Writing Advice: Magically changing your POC characters

You might not realise this, but if there’s a POC character on screen then there’s a good chance the character won’t stay themselves for the entirety of the story. Don’t believe me? Here are a few examples.

Princess and the Frog: The main character turns into a frog

Soul: The main character turns into a soul

Coco: The main character nearly turns into a skeleton

Brother Bear: The main character turns into a bear

The Emperor's New Groove: The main character turns into a lama instead of being dead.

You get my point, yes these are all Disney/Pixar-related stories but the point still stands, it’s a very common trope.

You might be asking yourself, why is this a thing and honestly...I don’t have a good answer for you. It’s almost the same question as “Why does every black superhero have lighting powers?” It’s a common trope that again, not many people understand where it came from or why it’s a thing.

I think I might have an idea but it’s only a theory though. I think this is one of those situations where white people try not to be racist but instead create a racist character anyway and for this example, I’m going to be looking at Pixar’s movie, Soul.

If you’re a person of colour and a writer you might’ve gotten the good old. “How do I write a black character?”

“I don’t write black characters because I don’t want to accidentally become racist.”

“I just find it easier to write stories about fictional animals instead of humans because I don’t want to be racist.”

I discovered that young writers are afraid to create people of colour because they think they're going to get “cancelled” or get called out for being racist and to avoid the uneasiness about writing a person of colour, they make the character transform into literally anything else. This way the writer gets the benefit of no longer writing a black character but instead a [blank] one, all the while still having a black person on the diversity checklist because said character started off as black.

In the movie Soul, the main character doesn’t even stay in their own body for ten minutes before getting swapped by a white woman and in a way...that was kind of blackface the more I think about it.

While yes, there was one black writer (Kemp Powers) to help write Soul, there were two other writers who were white. One of them had been with Pixar since Toy Story. So, it’s safe to assume in the pecking order for who was in charge of creating the story, it was most likely a white person with Kemp being there to help do touch-ups. (Pure speculation).

I’ve seen countless white people try to “avoid” being racist by creating characters which are extremely black-coded but for some reason aren’t considered black because said character doesn’t have a black skin tone and the thing is, if you’re trying to avoid writing a POC because you don’t feel comfortable writing them, then you need to ask yourself, why? Why are you uncomfortable adding a person of colour to your story and why do you think people of colour are these weird foreign concepts you’ll never understand?

We’re not asking you to write a POC story, no. We just want you to add us to your story because we exist.

If you’re going to add a person of colour in your story, maybe don’t change them midway through, because I think it might come across as you’re trying to avoid writing us, by changing us into something you’re more comfortable with and we don’t want to be changed, we like ourselves for who we are.