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

[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!