So something that’s happening in my mentions is people are talking about who is “capable” of writing what, and look, I just want to be clear that the issue is not one of capacity or like, a phrase I hate, “getting it right.”

I personally find it very annoying to read books with lawyers written by non-lawyers who haven’t done the research, because it drives me personally nuts when things are just wrong.

But. It’s not generally *harmful* when someone who doesn’t have the capacity to accurately portray a lawyer just makes shit up and doesn’t understand a billable hour.

Whether you “do the research” on being a lawyer and try to get it pitch-perfect or you don’t, you can still write an enjoyable story that doesn’t hurt anyone!

So it’s not about “right“ or ”wrong.”

It’s about harmful or not harmful. It’s not entirely about knowledge, although knowledge is entailed. It’s about caring about not hurting people.

And you cannot ”research” your way out of a harmful mindset, because we are surrounded by research materials that are themselves harmful.

As a quick, personal example: for reasons of the upcoming book, I was researching what it was like to visit the interior of China in the late 1800s. I read account after account about how venal and offensive the Chinese officials were.

And if you just read all that you’d get the impression that Chinese people in the late 1800s were just venal and offensive people.

And I finally read one account that made it click in my head.

I’m paraphrasing now, but I’ll find my screenshots for the author’s note.

This one guy, going to the interior of China, asked a bunch of people for advice about how to deal with those terrible Chinese officials.

And all his white friends were like, “show of strength! refuse to give in on the slightest thing! demand their submission!”

But the author talked to one person, who he referred to as a “heathen.” So I assume this person was a non-white, non-Chinese person who had visited the interior of China.

And the “heathen” said something like, “Just remember that people are people everywhere, and if you’re polite and apologize for not knowing the proper forms, they’ll be kind back to you.”

And the author said, without any hint of self-reflection, “What a beautiful sentiment. How lovely. Anyway, I decided to go for the whole show of force thing, and turns out, I was right to do so because the Chinese are horrible.”

This is me, doing research on my own people, and I still have to do a ton of reflection about what is going on, because the bread crumbs to the truth are hidden under three layers of racism masquerading as “the truth.”

So that’s why I think the question isn’t one of “research” or “capacity.” If I don’t start the research with empathy in my ind in the first place, I’m absolutely going to fuck it up. You can’t research your way out of racism, but you sure as heck can research your way into it.

I’m not perfect. I do make mistakes. There are things people have pointed out to me after the fact in prior books that I wish I had done differently, after I’d seen what they helped me to see.

I try to repay this by doing better.