ELECTRIC.

NO JUSTICE. NO PEACE.

DON’T

•Dehumanize poc characters. This includes giving only your poc characters monstrous features (animal ears, tails, fangs)

•Don’t make your white girl oc’s soft and cute or fun while your brown/black girl oc’s are Muscular and Strong with Don’t Need No Man and strict attitudes, let brown and black girls be soft and cute and fun, too

•Make the only poc characters as villains, victims, refugees, especially the tan and dark-skinned poc—let poc be heroes, too

•Write your Muslim (and any brown) character in an arranged marriage or being forced into anything in general (ie, hijab)

•Give your East-Asian oc’s yellow skin, even if it’s light enough to almost look ‘natural’—it doesn’t, and no one has that skin tone

•Make your only East-Asian character(s) meek, submissive, quiet, brooding

•Describe poc skin tone with food (ie, chocolate skin)

•Make only your poc characters the edgy, temperamental, brooding or jealous characters while your white oc’s get to be colorful and bright and strong and fun

•Have your white oc’s always better off than the poc characters (whether it’s money, status, beauty, power, etc)

•Kill all your poc characters off or torture them repeatedly while the white characters get everything they want

•Fetishize your poc characters (ie, how the brown girls in Disney films are all sexualized vs the soft innocence of white Disney princesses, how Native Americans are often sexualized, etc)

•This includes the sexy “Exotic” trope

•Write about an experience or identity that isn’t yours to write about—IE, you shouldn’t be writing from the perspective of a Muslim Arab-American girl facing racism and islamophobia in a small, white town. Write about another white character witnessing the events instead. (ie, secret life of bees)

And lastly…

•Don’t be afraid to ask.

DO

•Your research

•Include poc in a respectful manner (no it’s not that complicated)

•Be mindful of harmful tropes (angry Black woman, Muslim women being oppressed, etc)

•Let brown and black girls be love interests

•Romanticize (not sexualize) poc features (black and brown eyes, monolids, tan and dark skin tones, different nose shapes)

•Let girls have darker skin tones than their male love interest

•Let poc be disabled or have other identities—no it isn’t ‘too much’ to have a deaf, black, non-binary Muslim character

•Be mindful of internalized racism. The best way to avoid this is to…

•Ask poc about your non-white oc’s; if you think you’ve got a good handle on things, it’s likely you don’t. Don’t get mad if/when poc correct you. If you don’t know any poc, that already sounds like a problem and you should reach out to some people and go to @writingwithcolor’s blog, and do some of your own research as well

•Include interracial couples (yes it’s okay to have a poc in a relationship with a white person)

•Let brown/black men be soft and weak and romantic and kind

•Include tan and dark-skinned poc

And lastly…

•Write them as a person.