They don't call America the Great Melting Pot for nothing. Our culture is a hodgepodge. Heck, my family seriously hodged the podge. My dad's family is primarily German; Mom's is Irish. I've got cousins on both sides who have Japanese ancestry. Then there's cousins from Costa Rica and cousins who vacationed next to the Kennedys. Most of my paternal grandfather's neighbors were Amish. Then there's me, a neo-pagan, who's married to a Methodist. My Luthern uncle performed the ceremony.
So I have a tendency to write characters from all over. In fact, one of my friends accused me of throwing in everything but the kitchen sink after reading the holiday scene in Blood Magick. Of course, this is the same friend with an Anglo father, a Mexican-American mother, and a Chinese-American husband.
So, readers, I'm curious. Does mixing cultures in books bother you? Why or why not?
3 comments:
I love the mix! Love to learn about different cultures!!
Since I grew up roaming the world, I love to see cultural mixed up! I also think we will see more and more of that as time goes on- barriers are being broken down daily. The world used to be such a vast place and now we traverse it in a matter of hours. How could we not be culturally mixed???
To me, multiculturalism is so reflective of our reality that it strikes me as unrealistic when books, movies, and tv fail to reflect it. It's always a challenge to respectfully and accurately reflect other cultures, but we're in the business of creating fully-realized characters, and as long as we're mindful of reader perceptions, it can be done beautifully. I definitely take exception to the notion that a person can only right characters of his/her own ethnically. That's as silly as saying writers should stick to their own gender. Or species. LOL.
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