Describing POC's Skin...

I just read this hilarious thing (Or at least I found it hilarious...)

If White Characters Were Described Like People Of Color In Literature

It's making fun of the way people of color's skin is often described in books. It's very common to compare skin color to chocolate, coffee, latte, tea, cinnamon, caramel. This is generally reviled as fetishizing and objectifying.

Now, I have no intention of being fetishizing or objectifying and I want to portray all my characters as respectfully as possible. However, two things give me pause:

1. White people's skin is described this way and no one cares. ('Creamy,' 'peach', like that, or a blush as like some red food.) So, the thing, though funny, isn't completely accurate. Its no less objectifying, but no one frowns upon objectifying a white woman by comparing her to delicious food. (Of course, describing a white persons skin tone isn't considered a necessity, since in books it's White Until Proven Non-White. We're supposed to assume it.)

2. How DO I describe skin color in a way that's not offensive? My options are narrowed down rather quickly. I can't say 'tan' because readers will assume a tanned white person. Lots of skin color descriptions I've read in recently, trying to avoid this, are weird and make no sense. A book I read recently described a character as having 'golden' skin. Golden. I don't even know what that is supposed to mean. I also keep reading 'as dark as the night...' Skin tones THAT dark are not common, so it sounds as if the character was made to fit the description for lack of a better descriptor, not the other way around. Not to mention that reading that someone was 'as white as a cloud' (to flip it around) would be downright WEIRD.

For some reason 'copper' sounds racist, I'm not sure why. Same with bronze. Im sick of reading 'bronzed,' besides being overused I have no idea what color it's talking about.

Trying to think of brown things with positive connotations and honestly I'm realizing, what do I have to work with? Dirt, bark, dead leaves...poop?

Closely connected is my failure to find a useful way to describe brown eyes. I find brown eyes very beautiful, but all the ways I can think of to describe their color sound...not so beautiful.

So, maybe the reason that people of color are compared to food so much is that there simply aren't a lot of good comparisons with positive connotations. Not because authors are subconsciously objectifying and fetishizing them. Honestly these things that are so reviled accurately describe actual human skin tones, while things like 'golden'...do not.

All the same, I want to avoid it. Is it worth avoiding or am I just being paranoid?

 

That's true, but in a fantasy setting with no connection to earth, ethnicity isn't the same, cultures are different, so you can't use them as a reference.

I can say my one of black characters has bouncy, tightly curled dark hair, but...even a white person can have hair like that.

 

I'm also in a bind due to the fact that both my POV characters' love interests are people of color. I don't outright say that my MC's are white, but I picture them that way. (Weeeellllllll, one of them has blond/light hair, and they're brother and sister...) I just know people are going to be up in arms about that. Not completely sure why, but...

At any rate, them being love interests makes these particular characters especially hard to describe without sounding objectifying. It could be argued that love interests are inherently objectified.

In any case I'm not about to make them white.

 

I've read this post before. Frankly, most of the examples for comparisons are useless (in my opinion). Topaz, might work for brown eyes. I could see clay/terra cotta for skin. But the others? I haven't even heard of some of those flowers and minerals. No chance the reader has. And...driftwood? Cattails? Acorns? Seashells? What? Seashells can be all sorts of colors, for starters, I have a dark pink one with white markings, and also white ones and orange ones, so I have no idea how you would compare someone's skin to a seashell. Is wood even those colors until it's stained? Also, most of them apply mainly to pretty light-skinned people (hay, sand) like, light skinned as in white. This is essentially what I mean when I say we don't have any good comparisons.

The part at the beginning about basic colors and shades, though, is extremely helpful.

I also read the post about why food comparisons are offensive. Am I the only one who thinks that "chocolate/coffee comparisons are offensive because slave labor is used to harvest them and black people were (are) slaves" is a huge stretch? I mean, I'm white, so I don't know if my opinion matters on this count, but really, if I said a character's hair was as white as cotton would everyone freak out because slave labor was once used to harvest cotton?

I do understand why it's a good idea to avoid food-related comparisons, but... is anyone really bothered by them for that reason? It makes me wonder how much the author's opinions reflect the opinions of most other people...

 

I really wish this worked in my situation...

My world has gone through a society-ending catastrophe pretty much, and cultures have fallen apart, governments have been destroyed, and united under a totalitarian state except for a few outliers...

Basically, cultural context doesn't even exist because all the world's various peoples have been mixed together and their cultures basically abolished. It's a very diverse crowd anywhere you go. No one would have any ties to the land their ancestors lived in. It would all be gone.

 

Hmm, I suppose it's because I really like to describe my characters. I like to know what characters look like when I read books; I get frustrated when nothing is described because I can't see it clearly. And I have a very clear picture in my mind of what many of my characters look like, and I want to share at least some of it with the reader.

 

I would use descriptors like forest loam or freshly tilled earth or riverbank clay, because those are positive associations for me as a nature lover...but would those be positive associations for others? Am I overthinking this?

And the majority of characters won't be described in terms of skin color, but some characters are just going to be around for a long time and are really important to the story, so I want to describe them well. Honestly, if I don't say otherwise readers are going to assume them to be white, and I don't want that, because I don't picture them that way.

In my world, being white isn't that common. It's a tropical climate so it's not very useful. The majority of people have skin that is some shade of brown. In fact, later in the story the characters come across a village led by a young woman with red hair and they're fascinated by it because they've never seen that color hair before. Everyone's hair, practically, is brown or black.

I don't see the purpose in describing my POV characters, since they narrate in the first person and why would they describe themselves...?