Here we go, this is an interesting topic:
I'm one of those people who never worried about this; indeed, it seems that until recently nobody else did either.
People have certainly been talking about it for quite a while, and at least some writers and academics have been concerned about it for a long time. The publishing industry, along with other segments of our society, are finally starting to notice in a more collective way that the world is a very diverse place, and that it has always been a diverse place, but until recently western media has presented certain things as norms that weren't, in fact, normal. Think of all the
gender inequities in movie casting, from the level of leads, to speaking roles, to extras in street scenes (and more than half male, and able bodied, and fit, and young, because diversity is not just about race). Think of all the TV shows, books, movies and so where there is the one token black person or woman or whoever, if that. We internalize those norms and don't tend to question them, but that doesn't mean they are the way life really is.
I can't help feeling that this is a fad, like space movies, kung fu, and westerns, and like all fads, it nails the story to our times. When someone picks up the book ten years from now, social niceties and opinions will have changed again, and not necessarily for the better.
I hope it's not a fad, and I don't think it really is. Once you've seen something, you can't unsee it. When I read books and watch movies and TV from a few decades back, I notice the lack of diversity in a way I didn't at the time. I also notice underlying assumptions about what a typical, normal, relatable human being is. I definitely notice the assumption that a book or movie can't be about anyone other than a white, straight, able-bodied guy unless the race, gender, orientation, and ability of the character is somehow a focus of the story.
But right now everyone's doing it, plopping all sorts of colours and types of people into a story because they allegedly should be there.
Your use of the term "plopping" makes it sound like it's done without thought, rhyme or reason. Your use of the term "allegedly" makes it sound like you don't agree that the world is a diverse place. Perhaps some are doing so randomly or without much thought, which isn't always the best approach. Obviously, there is more to creating realistic and reflective diversity than just randomly painting people with a brush. But it doesn't hurt to think about why we assume a character should
automatically be white, male, straight, able bodied, slender etc. when we write, or why we assume every story with a character who isn't all of these things must be focused somehow on the person's gender, race, ability, orientation and body type.
And there are certainly settings or stories where it makes sense for a setting to be less diverse. A novel set on a WWII US submarine will not be terribly diverse in terms of cast. Chances are the major characters (or at least the ones part of the submarine crew) will be male, white (racially segregated military still, at least in the US), able bodied and slender (recruitment requirements), young and so on. But even so, the world they lived in was diverse outside of the sub.
And with no bearing on the story, when there could at least be a plot where green people who eat rabbits are mocked or persecuted.
Why do you think race, gender, orientation, body type etc. must have a bearing on the story only when characters deviate from white, male, hetero, able bodies, young etc?
Worse still is this oft-repeated line that people wish to see themselves depicted on screen or in a book. I have never come across any research results or opinion polls that support this assertion; if someone knows where to find it, it would be illuminating.
Aside from being common sense, the research is out there if you care to search for it. Worse yet, the way we see people who are like ourselves, especially when we are young, portrayed will have lasting effects on the way we see ourselves.
https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=urss
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https://theconversation.com/why-its...-to-see-diverse-tv-and-movie-characters-92576
https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/josi.12096
https://writershelpingwriters.net/2...ature-why-its-important-and-how-to-handle-it/
https://litreactor.com/columns/representation-matters
https://www.bkreader.com/2017/04/11/importance-representation-childrens-literature/
https://books.google.com/books?hl=e...sentation of minorities in literature&f=false
We are struggling with differential outcomes in higher education right now. Seriously struggling. As instructors, we can't fix all the things that happened before the students get to our classes that put some groups more behind academically (in a statistical sense) than others. I certainly can't change the fact that a higher percentage of my white students had privileges growing up that better prepared them for college-level work. But we can try to present a more inclusive environment and be aware of our own underlying assumptions and of the danger of extrapolating our own experiences to others.
I teach students who hope to enter the allied health sciences. It is not a panacea, but it definitely helps for students to see diversity in everything from their textbook diagrams, to discussions about differential healthcare and demographics of disease, to examples of people from different backgrounds who have contributed to our understanding of science and medicine. So many have gotten the subtle (and not so subtle) message that people like them simply don's, or can't, do certain things. There is also the not so subtle issue of
under-representation of different groups in medical studies. Does this relate to literary under-representation? I think both are facets of the same problem--a mainstream culture that sees certain groups as more "normal" or "typical" than others.
Anecdotally, I can absolutely say that under representation of girls and women in books, TV, and movies (and in our classrooms) growing up, and the way they were represented when they were present, affected the way I see myself and my gender, and not in a good way. This is still reinforced by unequal and limited portrayals today.
Another issue, one discussed less often, is that
exposure to sympathetic characters who are different from oneself in books and media will expand empathy and decrease racism etc. in people who are of the culturally dominant groups.
To me the concept is faintly ridiculous: am I really supposed to be unable to connect with a character who has a different taste in music than me, or has a different shoe size?
No one has ever said this, but do you really think something as central to one's experience of self (not to mention the way one is treated by society) as race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability, are as minor and trivial as shoe size or your favorite music? Of course we can all relate to well-drawn characters of different genders, races, cultures, experiences even so. But does it not seem strange and unfair that members of some group have to do so far more often than others? Is it not a good idea, in a society where the consequences of this historical racism etc. is still very much with us, for white (and male, straight etc) people not to have more access to stories that allow them to learn from and relate to people who are different from them? Again, regarding gender, I eagerly read books about boys when I was a kid, and I enjoy books with male main characters today. But it would be nice of there had been (and are) more books and movies with good, well-drawn, and interesting,
and varied representations of girls and women.
Also, this sort of thing seems to exclude certain types of story. For instance, if you wish to tell a story about six straight white men climbing up a hill, now it seems that one of the white men must be replaced by a woman or a black man or some other variety of person. But then it's no longer the story of six straight white men climbing a hill anymore. The story might be amazing, but no-one will ever get to see or read it.
If there is a reason for those six men climbing up the hill to be straight, then I don't think anyone would question that, any more than we would question a story set in a British boy's boarding school in the 1920s focusing on boys from a certain social class and ethnicity. But even within that framework, I suspect at least a few of those boys might be gay, or overweight, or have certain health issues or disabilities, and those differences would have consequences, even if they aren't the focus of the story.
But what is starting to be questioned is why we have such a glut of stories focused on settings and experiences that are white, male, cis, het, able bodied, youthful etc. Why so many tales about the male experience during war, and so few about the female? Why so many tales about the pioneer or gold rush experience focusing on white pioneers and 49ers, and so few about black pioneers or Chinese Americans working and living in CA during the gold rush? And why do stories that focus on the white, straight, male experience often fail to acknowledge that other people existed at all, let alone had agency?
The most interesting (and worrisome) aspect is that there seems to be a considerable and growing backlash to all this. (And that many people are complaining that now only straight white men can be villains). I suppose it bears some relation to the market and/or is a generational thing. So what to do, pile in with the diversity or sit back and see what happens?
I don't think anyone says only straight, white men can be villains, but if the only villains are members of other groups, or if the only characters who aren't white, straight guys in a story are villains, then less likely to go unexamined these days. There have been certain stereotyped villains we've seen so often in a completely unexamined way, that people are going to be sensitive to them. This will likely change with time, if a more realistic and multifaceted diversity becomes normalized in stories.
what happens when we start granting rights to artificial intelligences and autonomous robots? Now there's a can of worms we need to be prepared for.
Sounds like a good plot for a SF story, and in fact it has been explored by some authors. So have the moral implications of the genetic "uplift" of nonhuman animals to full sapience. But I don't see how wondering what might happen in a hypothetical future is relevant to our current situation when people who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves are in fact saying that the status quo is not working for them.
