Oh hey, I found this thread while doing a search on "character race." The last few days I've been working on a spreadsheet for my characters to keep them all straight. I hadn't realized until then that all my characters are white.
My WIP is set in Oregon (where I live) on the coast where probably 90% of the people there in Real Life are white. The rest are mostly Native Americans and Hispanics. Very few blacks and Asians in Oregon. I moved here from SoCal, a much more diverse population, and am still surprised by the lack of minorities here.
So, even though the novel's exact location is fictional, it's set on the true Oregon coast and I should use the true population mix there, yes? It would seem very false to have a couple of blacks and Asians and whites and Hispanics all hanging out at the coffee shop, although that would be appropriate in SoCal.
It just feels wrong to me, somehow ... as if I'm ignoring huge numbers of people ... although in Real Life the Oregon coast is almost completely Caucasian ...
And then again, as so many have pointed out here, the characters' races aren't a part of this plot, so don't need to mention at all. I, the characters' creator, didn't even think about their races* until I started doing the character sheets. So I think not mentioning it is ok.
I'm glad the search function here works pretty well. This thread really helped me.
*question for me to ponder: did i not think about this before now because it truly isn't important to the novel, or because i, as a white person, use "white" as the default? if i were a black person writing about the Oregon coast, i'd still have to use mostly white characters, because that's just the way it really is here, right?