I am a writer. I mean that more in the life-calling sense, rather than the vocational sense. I wrote my first coherent story in the 2nd grade--a memory I vividly remember because of how my teacher responded. It was about a child who was stuck in a toy store and spent the night there alone. Everyone in my class had been assigned to write something on this prompt; but I had weaved a narrative with detail and depth that had apparently surpassed what was expected of a second-grader. My teacher was so shocked by the story I wrote that she went on to inform everyone from my mother to the principal. She even got me featured as a highlight in the school newsletter for it. It was honestly life-changing; before then, I remember feeling like the odd one out, even as early as kindergarten, because I didn’t feel like I had any talents. But from that incident onward, I finally found my gift.

However, about two years ago, another truly startling realization came to me:

That the characters in my fiction pieces were, and have always been, almost exclusively white.

This was a very unpleasant pill to swallow. Not only as a black woman, but as a person who gripes about underrepresentation and the need of diversity in TV, film, books and other mainstreamed art depictions. And yet, I--someone whose own stories and perspectives would help to dismantle that underrepresentation--had actually become just as complicit in that plight of black faces, voices and narratives that I so bitterly despised.

I am not proud of this AT ALL. But I say this to show just how sneaky modern-day white supremacy and anti-blackness is (i.e. carried out by minimizing non-white voices and narratives in major media and art forms); and how, regardless of your race, it can invade the subconscious of each and every one of us. This means that while surely our white friends collectively have a lot of unpacking they need to do, I think many of us BIPOC folks (particularly those of us raised in Western white-centric contexts) will be dismayed to find that we may have a bit unlearning to do as well.

Once the realization set in, I couldn’t un-notice this. And I immediately knew that this was something I needed to fix. But before I could fix it, I needed to know how I arrived at this place.

I took some time to think about the influences upon my writing throughout my life. Because just as much as stories and narrative flow out of me, do they flow into me as well. And it didn’t take long for me to identify the first and primary place that I received my writing inspirations. It wasn’t from my family or living circumstances or anything like that--it was from BOOKS.

I can’t decipher if it was my love of writing that spurred my passion for books, or vice versa, but I love reading. My second grade teacher--the same one that discovered my writing talent--discovered my book addiction early on as well. “Why is your backpack so heavy??” she commented one afternoon as she was escorting me and my fellow car-riders to the front of the school to be retrieved by our parents. She observed with perplexity how heavy my bookbag was while I lugged it, and the ‘thud’ that it made when it landed on the concrete sidewalk. “It’s not like I assign you homework…” More concerned than anything, she decided to investigate for herself. She certainly wasn’t prepared for what she found. There were of course the one or two folders that all of her students used to organize our worksheets, as well as a few childrens’ books from the library. But she wasn’t prepared to encounter the single item that accounted for about 90% of my bag’s weight--an encyclopedia. I had received that children’s encyclopedia the previous Christmas; it was filled with all kinds of facts about insects and dinosaurs and space, balanced out with vibrant photos and drawings depicting these marvels. I was so fascinated by it, I liked to bring it to school to read through during free time.

Yup. My love affair with books was so deep then, that young Etinosa didn’t discriminate between reading children’s fiction stories and encyclopedia facts.

So at any given spare moment, I was either pouring out of my imagination with a pencil, or pouring into it with a new book. Present-day me considered the fiction titles that I remember indulging in: Nate the Great. Cam Jansen. Magic Tree House. Encyclopedia Brown. Harry Potter. Number the Stars. Tom Sawyer...

Notice something?

These books that I avidly poured into my imagination with during my formative years--you guessed it--portray almost exclusively all-white protagonists.

Well FUCK, I thought. It’s no surprise that I, a black woman, found myself always writing my characters as white: because all my life that’s what I’ve been shown to do. It’s what we’ve all been shown to do. Books with white characters were the norm. Of course, words like ‘white’ or ‘caucasian’ rarely came up on pages; but descriptions of “porcelain skin”, “flushed-red cheeks”, and “flowy hair” made it clear what kind of characters were most often being portrayed in literature. On the other hand, reading a book featuring a black protagonist was more often meant as a lesson, to be read for information rather than leisure (ones that stick out in my head include ‘Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry’ and ‘Things Fall Apart’). Looking back, I recall reading almost no books that painted portraits of characters resembling me doing the light-hearted things that kids want to read about--no embarking on magical adventures, no playing practical jokes on neighbors, and certainly no overpowering villains and emerging as the savior of the story.

It was a little overwhelming to realize just how deep this went for me--for all of us. And honestly, it was a bit dismaying to see how blinded I had been all these years...and how, in a way, I perpetuated the silencing of my own voice in the one medium where I thought I truly had one.

So now, I identified the cause. But all of this was just step one. Next, it was time to do the work to start fixing this issue.

See the distinct steps I took to decolonize my writing in my next post.

In the meantime, I want to know about your thoughts and experiences. Think about the books you consumed growing up, especially the children’s books--did the representation of character descriptions match what you would see if you looked out into the world, or was it heavily skewed, or almost assumed to go one way? How often did you encounter light-hearted positive representations of non-white identities in literature? And if you are also a fiction writer, what has been your honest experience in terms of diversity (or lack of it) across the characters that you bring to life in your works?

Thanks for reading.