sensitivity reading

The main reason this exists is that I think the fear of cancellation makes white authors afraid to write characters of colour. The hope is that if white writers have a place to ask their dumb questions and get proper answers, I can read well-written work about people of colour. Also, I think the funniest thing in the world is clueless people trying really hard to be woke. I'm having a good time with this, I'm not being a hero suffering on the front lines to protect everyone else from racism exposure or whatever.

My promise to you: you will be anonymous. I am very very hard to offend, and there is no world in which an anon on tumblr is capable of hurting my feelings so you can pretty much say whatever the fuck you want. I will never call for someone to be cancelled no matter how racist your question is, because I am assuming you're here in good faith.

I'm a person, not an all-knowing entity, so if it is a question outside of my scope of knowledge, I will publish it without an answer so as not to spread misinformation.

I can tell you about immigrants, children of immigrants, and diasporas in a Western industrialized country. How queerness works in context, what growing up in a collectivist family means about things you'll do and won't do, if your OC's name or music taste is very clearly something that would set them apart. That brown man would not pray five times a day, drink alcohol, be no-contact with his mother, and listen to Taylor Swift.

I will not give you permission to write something. I'm here to point out accuracy, not morality or racist tropes. I also won't translate into languages I don't speak/name your characters for you. I am talking about diasporas within a generalized Western context and cannot tell you sensory details about an immigrant's place of birth or new home because that is probably not a place where I have been. I am not Indigenous and I am not Black; if you ask how it feels to be either of those things I won't answer.

Taking your hijab off is a very personal decision and also a very casual one, in that it is not a big deal when someone takes their hijab off around you for the first time and a hijabi is constantly deciding for specific circumstances whether they want to wear their hijab or not. It's also a fairly comfortable thing to wear; it's not like a winter jacket where you take it off the second you can. You can chill while wearing your hijab, so there isn't really the motivation to take it off. As a writer, when in doubt, assume she's wearing her hijab.

Most hijabis I know would never take their hijab off around an unrelated man, no matter how good of friends they are -- even if your character has a male bestie and they're completely platonic, she'd probably keep her hijab on when they're hanging out. It's not a sign of lack of trust or whatever, it's just a choice she's made. No one puts a hijab on to talk to their dad or brother, but they probably would to speak to their father-in-law or brother-in-law. Like how mothers will sometimes bring their young sons into the women's washroom, people won't care about putting on a hijab around young boys. Homophobic Muslim women might wear their hijab around a woman who's queer (interpreting it as "no one who likes women" instead of "no men"). Still, in women-only spaces like a salon, she isn't wearing a hijab.

This depends on a lot of factors! First thing to do is identify who all the people in this family are as independent characters, not as "_'s brown mom who I don't want to be stereotypical." What do they do all day? What do they worry about? Who are they angry at? What do they wish they could do more? What has been their prior experience and understanding with queerness in strangers and the sense that your brown main character is queer? None of this has to be explicitly stated in the story but knowing the information will colour your portrayal of them; you won't be writing a stereotypical brown woman anymore, you'll be writing a character you've fully fleshed out.

Some things to consider:

They might speak in another language to obtain some sense of privacy in front of this white character.

If the family is fairly conservative/traditional, they wouldn't be happy with your main character dating and sleeping with a man, either -- they'll definitely be uncomfortable that your character is queer, but what they'd want is her to not date anyone and then come home one day sensibly engaged to someone of her same religion and economic class. So no "But you liked this boyfriend so much in the past, can't you get back together with him?"

Do they know other gay people? Are they in their community/culture? How are they treated?

Do they consider queerness to be foreign/Western? Is it a sign that your main character isn't respecting her culture to them?

If your character is bisexual, there is going to be someone who tells her to "just choose a man then."

some things to consider:

a multicultural city is made up of many neighbourhoods with one or two cultures in them. what cultures are in the neighbourhoods your character is in? don't say "Asian," say "Korean" or "Persian." Specificity makes for better storytelling.

don't confuse multiculturalism for liberalism; just because a place has a lot of ethnic diversity doesn't mean everyone there will believe in socialism, for example

the grocery stores and restaurants around her will be very different than what she's used to. does she seek out the familiar big names that she knows?

is your main character mistaken for Afro-Caribbean or West African, now that she's in a place that might have a large population of that ethnicity? is she less visible than she used to be, because there are more Black people around her? how does she feel about that?

people will be less curious about her Blackness -- fewer well-meaning lowkey racist questions, fewer interactions on the street that you walk away from knowing race had something to do with it.

honestly, look that name up on instagram or facebook and make sure one or two profiles belonging to normal people show up. there are 8 billion people in the world, most of whom are online -- if no one's ever been called the name you've made before, red flag.

his friend group is mostly white men but he feels disconnected from them

This would differ depending on what region of South Asia he's from, whether he moved to an urban/suburban area or a small town, and if he's working-class or middle-class.

If his family speaks Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu and is suburban or urban, he could be listening to South Asian music -- the Punjabi music scene boomed at this time and was very popular, but he'd need access to it through radio stations and CD shops that he couldn't get if he was in a small town. If he's South Indian, he probably isn't listening to much South Asian music at all because South Indian popular music wasn't nearly as easy to get access to in Canada at the turn of the century.

If he's urban or suburban, he and his friends are influenced by Black American culture, even his white friends. Some young men (brown and white) who love rap and hip-hop are respectful, and appreciate it, and aren't weird about it. Others are convinced that since they listen to it, they can talk like they're Black, sing along to the n-word in songs, and ignore the fact that this music comes from a specific cultural context that they are not a part of and have no lived experience with.

If he's from a small town, he might still be listening to a lot of rap and hip-hop; diaspora kids of all races look up to Black artists. Especially when every other artist they know is white, lonely non-Black kids of colour end up feeling more seen and represented by Black rappers than white mainstream rockers. But his friends probably listen to rock-adjacent genres, so he'd be familiar with that type of music too.

If it helps, it's a romance novel about her and her ceo and it's set in the midwest.

Wow. Lots going on here. Don't their necks hurt after a long conversation?

Sure why not though I'm bored let's engage.

No it doesn't make sense. A second generation immigrant means your OC was born in the midwest and spent her whole life there. The language you think in is the language you speak with your peers; for her, that is unambiguously English. There is no situation in which someone gets confused between English and Cantonese when speaking to a white man if they're second-gen.

I'm not really interested in dictating what tropes or stereotypes are harmful or in telling you what type of story to write but I can tell you some context about Yuna Hollander and Shane being Japanese-Canadian. In summary: there's no immigrant longing or home to "go back" to, and Shane wouldn't feel disconnected from Japanese-Canadian culture due to being mixed, he'd feel disconnected because he grew up in Ottawa.

Yuna's actress is 54, and has a Canadian accent, so she was either born in Canada in the early 60s or her family immigrated in the late 60s (since the show takes place in the mid-10s). Since she's supposed to be Japanese-Canadian, it's very unlikely her family immigrated in the late 60s because Japan was doing very well at the time and there would be no reason for her family to leave. So she's Canadian-born.