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Cultural Appropriation: can a white writer ever create minority characters?
When is it okay for a white writer to create a black character? For instance, I'm white, but writing an urban fantasy featuring a bi-racial (black mother, absent white father) jazz musician who's down-on-his-luck... because he's a heroin addict like many jazz musicians. It's set in 1978, and (like me back in the late 70s/ early 80s) he's a huge P-Funk fan so he slips P-Funk-isms into his thoughts, like calling the antagonist, a white drug dealer he owes money to, as "Sir Nose d'Voidofunk." My question is, would folks see that as cultural appropriation? I'm interested because I'm a huge social justice progressive and yet often feel stymied by political correctness. My intent is to embrace Jimmy (who I really, really like despite his flaws). In fact, of all the characters in my urban fantasy world, Jimmy's the one most like myself (though I've never tried heroin and am a middling jazz guitarist at best). Thanks in advance. PS. Everyone wins. But in payment, I'll read your most recent work and comment. Please tag me in your comments.

Questioning

So this is a topic I’ve thought and written a fair bit about. I’ll link to two other pieces that I’ve written about it for some more in depth thoughts. My general thought is that the framing of the question such that there is an iron clad absolute moral answer is stupid. Intstead I think it is better to ask oneselves some or all of the following questions:

How can my writing respect people of all races, ethnicities, religion, abilities, sexualities and genders, while also respecting and agnowledging the histories of suffering, oprression and apropriation that are attached to many of those identities?

How can my writing show or encourage a world of inclusion and diversity that is often unrealized in reality?

What biases do I have that show up in my writing and how can I agnowledge them and avoid passing them on to my readers?

How does my work interact with racist, sexist, ableist, classist, homophobic etc. tropes?

How does my work interact with the history of white cis men aprropriating the stories of marginalized people?

I don’t think there are many specific rules that people have to follow, but I think that every writer should grapple with these questions. So while I don’t have a solid answer to your question I hope you can think about these questions and find your own way to move forward in this excessively problematic world.

Here are links to the other 2 posts I mentioned:

https://theprose.com/post/271406/framing

https://theprose.com/post/214764/manifesto