jenniferrpovey:

fullcontactmuse:

jenniferrpovey:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

whokilledlordmorley:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

comicgeekscomicgeek:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

writingwithcolor:

Many authors can relate to the frustrating accusations of their characters and settings simply being the way they are for “diversity points” and writers are often scared of adding diversity out of fear of it being received poorly as a gimmick. Why does this situation exist?

Bad representation and gratuitous diversity are not the same thing and have to be addressed separately. The first one is a legitimate fear; the second one is exaggerated and has the dangerous potential to shut down legitimate representation. There’s so much diversity that you don’t even notice it in real life.

You go shopping in a Korean and Black neighborhood, get directions from some Desi folks, hop on to a bus and sit behind the guy in the wheelchair lift. When you come home to crack open a book (after shopping in that same neighborhood and riding on that same bus), does seeing diverse characters make you or someone you know cry, “WAIT A MINUTE NOW. I AM THE GRAND WIZARD. I SAY THIS IS TOO DIVERSE?“  

What is representation that ends up being harmful instead of supporting diversity?

“I need a tough drug dealer ex-boyfriend for my MC to be scared of. I know! I’ll make him Black and/or Latino.”

“My MC is oppressed by her parents who want her to get married, have babies, and not major in anything that would threaten a man’s ego, when she’d rather marry a girl and become a physicist. I know! I’ll make her Muslim, Hindu, or an Orthodox Jew.”

“My MC is very sexually open and adventurous. I know! I’ll make her Latina because that sounds sexy.”

“My MC has an older female boss who yells at him all the time, who he’s scared of. I know! I’ll make her East Asian.”

When choosing a character’s ethnicity, if your logic flows like this – you have to work harder to free yourself from the white supremacist myths that permeate our everyday life.

This is not the same as “gratuitous” diversity.

People have a way of accusing diversity that doesn’t seem plot-relevant of being “gratuitous”, but a character doesn’t need a plot reason to be Muslim, Jewish, Black, Latina, in a wheelchair, trans, or anything else.

If you have a witness in a trial, and she wheels herself into the witness box instead of walking, you don’t have to sit there justifying it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. If you walk into a coffee house and ask directions from a cute barista in a headscarf, you don’t have to work her ethnoreligion into the plot for that to be “allowed.”

Now, if you have actual significant characters who are diverse – and you should! – their identities should be incorporated into their characterization and not feel like they’re wearing a series of nametags. There are plenty of ways you can do this – giving them names common to a group, mentioning a Black character’s specific natural hairstyle, having them endure a microaggression, having a trans character experiment with presentation, having a gay or bi person mention a partner or a celebrity crush. You can also just say “He introduced me to a tall East Asian man wearing a polo shirt” or “the new doctor was a Black woman with her hair in twists and glasses that looked like they could stop a bullet” and just leave it there, since that’s referencing a visible trait; if that looks pasted on or artificial to you, you may have unexamined prejudices, which is normal, but something to work on.

Remember that if you’re not in a group, your meter for determining whether or not diversity is “forced” is going to be unreliable. Don’t assume that other writers whose works are diverse are trying to coast on diversity stats or that the diversity in their books is automatically unrealistic and forced just because it’s more diverse than the media you usually consume. The real world IS diverse and lots of people get erased by the way mainstream fiction is structured, most of all being people who are marginalized in multiple ways at once.

–WWC

Any time I see people complaining about representation and seriously using words like “Pandering” or “Tokenism” or anything remotely like that I just go ahead and safely assume that said person is a bigoted asshole whose opinions are utterly worthless

The real problem is, there’s a lot of people who either a) don’t want to ever have to acknowledge that anyone not like them exists, b) can’t handle a world not built for them exclusively, or c) some combination there of.

This is especially true in comics and sci fi fandom where there’s an unfortunate number of shrill cishet white dudebros who apparently think acknowledging that queer, trans and black people exist is somehow the Worst Thing Ever ._.

I especially support the part that says “a character doesn’t need a plot reason to be Muslim, Jewish, Black, Latina, in a wheelchair, trans, or anything else.” Because the ‘default’ is white, abled, straight cis male, creators often feel like introducing any diverse characters will require an explanation- after all, why would you include anything but the default if you don’t have to? Then you have to be responsible, and aware of consequences and context, and so on. Far easier to be lazy and cowardly and just go with the default white dude. This is a problem I see far more often in film, to be honest. People working on the Transformers movies, for example, stated they decided to leave out female Autobots because then they’d have to explain how their genders work. As opposed to the obviously male-gendered robots already present, which did not make people think about gender because they are the ‘default’. It’s a lot easier to go with the default, but it’s easier because it’s not challenging anything, because it’s not creating new forms of thought in the audience or the creator. We need to encourage the idea that diverse characters can just be in a film, rather than exceptions which must warrant a justification. 

SO MUCH THIS

There doesn’t need a “REason” to have queer and trans and POC characters in the story

You can just…HAVE THERE BE QUEER AND TRANS AND POC CHARACTERS

You don’t have to justify it

“Why is that character a black lesbian?”

“I felt like it.”

I dream of a day when there’s a black trans woman who is this doctor or lawyer and they are important to the story. Not because they are black or trans but because they are a doctor or lawyer and they are good at what they do.

I think it’s very important for writers to realize that they HAVE a default, normally a straight white cis male, and challenge it.

Another really good way to challenge the default is to mention the skin tone of all of your characters. Because how many times have you read a book where the only time skin color comes up is when the character isn’t white…