I know it is hard for us white “European” westerners to appreciate what minorities have faced and are still facing (even though most of my adult life I have lived as a minority white alien woman in brown/Muslim/Asian/Arabic/male-dominated societies, so I have more of an idea than most – and believe me there have been many times when I was breathing fire), but I don’t think the answer is to jump up and down and shout “plunder!”. Rather it is to jump up and down and demand respect for our minority/culture/norms etc.

In the YA books, the “Worldweavers” trilogy, I have taken the mythos, the archetypes and the world-creation stories of Native American provenance – Grandmother Spider, Coyote the Trickster, things like that.

I am not Chinese. I am not Arab. I am not Hopi.

I am *human*. And so are all these other peoples. We share our world; we share our stories. SO long as I am not disrespectful, or deliberately hurtful, or completely and wilfully ignorant of the things whereof I write… I think, as a human being, I am allowed to write about other human beings. My work may or may not convince – but I take pains in my research, and I freely admit that any errors that creep in are my own and I”ll take responsibility for them, but if I were to be stuffed into the box of “upper middle class white female” I would never have written at all, or at the Least I would never have written a story that would have been of interest to anyone at all. Are the cultural “misappropriation”
crowd really suggesting that a writer may only write for those exactly like him or herself – and that attempting to colour outside this box is a punishable offense?

I don’t think so.

I think the kwy ingredients are knowledge, respect, and a willingness to compromise if something inessential to your story is standing in the way of communication with another human being. But other than that… we are human. We are *human*. So is every story that has ever been told.