Writing Racism

Yesterday I wrote about encounters with racism, for the most part what I'd call incidental, in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels I read while I was waiting for my eye to heal following surgery. One of the novels I read was Kipling's Kim, and I didn't say anything about it in the previous post because it made me think about my writing more than my reading, and yesterday's post was already long enough.

Kipling is usually dismissed, these days, as a racist imperialist (or an imperialist racist, I suppose). I'm not really interested in defending him here—my own opinion probably doesn't count for much anyway, old white and male as I am, and anyway I'm not even remotely interested in trying to defend "The White Man's Burden"; oy fricking vey—but from a writing perspective there's something about Kim that jumped out at me as I read it.



Many British people were horrifically prone to use the n-word when referring to South Asian people; my own paternal grandparents did it, and to this day I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard my grandmother say that word. And indeed the word does appear in Kim. But as I made my way through the middle and to the end of the novel I noticed the word wasn't appearing anymore.

So I went back and had a look. And the only characters in the novel who use that word are British, and the word (to the best of my memory) only appears in dialogue attributed to these British people. And every person who uses that word is painted, by the author, as being the most ignorant of bigots, and completely incapable of appreciating India and its people for what they are. Kipling is much more interested in the non-British characters—who comprise by far the majority of individuals in the book—and his drawing of those people throws the bigoted British into even sharper relief.

I am fairly certain there are plenty of people out there for whom the parsing I've just done provides no excuse for Kipling, and peace be unto them. From my perspective, as a writer of historically based fantasy, I find in Kim a small justification for my own approach to racism. In Dixie's Land and The Bonny Blue Flag it has sometimes been necessary for me to use that same unfortunate word Kipling puts into the mouths of the bigots in Kim. The same necessity will apply to An End of All Things, which is currently at the outline stage and which I hope to write, and serialize, sometime in 2020.

I like to think, though, that I have performed the same authorial service in the way I've used the word. It never appears in the narrative, only in dialogue. And when it appears, it is only in the dialogue of characters who are clearly represented as failures of humanity.

I can't think of any other way of approaching history as fiction. To make characters all anachronistically sensitive is to destroy the sense of wonder fiction requires.