Do I dare tackle the topic of racism in a story about Paradise? That was the question I wrestled with as I considered the conflicts which would develop in Shadows From The Sun. Anything I wrote would be flirting with disaster. Too many people are easily offended—from the hypersensitive moralist to the outright racist.
But prejudice is a common human trait, inflicted on anyone and anything that tempts people to offer an opinion: other cultures for instance, other religions . . . other nation’s clothes, their foreign food . . . politics, gender, sexual orientation, education, social standing . . . the list isn’t endless, but it’s impressive enough.
And prejudice is most dangerous when it cloaks itself in virtue. National pride. Religious beliefs. Cultural notions of morality. We look for righteous rationales to justify our bigotry. It’s all too easy when we don’t have to think too deeply.
But in Shadows From The Sun we have an Indigenous community untouched by the outside world, a community living without sin. How would we react to the innocent First Nations people living there? How would they react to us? That’s when I realized Paradise is the perfect place to explore how innocence would respond to bigotry.
None of those who discover this ideal place are bad people. But they are very human.
Thank goodness most of us aren’t racist. We celebrate the diversity that our world allows us to explore and enjoy. Even so, we’re not color-blind. So how would we react to the Native people living in this Paradise who have no skin color at all? Black hair. Brown eyes. But absolutely no skin pigmentation. That’s when we’re faced with the true absurdity of racism. Do we even need skin color to be prejudiced? This scenario was too delicious to ignore.
And so we have Shadows From The Sun, the adventure that’s more than just a story, due to be released in September. Why shadows? That’s the subject of another blog.