[quote=@Dagger]At the end of the day, they're all human and that's the most important thing to remember, but I've learned that there's something beautiful in at least acknowledging some of the cultural differences between my white, black, Latinx, Asian, Native, etc characters who were brought up by more traditional families. Which is where some advice from people with life experience could be helpful if anyone reading the thread has anything they want to share in that department! :)[/quote]
Having been raised in a 'traditional' family, I can speak to this somewhat. I think that though what [@POOHEAD189] said about us all being human certainly rings true, it can also be a disservice to disregard culture and to treat it as merely window-dressing. We are all human and we share common experiences as human beings, but that which we find to be innate and/or natural can very often be socially conditioned. That isn't to say that people's futures are determined by their cultures, of course (and people of color are not always in so 'traditional' families nor do they have the same experiences within them) but the way people are brought up and socialized has a huge part to play in how so many people live their lives, and the concept of the individual unbounded by culture or family structure or other hierarchical ties is generally a modern one that still isn't true for many people today. I think that writers (especially writers situated in the Global North) can have a specific view of the human condition or human nature which is conditioned by the legacy of the Enlightenment, resulting in mores that are ultimately Eurocentric even if we might think of them as universal. I think in writing someone different to you, it's also good to ask: what makes you different from them? What do you do in your daily life that goes unnoticed because it's just quotidian to you? As the anthropologist Ruth Benedict said, "No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking."

To speak about things that are more actionable for roleplayers, I'll say that it's good to consider culture's often immense impact on people, but also to remember that that non-white people aren't creatures of the past; tradition is a malleable thing and these familles are neither homogeneous nor unchanging; to treat them as such is a huge disservice to them. I would think not "What culture is this character from?" but rather "What were this character's parents/family like—and how did their culture influence their familial relationships?" It's a minor change, but it's a line of thinking that I think both highlights culture's importance but also centers on the specific individuals in question instead of treating a culture as an unchanging and singular monolith.

In regards to writing people of color specifically, one thing I'll add is that roleplayers can sometimes have the tendency to fixate on things like eye and hair color in their RP—which isn't necessarily bad, of course, but they can additionally imply a certain level of importance to that color variation, variation which most people on Earth simply don't have. I haven't seen it especially much here, but having a section in, say, a personal description for hair color and eye color is pretty Eurocentric when the majority of people in the world will have dark hair and dark eyes as a rule. I know that culturally in the West we put a lot of significance into those things (feisty redheads or pure blue eyes or what have you) but they're also tropes reflective of a white-dominated culture that don't really apply to other people. There's also a tendency to ignore that, i.e. have a character who's Asian except for their blue eyes (which really just makes me think of Toni Morrison and [i]The Bluest Eye[/i]) in a way that's uncomfortable because it can be read to say that PoC characters aren't interesting enough unless they have colored eyes. The one exception I'd make would be anime settings because of [i]mukokuseki,[/i] because then everyone has colored eyes, but that's a trope of the genre rather than a player choice per se. Outside of that one exception, however, I think that these sorts of characters can tend to make it hard to feel seen and appreciated as who you are—instead they can make you feel that people like you aren't 'interesting' or 'beautiful' enough to be worth exploring as a character.