This week I saw Twilight, several days after the boxing-day release, in order to avoid the swarms of squealing teenage/post-teenage girls. Sadly I didn’t wait long enough, and had to endure wet feet for the duration of the movie when the adjacent approximately-fifteen-year-old actually jumped out of her seat - knocking into me and spilling my Diet Coke over my shoes - upon first glimpse of the dazzling Edward Cullen.

The first moment of surprise for me, however, was upon discovering that three of the minor characters had been cast as ethnic minorities – Eric as Asian, Angela Latino and Laurent as African-American. Now, I still have to read the last two books, and as such may stand corrected, but I am fairly sure that with the exception of American-Indian Jacob Black there was no mention of any ethnicity in the book series. And regardless of whether I am right about this, it led me to discover that I have a tendency to think of all book characters as Caucasian, unless specifically told otherwise.

The only other instance that I can remember of having a character cast differently to my ‘white-by-default’ expectations is that of Kingsley Shacklebolt in the Harry Potter films. (Kingsley may in fact be an African name, I am unsure. Wikipedia is not informing me if it is). Upon discussing this with a friend, I found that I am not the only one who made these thoughtless assumptions regarding said characters. But it seems that if an author wishes for her character to belong to some ethnic group, it must be made quite specific for many of us to be able to ‘pick up’ on it. Which has made me ponder whether African-Americans assume that characters described as having brown hair and brown eyes also have brown skin? (I am informed that no, they do not – curious).

I am currently part-way through a novel set in the 1930s, a tale of two sisters who are effectively raised by their nanny. Nowhere in the book is there mention of the nanny’s ethnicity, and yet for some reason I assumed her to be African-American, despite it being entirely plausible that she was not. I seem to have been stereotyping maids/household workers in the early 20^th century as being non-white, but cannot figure out why. Perhaps it is just over-exposure to the cinema that has rendered this obviously-incorrect generalisation in my mind, but has also made me feel quite the racist, making those kinds of suppositions.

New Year’s Resolution: Don’t assume everyone is free from some type of ethnic background. This can also come in handy in real life, as a teenage boy who was in Pathfinder Book Shop at the same time as me before Christmas can attest to – his ranting about the Treaty of Waitangi being irrelevant was cut short when it was discovered that his companion, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenage girl, was in fact 1/64^th Maori. The awkward silence afterwards had a ‘lol’ factor of 8/10.

New Year’s Resolution Number Two: Don’t wear any variety of canvas shoes to the movies. Especially if there may be excitable youth around