Recently, I listened to Romanian Vee contrasting contemporary woke “representation” vs the rest of the world in the context of a race swap in a recent staging of “Romeo & Juliet” with Tom Holland and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers.
He caused me to think how I might race swap characters to adapt that story…
“…both lead characters are black but instead of representing two rival families she is from a family who integrated & became wealthy while he is from an urban underclass family & never knew his dad. The families’ conflict is WEB DuBois’ Talented Tenth vs. the urban left behind, so class based. In part it would look at a black political elite whose position comes at the expense of an underclass despised by the black elite. Not only gripping conflict but relevant to current year as stereotype busting of what it means to be black in America today given the actual diversity of haves, have nots, and immigrants.”
Except in rare cases where it is relevant to the story, my characters as drafted could be any race as it is irrelevant to me unless it affects the story. In thinking about editing one period story, I realized that it could be set in Germany, Syria, India, or China without changing the story.
In the Chappo story, Geronimo’s Spirits, it is important that Chappo is an Apache as the setting is a 21st century Apache-Mexican war.
One of Chad’s dates is of Vietnamese descent because I thought it could be interesting to have a granddaughter of boat people being an international contract lawyer facilitating commerce with contemporary communist Vietnam.
One of my draft stories is about a racist elf-supremacist who begins to develop feelings for her human warrior partner in the context of a fantasy guild quest.
Overall, my focus is on whether such diversity matters to my story, which it generally does not.
Jaycee Woods 
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