thegoddamazon:

spicyobsession:

When I started writing fanfiction and eventually original fiction, I never wrote a POC as the main character. In fact, I never wrote in an Asian character at all. In fact, my literary imagination was littered with white people and their white problems, living in their white neighborhoods, going to their white schools—white white white everything. Do you know why?

Because I didn’t want people (specifically, my friends and my teachers who did read my work) to think that I made an author self-insert. Yes, that’s exactly what they would have assumed had I made my main character of whatever story an Asian girl. No matter how badly I wanted to write from my point of view, I always stopped myself from giving POC a voice. I was too afraid of what other white people would think.

More importantly, I was fed on a diet of white people stories since birth. Movies, books, TV shows, video games, magazines—their trials and tribulations always mattered. Theirs were the universal human experience that anyone from anywhere in the world could connect to. Black people? Latino people? Asian people? They’re niche groups. That’s why they have their own separate shelves at the bookstores: they’re not part of the global, literary narrative. They’re outside. They’re different. They’re not like the white people stories. 

I grew up believing that my life experiences were not worth listening to, were not part of literary canon, were not mine to share. And now that I know better, that white kool-aid simply won’t do for me anymore. 

Excuse me while I finally go make an Asian Shepard in Mass Effect for the first time in my life. Because it’s fucking time I represented myself.

Basically.

I didn’t start writing stories with people of color as the main characters, or even people of color really, until I was about 16/17.  That’s a damn shame.