In my opinion, I feel that there are certain things that we personally will never understand fully. For example, Imagine you had a childhood friend who you were extremely close with and spent a lot of time with their family. One day in your adult future, you decided that you wanted to write a book about your childhood from both your perspective and your friend’s perspective. To me, I would think that you could use your imagination to describe what you think they experienced but there is no way (Even with intensive explanations from them) to completely fully understand how their life was without experiencing it yourself. Now imagine that you were a white person and your friend happened to be a black person (Or vice versa). In some cases, many people would say that your representation is not correct due to the fact that they are black and you are white. However I think that it doesn’t matter if you were white and they were black or even if you were black and they were Chinese. I think its the fact that each person’s experiences are different which is why our representation would perhaps not be accurate. Even two siblings from the same family who grew up in the same environment can have completely different experiences which could be inaccurately represented by their counterpart.
Overall, I feel that it is okay to write a story that could represent someone else, however it needs to be understood that what you write about them would not be fully accurate and only be accurate to the reaches and edges of your imagination.
