Apartment, and other things

I have officially begun the process of moving things into the new apartment. I also took some photos:

The kitchen:

 And if you turn around, the living room:

Also, to show you how far out in the boonies I am, here's the town:

with the pub with the best name ever

and here's the surrounding area.

Currently, my biggest dilemma is purchasing a shower curtain and a rod to hang it on. Sounds simple, right?

WRONG.

There are too many choices. Currently browsing Amazon for something cheap but not so cheap that it will disintegrate in a month, and pretty much everything has 50/50 great vs. awful reviews.

Speaking of reviews, I have received my first book review accusing me of being a racist.

Not gonna lie--at first I felt kind of offended. The reviewer's tone was a little nastier than necessary, but I do concede he/she has a point, and it's something I've thought about before. Something I've thought about a lot, actually, and said thoughts usually lead to the same question. 

I write mostly for the 10 - 13 age group, and I would love it if kids from all social/cultural backgrounds could read my books and enjoy them. But at the same time, I recognize that the vast majority of my characters are middle class white people.

I grew up in middle class white-dom. Sure I knew a few kids from other cultures and races, but the town I grew up in had LITERALLY one black family. The Asian kids I knew in school were all Korean (all 3 of them), and from what interaction I had with them, all I really knew about them was that their number one priority was school work and getting straight A's. Am I saying that was the sum total of their personalities? Absolutely not. But I didn't know them well, so that's all I saw.

Which is exactly my point. How do I include other races and cultures in my writing, as main characters, when I have pretty much zero knowledge of what it's like to grow up as anything other than white middle class? In a series of books I've been working on over the last couple years, I have one black main character. I think he's a pretty well-developed character, but he's in a post-apocalyptic setting where I've never had to write about his life before the apocalypse, outside of a short conversation with another character about being the only black kid in their grade. Because I don't know what it's like to grow up in whitewashed suburbs while not being white.

I also feel like if I just throw in a couple non-white characters just for the sake of being racially diverse, it's going to be superficial. In other words, it's just going to be garbage. Just another Politically Correct™ piece of rubbish completely devoid of anything remotely interesting.

One of the first things my college professors always told us was to write what you know. (That's why so many of us writers have ADD--we encounter a roadblock in the form of a subject about which we know nothing and go out and try to acquire knowledge about it, which eventually leads to the whole jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none problem so many writers have.) But the knowledge of what it's like to grow up a different race is not really something I can just go out and research. I mean I can research it to a point, but that's one of those things where the experience trumps any research I could ever do.

So that's what's been frustrating me for the better part of the last seven hours.

I don't know. What do you guys think?