It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Coloured people's laughter. It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls , “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse
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