A Reader Called My Protagonist a Racist

When I finished the first draft of my latest book, I looked for help to critique and review the story. What began as a 12k-word short story about a young and inexperienced Catholic priest assigned to reopen a church shuttered five years earlier eventually grew into a 25k-word novella.

After sharing a few advance copies for critique, I received one very negative review. The reviewer called the book racist, and in turn called me racist. To be fair, her assertion was correct.

Staged in an inner-city slum, it describes all the typical ills of a neighborhood that has been beaten down by crime and poverty. The priest, a white male on his first assignment as a pastor, must convince the residents that the church is not only a place of worship but a place where love and support are still alive and well. No easy task considering the hardships the residents have endured for years.

The antagonists include a black mobster who rules the streets and alleyways on one side of the neighborhood. a Hispanic gang whose members are sometimes violent, a group of juvenile delinquents whom the priest tries to befriend, a house of prostitution that operates in plain sight, and a small band of Polish immigrants who are hanging on to their former way of life despite the church abandoning them five years earlier.

When a dead body is found near the church, the priest, who had earlier befriended a police detective, becomes involved in solving the crime.

The critique chastises the protagonist for identifying the races and ethnic groups using offensive stereotypes.

But is the narration racist? In many ways, yes. I cannot say the reader is wrong. Because, like my protagonist hero, I’m a racist. I'm not proud of it, and I'm trying to change.

In my defense, I grew up in a big city in the 1960s and was taught racism most of my life. When you experience it every day, it’s hard to deny its existence.

Maybe if you are someone who never stopped at a Howard-Johnson restaurant in Birmingham, AL, and ate lunch in a “whites only” dining room, or watched as your all-white school was integrated by Black students bused in from across town, or was the only white player on the softball team where you played second base, you could deny racism exists.

Pretending you could forget that racism exists merely means you don’t understand.

Merriam-Webster dictionary offers several definitions of racism:

-: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

-: behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief: racial discrimination or prejudice

-: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

I’d like to believe my protagonist has identified the third definition as the force that is troubling his parish and is working to eliminate it, not by ignoring it but by bringing it out in the open for discussion.

You see, it’s nearly impossible not to notice the differences between races and ethnicities. Because there are differences, especially in places where racial division exists.

If the police asked you to describe someone you saw vandalizing a car, the questions would be:

Was it a man or a woman?

Was he tall or short?

Was he black or white? Hispanic?

Did he speak with an accent?

You see, those are often the physical characteristics of people. Identifying them by their characteristics isn’t racist.

While using stereotypes may be racist, it is also descriptive. It doesn’t mean the characters don’t deserve equality; it means people have different needs that must be addressed differently.

In her critique of my work, this reviewer implied that she doesn’t see race or ethnicity, and that I shouldn’t either.

She read an early version of book one of a series. She probably won’t read the second book in the series because it uses the same allegories. But I’m not changing my story. You cannot change the future by ignoring the past and pretending it doesn’t exist.