On Writing a White Character from a Place of White Privilege

Often, when white writers like me consider how we write about race, we discuss how we write about racialized people. We seldom (with some exceptions) discuss how we think and write about the experience we know most about: that of being white.

This is not about the ludicrous idea that white people’s experiences and perspectives are being ignored (they’re definitely not) or that white people are inherently special (we aren’t).

Instead, it’s about a key fact: exploring the experience of whiteness as racially specific rather than the default is an important step in understanding and fighting racism.

As a white person in Canada, I often experience white discourse about racial diversity with the implicit assumption that it’s about embracing the “special” experiences of people of colour alongside the “ordinary” experiences of white people. There’s the baseline of humanity–our privileged, historically contingent experience–and then new things other people add to it.

In the same way that able cisgender men’s bodies were/are (and are… and are) considered “normal people bodies” and the bodies of other genders considered in terms of their differences to “normal bodies,” not as bodies in their own right, we consider our white experience so normal that anyone who doesn’t live it has their life described in terms of its differences to the white standard.

This is, of course, an ignorant view. It shouldn’t need to be said, but there is no neutral human experience; nobody’s life is the baseline of humanity, to which the experiences of others can be added or subtracted.

But examining our whiteness and seeing our experiences as part of the culture of our race isn’t something many of us white people are taught. It’s necessary, if we’re to understand and help dismantle the enormously slanted playing field we’ve built and continue to maintain: it’s the difference between someone who complains about “Black History Month” and someone who understands that what mainstream thought calls “history” is tacitly “White History.” It’s the difference between assuming that scientific practices are procedurally objective and realizing that knowledge can be tainted by the assumed-to-be-universal white culture of its gatherers.

Now, I would be lying if I said that these are the reasons I made one of the two main characters in my most recent MS white. Initially, I made Meyer white without thinking about it, because I am white, and most of the characters in the stories I read are white, and I already had an idea about how her lived experience would make her the person I wanted in my story. Which is an excuse, not a reason.

Thinking in a white default, despite knowing it’s wrong, not wanting to, and working to stop, is not a good thing.

But as she and my other characters grew–read: as I listened to other voices and worked to shed my ignorance–Meyer’s whiteness became part of the story, in ways that made her race integral to who she is.

Meyer’s whiteness affects the story in many ways: how she interacts with her co-protagonist and colleagues, many of whom are characters of colour; how others interact with her; and how she perceives the events and people around her. Most important of all, it partly drives her character arc.

Although Meyer is very concerned with social justice, her perspective is necessarily limited. Despite her strong sense of right and wrong, she is as limited as any other would-be ally from a place of privilege. Part of her overall journey is how she learns that her take on the world–the way the government, the police, and other people behave–is true only for others with the same colour skin and middle-class family background.

Like me, Meyer is in a place to understand these ideas intellectually–she’s aware of how privilege works from the parts of her demographic that are not privileged, such as being a woman, being Jewish, and being bisexual. But she has to learn, as I still am and always will be
learning, that the privilege she does have masks important parts of the world around her.

This leads Meyer to make mistakes–actions she intended to minimize harm put people in great jeopardy, simply because she assumes things like the police treating everyone the way they treat a middle-class white woman.

Meyer starts off the story semi-unconsciously buying into the White Saviour narrative: she believes that changing the world for those who are oppressed or marginalized is her individual responsibility, because the world she lives in tells her that’s how wrongs get righted. One or two brave members of the privileged group see that the marginalized are people too and work against the rest of the members of their group.

To be on the right side, Meyer figures, she must do what needs to be done, no matter how difficult. Although she recognizes that her actions may have adverse consequences, she’s confident she’s serving the greater good. She’s aware of parts of her own privilege, but those parts sometimes feed inward-facing personal guilt rather than outward-facing empathy and humility.

Meyer has the qualities of a good person–she genuinely cares about others and prioritizes their wellbeing over her own. She values everyone for their shared humanity and has a deep respect for life. She acts on what she believes in, prioritizing what is ethical over what is comfortable. She goes out of her way to avoid causing others pain.

But that’s not enough to ensure one is doing good. Doing the right thing is messy, in part because that “the” is misleading: there can never be a perfect solution to injustice, and approaching inequality from the standpoint of someone on the weighted side of the scale makes it less likely that one understands the problem.

In many stories, it’s more heroic for a white person to be a saviour than to listen to and support those already in the process of “saving” themselves, but the latter acknowledges that marginalized people know more about their own lives and experience than even the most well meaning privileged person does or can.

Just as importantly, acknowledging the contingency of morals–what you know to be right is inherently biased, and there’s no way for you to check that bias on your own–makes any lesser-evil-greater-good calculus scarily precarious.

People of any race and ethnicity can accidentally overlook this problem, but Meyer’s whiteness (and, for that matter, class, and, in the universe she lives in, theism) starts her off with one hell of a bias. It gives her moral arrogance that she doesn’t realize she has. And that plays an integral part in the story I want to tell with her character arc: the process of realizing one has done wrong and working to make that right, even in a world where “right” doesn’t always exist.

It may have started off as a badly chosen default intuition, but my character’s whiteness has become a considered, crucial story element. I have to continue confronting and challenging my own privilege–my own moral arrogance–to make better choices.