Dammit, I can’t do it. I tried to make my hero an overt racist, but the words came out wrong. I am not convincing. I have had to rewrite most of my chapter.
I’m not proud of myself. Far from it. I’m actually kind of pissed off. I want to believe that I can portray characters of different moral values. Stories need villains, and if everyone is making nicey nicey, readers yawn. I want a believable type-1 racist and I can’t seem to find one inside me. Not yet, anyway.
So I’ll work with what I know. As a white middle-class guy, with a few black and brown acquaintances but no close friends of colour, I’m sure I possess all kinds of race-based assumptions of which I am oblivious. My hero will be a version of me, only (I hope) more obvious, more unattractive. It’s like I will be tweeting a picture of myself picking my nose.
Not flattering (even when the Buddha does it), but believable.