Unfortunately, not all characters are equal, in the eyes of your reading audience, if that audience exists as part of a society with institutional/historic racism. In American society, for example, it’s very rare to see people of color in fiction, especially SF/F, and when PoC appear it’s frequently as a stereotype or caricature. Your readers will be used to this, and it will affect their thinking, even if they believe that racism is wrong. So if you don’t explain/describe what race your characters are, most American readers will assume the character is white.

(Of course, that makes me ponder character introductions and the stylistic equivalents of presenting someone as though from a distance first vs. presenting them as though the reader has known them for years.)

I would love to see more character descriptions based on things like height and posture and build that can still be seen at a glance from a distance but aren’t necessarily or obviously racial markers the way hair and eyes and skin are. When I’m in Japan, though obviously my hair and eyes and skin mark me as a foreigner, I’m aware first and foremost of my size and body shape and movements being fundamentally non-Japanese, of being in a place where everything from the height of the showerhead to the amount of space between chairs in a restaurant is designed for a body that I do not have. (I imagine people who are more than one standard deviation out from their local norm on any physical axis–wide or narrow, tall or small–spend their whole lives feeling this way.) I can spot a foreign tourist in a New York subway station by the way they hold a map, the angles of heads when they consult with family members on the best way to get where they’re going. As I experiment with crossdressing, I’ve been thinking about male and female gaits, and of course the nuances of hips and elbows and strides and swaggers are cultural as well as gendered. So there are plenty of ways to talk about the ways someone differs from the unmarked state without either getting too personal or comparing them to food.

I’m not done yet so I can’t give an overall assessment of its treatment of characters of color, but I did notice that because of a past conversation.

Which got me thinking, what the hell color am I, anyway? A friend called me “tawny” and I said as long as it’s like the port, not the porn star. Since I never ever go out in the sun anymore (writer chained to computer day after day…) I’m white. Except when I get in bed with a lover who is actually white and then I realize, no, I’m a different shade. I guess I’m TAN, pun fully intended, and I guess I have to leave it at that.

This has got me thinking about other ways of describing shades of skin color. I see “nut brown” all the time but can never figure out what color that’s supposed to be. What kind of nut? It could be dark or light. I have no clue.

Much for me to think about here.