Are the races of characters in books always the race as you in your head?

Totally depends on how the book is written. In most cases, the setting, the character’s name, language/dialect, and interactions will them you what the character looks like.

If no clues are given, I probably stopped reading due to poor writing style. I don’t like cardboard cut-out characters.

Usually I imagine the characters as described. And if I watch the movie after reading you can bet I will be livid when it does not match my standards or visualizations. I take those kinds of things very seriously.

In fact it is something I rarely do any more unless I want to be angry. And most of my friends know me better then to go with me to a movie I say I have already read.

I also rarely read a book after watching the movie either. There must be a word for that.

Oh yes, I wish I could go back in time and read the Lord of the Rings before seeing the movies.

@simone54 GQ. I don’t even see race when I’m reading. Wow, that made me think. I don’t see any race or colors when I’m into a book. I don’t know why.

If a character is described then I would picture them as described. If the race is not clear, and the language used does not give away a possible race by the dialect used by the character, then I probably default to white. I will say that when I read a book I am not “picturing” them throughout my reading necessarily.

I find it odd that you read a book about black Hatian people and picture them as white.

If I know that the story is set in a place where the characters are unlikely to be white, the names are stereotypically linked to a certain race or there is a description of the character (I never imagined Claudia from the Babysitters Club books as being white for example) then no, I don’t imagine them to be white. If none of the above applies then I imagine them as white (with dark features) or south American in appearance.

I think what you’re talking about is affinity. If the author is any good, his characterizations allow you to establish affinity with the persons living in the book. The humane commonalities you recognize in the Haitians supercede race and culture and make these differences trivial in comparison to your mutual humanity. It enables you to be both sympathetic and empathetic with the people you are reading about. I don’t think this is odd at all. These opportunities occur all the time in real life, if one is bold enough to stave off one’s personal fears and prejudices long enough to stand in the other person’s shoes. And it’s beautiful when the other person is capable of doing the same in return. Then starts the adventure.

No. I picture them how they are described. If they are not described well, I usually lose interest in the book. However, if the character in question is purposefully illustrated as a mystery (to be revealed later), I view them as either faceless or shrouded. I don’t read many books like that though (fictional). I do think it’s weird that you read a book about Haitians and pictured them as white, lol. Wrong? No, just weird to me.

Interesting question. My mother got me interested in reading with The Wizard of Oz. The movie, as we know, has no Black characters. From there I gravitated to The Hardy Boys, Tom Sawyer, Superman and Batman comics. The point being, I grew up reading books and comics with an unquestioning acceptance that all of the characters were White. But then, that’s not quite correct…I didn’t really think about race at all unless it was brought to my attention. As a child, I can only recall this occurring while reading Tom Sawyer.

As an adult, it’s fairly obvious to me that the characters in books I read are White unless the book is authored by an African-American. The one exception is Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, in which the author describes the various nationalities of the people Spenser encounters.

I think it’s notable that I grew up in an era where I didn’t expect to see “myself” in media. Wasn’t really an issue until I learned to understand what racism was. Not that my reading habits have changed any; I enjoy certain types of books…they just happen to not have many characters that represent me.

Absolutely not, I use my imagination to create the characters as the author describes.

Unless it’s important to the story, I generally don’t even picture how a character looks when I’m reading. I’m more interested in how they think and what they do, than what they look like. I mean, I note the description the author gives, and then it just…leaves my mind.

Oddly, the one time I assigned a race to a character on my own, I was dead wrong. For some reason, I had it in my head that Patricia Cornwell’s character Benton Wesley was black. I have no idea why, but when I much later figured out he was white, I was really surprised.

I have to hear what I read in order to understand what I’m reading. In a novel, the voices vary according the the description of the characters. If characters are not described particularly, my mind makes up the voices and descriptions. Obviously, as I get more information, the voice and descriptions change. Unless I have clues to the contrary, I think of the characters as white, but I’m not surprised if it turns out I was wrong.

@augustlan – To me, Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal series – the one whose brain Hannibal eats while he’s still alive? He was black to me, too. I was kind of disappointed when I saw the movie.