An Interesting Small Flaw In FLEX

Your background helps drive your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.  If you grew up in the Deep South, you’re probably going to have a good handle on describing the Appalachians.  If you grew up in lily-white Connecticut and never explored, you’ll probably have issues capturing a multicultural environment.
And my novel Flex has an interesting small failure, created by my own background.
Now, if you’re not familiar with Flex (and why would you be? It just came out yesterday! Get reading!), there’s three people who are the central family: our lead character Paul Tsabo, his ex-wife Imani, and their daughter Aliyah.
I’m getting some preliminary confusion as to what ethnicity Paul is.
Aliyah, his daughter, is clearly described as black: “His daughter appeared in her bedroom doorway, clad in her pink-and-green Kermit-hearts-Piggy nightgown. She clutched the prosthesis protectively against her chest. She had her best pouty face on, somehow adorable beneath her mop of tangled black curls – a messiness Imani would have combed flat, but Paul liked to see his daughter’s wildness made manifest. Against his daughter’s soft brown body, his artificial foot’s sharp carbon-and-titanium profile looked like a blade.”
That’s pretty clear.
Things gets wobblier when I describe his ex-wife Imani: “Imani, stylish as always, wore a long tan coat with seven onyx-black buttons. It looked both businesslike and regal, which suited her – an Egyptian princess’s stiff bearing.”  In this case, Imani’s probably black thanks to a Swahili name and an explicit call to her Egyptian heritage, but… I don’t explicitly reference that.  It’s a lazy inference.
So what’s Paul?
Paul’s ethnicity is not described.  (Well, there’s one brief referent about a third of the way in to “Paul’s hairy Greek skin,” but that far in you’ve already got your own image of Paul Tsabo, bureaucromancer.)
There’s plenty of description of Paul’s body – he’s an amputee, he’s scrawny – but I don’t really reference whether Paul’s black, or white, or what.  Which is a failure mode of me being a white guy, and buying into a culture where “white” is seen as the norm: I went “Well, most people have both legs, so I should mention that Paul is missing his right foot.”  I went, “Well, most ex-cops are pretty burly, I should mention that Paul’s kinda short and not muscular and had to work his ass off to pass the physical exams.”
And buried in a tangle of assumptions I should prooooobably unpack further was, “Well, most people are white…”
Now, that confusion only exists in the first place because I believe in multiculturalism, and as such I put a multiracial family at the heart of the book.  Honestly, if I’d just had a family of three white people, nobody would have been confused – and there’s a thought that fills me with discomfort.
Now, this flaw is subtle and doesn’t torpedo the book – mainly because the characters are written as people, with strong personalities, and race takes a back seat when the opening scene involves Aliyah stealing her father’s artificial foot because he’s fallen asleep on her again.  But it is something I’ve gotten some questioning on, and though Flex is a professionally-published novel that’s been getting some very strong reviews, that doesn’t exempt it from me going, “Hrm.  Coulda done that better.”
I’m a white guy who grew up with white guys.  I’m not used to explaining my own heritage; it’s kind of a trivia fact for me.  Hey, I’m Irish and German!  That means I drink a lot, ha ha!  Doesn’t affect my job chances at all, though, and the cops still love me.  But that means that when I write about race, even in the quasi-idealized racial world of Flex (and that’s a whole other essay in and of itself, on choosing to write a fantasy-ideal version of racial dynamics versus a more realistic version, and how that all boils down to the effect you’re striving to achieve in fiction), I often miss a beat.  I should have realized that Paul, too, needed his own identifier early on, because I’d established two black characters in a family and then left this nebulous gap when it came to Paul.
That causes some mild confusion, and regardless of how you feel about racial politics, “Confusion” is never anything you strive for as a writer.
That’s a weakness in my style injected straight from my background. I’m not going to flog myself over a detail like this – I’ll just put it in the large hopper of “Things Ferrett needs to improve upon,” and move on.  A lot of writers are all like, “I don’t wanna write about race.  What if I get it wrong?”  Well, here I am, botching it up a bit, and most people still seem to be enjoying my book.  The complaints, if you can even call them that, boil down to “So what’s with Paul…?”
So. In case it comes up, Paul is Greek, his ex-wife is black (actually a mixture of Egyptian and Swahili ancestry), and Aliyah is biracial but for all visual intents and purposes is black.  But if you read Paul as black?  I wouldn’t be offended.  And in the next book, I’ll do a little better at explicitly establishing ethnicity (and hopefully do it without anything as clumsy as “Paul examined his swarthy Greek skin in the mirror…”), and as such level up.
That’s all there is, man.