To Suck or Not To Suck? [Writing Tips]

|30| Where Are The POC?

Requested by: Its___Mia

Thanks for requesting!

And I'm so sorry for the wait.

Maybe you're wondering what is POC.

Well, it stands for "person of color" or "people of color". When writing for a story of any kind, you create characters. Those characters soon start to hold a special place in your heart and you get attached to them. They're your babies. You may have noticed that those characters tend to come a certain way. There are lots of blondes, for one, but that's not the only thing I notice.

They're all usually white. Let me start by saying that sometimes this is done unintentionally (I've even made this mistake before). It's because we live in a world where society has long since brainwashed us into having a certain type of character in movies/tv shows and books. The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight, and pretty much every One Direction, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, and The Walking Dead fanfic.

There are so many professionally published stories alone that have portrayed their leads as American and white. I mean, how many YA books have you read that have a black or Mexican woman/man? What about Asian? Yeah, not many. Thankfully, now we're at a time where more authors have started writing with POC leads (See: Adam Silvera, Angie Thomas, Nicola Yoon), but it should have been that way before.

Here's where this fact doesn't sit well with me, because as a black person, I usually only see black people firmly put in one type of genre: Urban. In those stories the baby daddy is probably drug dealing or in jail, while the baby mama is either entirely too ghetto or horribly submissive. And I ask myself, "Why can't we be portrayed normally?" Why do we have to be hauled off to jail in stories, or talk with this awful grammar. I understand that people write these stories to give others something to identify with, and I'm not discrediting them as bad writing, but not everyone identifies with it. Myself included - someone who graduated 5th in my senior class, was Quiz Bowl Captain + National Honor Society President.

I don't hang out in the "streets", smack my gum loudly, or always have a lollipop hanging out of my mouth while twirling my weave (which I don't wear, but a lot of people seem to think black people do). Hello! Those are stereotypes and they're offensive!

Right now I'm going to make a reference to one of my favorite movies: ATL. ATL is a movie starring T.I. and Lauren London, and other amazing actors that takes place in Atlanta, Georgia. A lot of people see Atlanta as ghetto, and this movie takes up that trope a bit. This is Lauren's character in the movie, nicknamed New New:

She looks like everything I described earlier, right? Well, that's because she is. To an extent. More on that shortly. These are her two friends/sidekicks, Veda and Star.