconic white male characters to idolize, emulate, or be entertained by. That is not the case for other demographics.

Beyond that, homogeneity is boring. Having so many characters cut from nearly identical molds makes for blander stories. Variety , diversity, difference, these are qualities that can make anything more interesting, and which should, if for no other reason than that, be embraced.