I seem to be spawning a novella. Woot!

[alexseanchai]

Problem being, the connecting point for most of the cast is Irish heritage, specifically music. Ireland being and Irish-Americans generally being white as Easter lilies, this could easily result in an all-white cast. In fact I suspect that if I do not have an all-white cast, at least among the characters claiming Irish heritage, readers will side-eye me hard and abandon me for implausibility.

I do not want an all-white cast.

I cannot make my lead a person of color, I think, because the metaplot is her realizing her privilege and trying to do something about that (core of the story is Child 200, and it just plain don't work if she doesn't start the story well-off), and also I dunno how 'be a proper young lady' instructions to a little girl play out when the little girl is of color. Which means her parents are white too, and that's three of my ten named characters, and five of the remaining seven are in this Irish music group and the sixth is a sibling to one of those five. Number seven is not Irish even a little bit, but, well, if anyone's a villain of this piece, it's him. If he's the token PoC, that would be bad.

I'm thinking about making two or three of the characters PoC anyway. Maybe the siblings and number seven, though I'm not sure yet. Does that sound like a good solution, or do you have other thoughts?

(The cast also looks very heterosexual and cisgender. I think I'm going to have to suck up the cisgender, but maybe the love story can be queer het instead of straight het.)

Comments

[gorgeousnerd]

Irish/Irish descent doesn't always equal white. The movie Breakfast on Pluto was based in Ireland, for example, and one of secondary characters was black. There's even a Wikipedia article with some percentages on black citizens.

And then there's the point that, if this takes place in the US, Irish heritage is unlikely to be the only branch of a person's lineage. My mom's mom was born in Ireland, but my mom's dad's family is Portuguese, and my dad's family is British and Scottish (with a little Irish mixed in). Still very white, yes, but my primary Irish heritage is only two generations back, and there's still three other geographic locations in there.

If anyone abandons you because of implausibility, it's ignorance on their part and not any lack of accuracy.

[alexseanchai]

Ninety-five, ninety-six percent white? Pretty damn white. Not 100%, true, and triply true in the US where mixy mixy, but the correlation is still pretty strong.

I'll take your word on the last paragraph, though.

[gorgeousnerd]

Sure, but just going by the population of Ireland on Wikipedia, that's still over 300,000 people (if my quick math's right). That's nearly six times the population of the US town I live in and ~75,000 more people than the largish city I'm near. And there's likely more people in the US of Irish descent than there are people in Ireland.

And even if none of this were the case, your story's fiction. There are very good reasons to tell stories with characters of color, and there are likely things that you'll completely make up for artistic license.

[alexseanchai]

*nodnod*

[malkingrey]

There's also the fact that "Irish music group" doesn't necessarily map 100% onto "music group composed of persons of Irish descent." Irish folk music is something like the lingua franca of the folk music world -- just about every country with a folk music scene has got some local people doing it. Right this moment there's probably some group out there doing, say, Irish-Caribbean fusion with pennywhistles and steel drums.

[alexseanchai]

...Irish-Caribbean sounds like a lot of fun actually.

I did not know that about Irish music, and it helps a great deal to know. Thank you!

[melannen]

Yeah, it would pretty rare for an American to have an ancestor from Ireland who wasn't white (most, though not all, of Ireland's current non-white population came to Ireland after most of the immigration to the US was over) but it is not all that rare for an American of Irish heritage to also have heritage of color. Or for a person of any race with no Irish heritage to play Irish (or celtic fusion) folk music - folk music subculture in the US does not tend to worry too much about people's genetic heritage if they want to play; and Irish and other cultures have been mixing for a long time in the US.

Also if you want to go for the obscure US racial history points, parts of the US have a history of brown-skinned mixed-race and/or Native American people calling themselves Black Irish in order to get legally classified as white; some communities and families with that tradition have only recently learned their founders were mixed-race rather than Irish as a result of DNA studies.

[alexseanchai]

*nodnod* Thanks!

[malkingrey]

And then there's the Afro-Celt Sound System (a real group; the link is to their page on their record label's site.)

[alexseanchai]

Shiny!

[julian_griffith]

This. My ex-husband and I are not even a little bit Irish (although, as Ashkenazic Jewish, we look pretty damn white) but we started going to pub sessions because MUSIC AND FREE BEER and pennywhistle's not hard to play for someone (me) who studied recorder and flute, and these days he plays bodhran and sings in an Irish band. (He got the sessions in the divorce. I got the goth clubs.) And Gaelic Storm at one point had a fiddle player of Indian descent -- I think his last name was Banerjee.

Another possibility

[pauamma]

If the setting is in the southern US pre-civil rights, you could give your main character Irish and Eastern US Native American ancestors, and make some of them adopted freed/fugitive slaves. Then you could make the chatacter pass as white, and someone out them.

Re: Another possibility

[alexseanchai]

Present-day.

I think the love interest will call himself Black Irish in honor of that reason, since he's black-white multiracial and somewhere in his ancestry there's people who called themselves Black Irish for that reason. History is fascinating.

[myaibou]

Sounds like you have some good solutions, but I want to mention that I really dislike the idea of filling a cast out by quota. It *feels* like it was done to fill it out by token if it's not integral to the story you're telling. If you're telling a story of an all-white subgroup, that's okay. It doesn't mean the story is racist. If you're telling a story set in a very mixed-ethnicity area, like say a typical NYC public school, and you don't have anyone but whites in your cast, okay, that could be a problem. But if your story calls for all whites, or all males, it's okay.

[alexseanchai]

To my way of thinking, if people of color are only present in a story when the story calls for them, then there's gonna be an awful lot of white characters and not many of color without anybody being consciously racist about it, and it's one more symptom of people of color being Them, not part of Us. Therefore my original stories always call for characters of color unless there's a real good reason for them not to. I'm sure I'll fuck this up, and you're right that tokenism and quotas are a way to fuck this up. But at least I will fuck up in a way that's out of step with the usual way to fuck up about race in stories, you know?

Similarly, without a real good reason not to, all my stories will have a cast that's at least half female. I want all my stories to have good representation of gender and sexual minorities and people with disabilities, too, and the reason I am not standing firm on those points the way I am on female characters and characters of color (whatever that reason is, 'cause I'm not sure I know) probably reflects poorly on me.

[myaibou]

my original stories always call for characters of color unless there's a real good reason for them not to

That's a good way to start, although it's possible this story might be a good reason not to. If you're telling the story of someone coming to the realization that they have lived a life of privilege (class and/or race) then it makes sense that when the story begins, they are surrounded pretty much by only their class and/or race. Not knowing the story, I'm not sure how your protagonists comes to realize that their privilege is mere circumstance, but often that happens through meeting people who have NOT had that privilege, and that's where your other race can come in. (Of course, I only know what your story is from the very brief details you gave in your post, so this might not be the story you're telling at all.)

I also am primarily a fic writer (haven't written original stuff in YEARS) so I guess my thinking comes from having cast and setting already determined for me, so I hadn't really thought of it from the perspective of starting with the goal of your setting/characters being diverse.

[alexseanchai]

When the story begins, sure. As it progresses? The characters who bring her around to the realization of her privilege are the characters in the Irish music group under discussion.

Oh god yes, on the fic writing. My fics--shit, that's right, AO3 changed the tags so only the top ten character tags I've used show. Anyway, my top nine character tags (I'm excluding 'Original Female Character') are all white folks. I've written people of color but not often.

[metonomia]

I don't know what time period you're working with, but assuming it's contemporary (and honestly even if not) - Irish and Irish-Americans can definitely be of color. Yeah, some readers will side-eye you, but as long as you feel up to taking that, while Ireland is largely white, there are plenty of POC there, too.

This sounds awesome, btw (Irish-American, here!) and I'll be looking out to see more about it!

[alexseanchai]

Present day, and gotcha. Thanks!

[pocochina]

Yeah, I don't know a lot of people of my generation who are 100% Irish-American, and I grew up in Philly where many if not most people have some Irish heritage. I don't think it would mess with credibility to have some of your cast be mixed race.

[alexseanchai]

:)