Diversity Matters: Stretch Your Skills
- Mar 23, 2018
- 3 min read
I'll be the first person to admit that I love a good Young Adult Distopian Fiction Novel. I live for the tensions caused by man vs society, teens discovering the injustices of the world, and the all too popular love triangles. Like Sour Cream and Onion Pringles, I eat it up.
But one thing this sub genre—and most other genres—could use is more diversity. The main character is almost always a girl who's "not like other girls", her plain brown hair contrasted by her fair skin. Her eyes are soulful, though. Can't forget that one.
"But Cookie, I read a Young Adult novel last week that had a secondary character that was black. That's diverse, right?"
Maybe. But adding a "black best friend", a "smart Asian", or even a "fashionista gay guy" isn't diversity, it's a stereotype. Yes, people have black best friends and know smart Asians and fashionable gay people, but if you try to add "diverse" characters and they're weak enough to be reduced to a single stereotypical phrase, your story is not diverse. It's not enough to toss in a non-white character and check diversity box. Crazily enough, people from other cultures, races, and ethnicities are actually as human and unique as someone from any other culture, race, and ethnicity.
Just in case I lost you, let me explain why diversity is even necessary in the first place:
Literature is often the first thing that exposes children to the world, and their new worldview can’t be so narrow as to exclude other cultures and experiences, and, for some children, to exclude their own from the picture.
Consider the following Ted Talk titled The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf by author Grace Lin.
As Lin discusses, books are either a window into a culture or lifestyle with which the reader is unfamiliar or is a mirror of your own life and experiences. The push for diversity is an opportunity to allow others to see into races and cultures with which they are unfamiliar, but this potential is halted by cultural inaccuracies. If the window the author provides is fogged up or too low to the ground to get a good vantage point, the reader’s perspective of the world would be deeply flawed.
Writing with diversity can...
Improve your writing skills
Teach you about other cultures
Have a positive impact on your readers and your community
A new concern arises: If we need to use character diversity as well as diversity of representation, how can we measure if a character is just a stereotype?
The problem with measuring a book's accuracy is that not everyone from a single race or culture has the exact same experience. In a book written by English teachers titled Stories Matter: The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children's Literature, they state,
“[N]o formula or prescription for culturally authentic...literature would emerge from the study of the works of writers from those cultures. For all the common cultural experiences and sensibilities shared by a group, there is still much within-group diversity.”
It is impossible to measure if a single character is an “accurate” portrayal of their race, because people do not act a certain way because they are of a particular race. Just as one person of a race cannot be used to represent the entire race as a whole, one character in a book cannot represent an entire race. People of any race are as diverse amongst themselves as people from different races.
If you walked up to a random person on the street and interviewed them about their lives, you'd find that there are more personalities than stoic protagonist, witty side kick, sexy love interest, and evil antagonist. As much as humans have in common, we are each unique in how we approach life. People can be pessimists, optimists, introverts, extroverts, realists, idealists, etc, regardless of their race, culture, and ethnicity. One's background is not the end-all-be-all of their personality.
If someone writes a book in which their characters are of a different background, they need to do research. Lots and lots of research. Then, once their research is done and their story is written, they need to find someone from that background or culture to read their story and give their two cents.
So, my fellow writers, when you start your next novel, try writing with diversity. (Say it with me: not stereotypes, diversity.) Challenge yourselves by writing outside of your own experience WITHOUT using stereotypes. Do research—do lots of research. Learn about other cultures. You'd be surprised to find how much you have in common with other members of this marvelous human species.
[Links to sources]
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Windows-and-Mirrors-of-Your
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w0AN1Lv-y7kC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=should+white+writers+write+outside+their+ethnicity%3F&ots=vgPnX27_QV&sig=nNQLnM27jHiNXusUkHeP85-W3Qg#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.cedu.niu.edu/oep/_pdf/Stories%20Matter.pdf#page=37
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