Thanks for asking about a "White Character" tag. As of yet, no one’s made that tag for us to mark as canonical. By and large, unless we’re making a metatag to link related tags or seeding a fandom with characters for a challenge, the wranglers do not make tags; instead we work solely with user-generated content. If work creators or bookmarkers feel the need for a "White Character(s)" tag, we encourage them to create and use it. Once it's been used by at least three different users, we'll likely canonize it!
“Character of Color” (first used in 2009) and the other tags you listed are user-generated tags. In our experience, their usage is typically not discriminatory: with characters of color being under-represented or totally absent from a lot of mainstream media sources and therefore also under-represented or absent from a lot of fanfic too, users created the tag to be able to search out and enjoy stories that have significant character of colors even if they don’t know the fandom. So a user might not know that a particular character in an unfamiliar fandom or story is of color, but want to find stories or new fandoms that have such characters, if only to find stories that are more representative of the real, multi-racial world that we actually live in.
For this reason, it appears that the creators of those 4400 works felt that the tag (and its various subtags) conveyed useful information for their work. Looking at the tag cloud for the Kaleidoscope Fanwork Exchange seems to support this hypothesis. Most of the subcollections, as well as the parent user-made "Dark Agenda" collection, have similar distributions.
Comment on Release Notes for Release 0.9.11
AO3_Tag_Wranglers (Official) Wed 11 Dec 2013 11:33PM UTC
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