When you read most mainstream books published in the West, there is something called the “assumption of whiteness.” Basically, unless an author explicitly tells you otherwise, you can safely assume that said character is white. Skin color will only get mentioned when the character is not white (or sometimes, if we’re describing a love interest in a romantasy as having golden skin to refer to being tanned).
The assumption of whiteness is basically a default in mainstream books in the West in which characters are presumed white unless clearly specified as something else. This is sometimes called the “unmarked default,” which is to say that whiteness gets treated as a default that need not even be named, because it’s neutral.
Whiteness in American fiction, just as whiteness in American culture, is treated as a neutral. Other identities have to be identified and marked, in contrast. And yes, this is a function of white privilege.
(Similarly: Asian American. Black American. African American. South Asian American. …vs white people who are just… American).
This norm has a measurable impact on readers (especially young readers!). Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita at Ohio State University (also called the mother of multicultural children’s literature) says:
Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.
Rudine Sims Bishop
A book in which someone sees themselves reflected back is a mirror. Books where you can look through a window is a book where you look into someone else’s world. (And sliding glass doors let you see, imagine, slip through the door and enter some other world).
What you don’t want, especially for kids, is for every single book to be a window, and to feel like you never see yourself reflected back.
The problem is multipronged, but one of the big problems is of course, the publishing industry itself, which tends to center books primarily about white stories, and which are predominantly written by white authors. The assumption of whiteness we experience with books is a downstream effect of who acquires books, who writes the books, and who is pushed by the industry to be a new star.
(And to be clear, big publishers are not the end-all be-all in the world of book distribution. Here are some words on author-owned writing, and here are some more, and here is my own story of getting my publishing rights back for Brown Voices).
There’s more to it than this, obviously, but that’s one piece of the puzzle.
In my work, the default is flipped. You should read my fiction with an assumption of Brownness instead. Some of that’s because I’m Brown, and that’s the default in my head.
And some of it is because the world of Jaraan, which is the setting for my novel The River’s Daughter and The River Goddess is just built around a Brown cast of characters. It’s the default in my book in the same way that whiteness is the default in 99% of what’s in bookstores.
— Punita
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