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Keithy

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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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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? There's plenty of people with size 8.5 feet and like classical music - are they so easily put off? I've happily watched movies and read books where the main protagonist is nothing like me, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

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.

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?

btw, for those who are wondering what might be coming next: 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.
 
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AstronautMikeDexter

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I am going to have to disagree. There is, of course, a right way and a wrong way to include some of these aspects in a story. Not everyone who writes diverse characters is going to hit the mark. You'd want to do research otherwise it can feel inauthentic. But including diverse characters in and of itself is only a good thing in my mind. It reflects the world we live in. I don't think it's a fad; I think it's a change that needs to happen.

Anecdotally, as a gay man, yeah, I do appreciate seeing people like me on the page or on the screen. It's refreshing. I don't have the same lived experience as a straight man. Maybe I can relate to something that they're going through but maybe I could relate to it more if it reflected a major part of my life more as well.

If someone can't comprehend how seeing themselves on the page can affect a person, maybe it's because they're already so used to seeing themselves on the page that it doesn't even register with them anymore.

I'm not sure how conflating the rights of AI and the rights of humans is pertinent to the issue of diversity either.
 

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What I've found useful to calls for more diversity is that it's caused me to analyze the bias I bring to my own work. To me, it's less about plopping people into a story and more about why is it that I gravitate toward including certain types of people above other certain types of people? Identifying that I am bringing a bias to my writing happens because of calls for diversity, and I think as a result my stories benefit from adjusting the demographics re: religion, age, orientation... both through representation re: characters, but also through subtext, theme, dialog/conversation/backstory, and so on. Your six white guys on a hill can bring in diversity through other means than changing one of them necessarily.

Those are my thoughts at this particular moment.
 

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I am struggling with how best to answer this.

The idea that perhaps readers might enjoy stories where not everyone is white, cis, able-bodied, heterosexual - this is not a fad. It's reality.

The idea that someone might have trouble publishing a story about six straight white guys climbing a hill is...not reality.

English-language publishing is still a wildly male, hetero, white-centric industry.

Write what you want, and please allow others to do the same. Nobody's taking anybody's chances away.
 

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I'm confused by your 'and no bearing on the story' comment. A story can have a brown main character, for example, without the story being about the fact that they are brown.

Also, representation does matter. Like everyone on AW, I am a voracious reader. I happen to be a British-born Indian and I don't tend to care about the main character's gender/race/sexual orientation etc. in a novel - I just want a good story. However, when I do pick up a novel about the experiences of other second generation immigrants, it is revelatory. There is something deeply emotional about seeing such a large part of your life reflected in fiction.

As a side-note - are people really complaining that villains are only ever straight white men? That's absolute rubbish. Just to pluck a few examples from the top of my head... Nagini in the live-action Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was played by a Korean actress, Claudia Kim. I believe the villain in the new James Bond film is played by Rami Malek, an American-born actor of Egyptian descent. I haven't seen it, but my understanding is that the actor who plays the villain in Black Panther is black, like the rest of the cast.

I'm genuinely perplexed by your comment about AI. It's not the same thing at all.
 

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Oh for crying out loud — don't tell me. You're white, male, straight and "normal."

I'm not straight, I'm not "normal" because I'm visually disabled. I'm not male.

I have little interest in reading just about white straight male characters. Sorry. Not interested. It's not realistic.

We live in a world of infinite variety. I not only want to read about people like me (middle-aged, female-identifying, queer, etc.) I want to read about the wide variety of peoples in the world, people not like me, and not like generic male characters either.

I don't care if you want to write diversely or not; it's up to you. I'd rather not see diversity done badly because it's so bloody awful when some idiot things people are like lego blocks of a similar size; hot swappable.

But I'm not interested in always reading about white straight men all the time. So very not interested. It's not what I see around me, at all, and I'm in a strikingly restricted environment compared to a typical Western city.

Regarding the asinine mention of an interest in diversity—maybe you should read a lot more, because this "fad" appears in texts written in multiple languages going back to the Middle ages, and possibly, sooner, since I'm not able to read any Asian languages.

But it's in Egyptian poetry that's pre-Biblical, it's in the works of people like Christine de Pizan, and it's all over literature from the seventeenth century on in English. People asking, in one way or another, "where are the books for people like us? Where are our voices?"

Unless of course you're a white straight cis-gendered male. In which case, you're often nicely isolated from the experiences of those not like you, because "they" don't matter.
 
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I'm one of those people who never worried about this; indeed, it seems that until recently nobody else did either. I can't help feeling that [diversity] is a fad, like space movies, kung fu, and westerns, and like all fads, it nails the story to our times.

...

The bridge crew of the original Star Trek (controversially) included a black woman, a Japanese man, and (at the height of the cold war) a Russian. That was 1966.

If it's been going for 55 years I'm not sure it counts as a "fad".

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. 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.

Uh, I'm pretty sure you didn't mean this like it sounds. Are you suggesting the only role of diverse people is to be persecuted? Because, uh. That's... extremely not ok.

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.

So, first, that's a bit of an oversimplification; it might be better to say whether seeing diverse characters on screen or in a book is valuable to people.

Second, there are a number of folks from diverse backgrounds here telling you that, yes, it matters to them, and you should listen. But if you're asking for receipts:

Fiction, empathy, and gender diversity WARNING: link leads to a PDF
Diversity on screen equals bigger box office bucks, study finds
Two in Three Black Americans Don't Feel Properly Represented in Media (money quote: "74% of those polled reported that content being inclusive (representing different cultures or people) is a key factor when they are choosing what they will watch.")
Why Seeing Yourself Represented On Screen Is So Important

... this was literally five minutes of Google searches. There's a lot more out there. A lot. There is a massive, decades-old body of research supporting this concept that it's valuable for people to see someone "like them" in media and that they'll seek that content out. Even the naysayers tacitly admitted it during the big "oh noes all these YA books have female protaganists and BOYS WILL NOT READ ABOUT GIRLS!!1!" scare a while back (the nineties? The decades blur together now. Goddammit when did I get old enough for that.) It was ridiculous (because there was still, like, a bazillion books for boys on the dang shelves) but it spoke to a pretty self-evident truth: people like seeing themselves in books.

Even you've fallen into that heffalump trap. You say:

I've happily watched movies and read books where the main protagonist is nothing like me, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

But not a paragraph later:

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.

So... if one of your six white men climbing a hill is now black; and you, yourself, don't mind stories where the main protagonist is "nothing like you"; and the rest of the story stays the same... why is it a different "type" of story? Why has it fundamentally changed? Do black men, or gay men, or women not climb hills, or do so in a fundamentally different manner? Why is the story suddenly different for you, less satisfying for you, a fundamentally different type of story for you, when one of the people in it no longer resembles you?

And if it is a fundamentally different story... then why wouldn't you accept that for other people, who are not like you, reading a story that includes only people like you is likewise fundamentally different and less satisfying?

The most interesting (and worrisome) aspect is that there seems to be a considerable and growing backlash to all this.

Well, no. As someone who's been watching this debate in one form or another for, Jesus, over twenty years (OLD I tell you HOW DID THIS HAPPEN) there is a less considerable and shrinking "backlash" to "all this". People have been bitching up a storm about "token" characters and people using diversity to "get attention" and "oh no it's not ok to be a WHITE MAN any more" for friggin' ever. They complained about Star Trek having female and black captains in the 90s, they complained about Starbuck's character getting gender-swapped in the '00s, they're complaining about Rey and Finn and "fake girl gamers" now. I remember getting stared out of multiple comics stores in the '00s or so while the (white, male) staff not-so-sotto-voice complained about Neil Gaiman writing his dumb GIRL characters and giving GIRLS the idea they could read comics, the nerve of them, they were RUINING EVERYTHING with their GIRL COOTIES.

It's all the same old crap, except it's getting quieter and quieter, because more and more it's accepted that, hey, girls can captain starships. Black guys can be in a movie as something besides the villain or the comic relief. Queer people can be the epic fantasy heroes who save the world. There's not more backlash, it's just getting uglier and more shrill as the creeps get driven into their increasingly small, lonely corner. There's so few of them now, being extra loud is the only way they can avoid getting drowned out.

(And that many people are complaining that now only straight white men can be villains).

The only people I have heard saying this were people complaining, as you are, about diversity. Within diversity-positive spaces, complaints only crop up when the ONLY roles in a story is for queer, POC, and female characters are villains and victims. Which, you know. *clears throat* *side-eyes much of twentieth century*

---

Look, I'm also straight and white. I grew up in the southern Appalachians, which, I assure you, are heavily in the running for "whitest place on earth". There were two black kids in my elementary school -- not my CLASS; in the entire SCHOOL. I'm pretty sure I was in my teens before I met anyone with Asian blood. I know where you're coming from here, which is the main reason I've written this epic. It's not comfortable getting peeled out of that whitebread sameness, whether it's through travelling or reading. It's intimidating realizing how much you have to learn, and frankly, a bit scary. But... the world where everyone important is straight, white, and likely male? That's fantasy. A glorified gingerbread house ghetto, shored up by books and movies and the news for far too long. The world where people who aren't like us aren't just villains, victims, or exotic pets? That's the real world.

I write fiction, but I don't write the one where only straight white people exist any more. It has overstayed its welcome.
 

Keithy

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So many questions arise from these responses.

Yes, there really is a backlash, rightly or wrongly. I am not sure if I should wait and see whether this takes hold or not. And yes, people really are complaining about villains always being straight white men; just look at certain fandoms. I suppose this is a situation where you're always going to upset someone, in fact a lot of someones who would otherwise buy your book or watch your movie. I am looking for the right balance to take here; who to upset and who to embrace. Or should I just write the darn story, see who buys it, and ignore the howls of outrage? And yes, the howls are getting louder too.

Regarding "plopping in" a diverse character: I've had that suggested to me, and it sounded like tokenism or "making up the numbers". Either way, it would look like I'm dragging our current world into what is supposed to be a medieval-style fantasy world, thus spoiling the illusion ("it takes me out of it", as some would say).

And lastly, I did not mention the probability that robots and AI will be granted rights to conflate that with current diversity issues. I was attempting to point out that beyond current human diversity issues, there's a much vaster question coming - and I think it's coming faster than anyone would care to imagine. I asked my wife tonight: if a robot was given the vote, what would it vote for, aside from more electricity? She didn't know, but I'd bet that it would be something so alien as to be inconceivable. And suddenly diversity changes markedly, for wouldn't they think that we are all the same? They might call us squishies or something even less complimentary.

I read those references above. They're interesting, but while there's many opinions there, there are few undeniable facts.
 
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mccardey

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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.



<<snip>>


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.

Oh good grief.
 

lizmonster

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The thing is, when someone's complaining about diversity, I can tell you with 99% certainty a few things about that person.

Men are not endangered. Stories about men are not endangered. And the fandoms you speak of? ...Yeah, I can tell you who's doing the complaining there, too.

As for the "backlash" you're talking about - yeah, Twitter isn't the publishing industry. The publishing industry focuses on what will allow them to turn a profit. So far, white men are still getting book deals. Really good ones, too. Agents and publishers on social media do pursue non-white-male writers because they're trying to expand their lists. That doesn't mean they're ignoring men. I promise.

One purely personal anecdote: I play video games. I play them badly, and I don't play a ton of them; I prefer SF/tech-based quest stories, which leaves out a lot of the big names. But one of my favorites allows me to play as either male or female. Yes, there should be more choices than that - but I can't properly express what it means to me to be able to choose. Regardless of the flaws in the game, I will always love it for that.

Representation matters. To actual people. And perhaps, my friend, you should consider that you're arguing the point that white men are the norm, and everyone else is some different thing that needs to be examined as alien. We are not "them" - we are your fellow humans. We should get stories too.

And if you don't see any stories out there you like, please, in all seriousness, write a story you want to read. I can assure you - any trip to a bookstore can assure you - men are still being published, and in droves. You writing about men won't doom you. For real.
 

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Keithy, if you can support any of your assertions with evidence, I'd like to see it. If you're arguing that we don't need diversity in publishing, because people don't need to see themselves represented in literature, why do over-represented straight white males have such a panic attack when they think they might be moved to the edge of the spotlight?

I'd be happy to never again read a book centred around a straight white male protagonist, but...well...those stories are everywhere.
 

mccardey

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Keithy, you're really very late to this no-longer-white-male party. But help yourself to a drink and a plate, and just sit down and, yanno, watch it not mind all that terribly much how you feel.
 

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And lastly, I did not mention the probability that robots and AI will be granted rights to conflate that with current diversity issues. I was attempting to point out that beyond current human diversity issues, there's a much vaster question coming - and I think it's coming faster than anyone would care to imagine. I asked my wife tonight: if a robot was given the vote, what would it vote for, aside from more electricity? She didn't know, but I'd bet that it would be something so alien as to be inconceivable. And suddenly diversity changes markedly, for wouldn't they think that we are all the same? They might call us squishies or something even less complimentary.

Dude, you gotta get out there and read more. Isaac Asimov wrote about this in the 1950s, as did numerous other writers, including C. L. Moore (1944!), Anne McCaffrey, Tannith Lee, Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Sheep, aka Bladerunner) etc. etc. etc. This is old old news, and you did essentially draw an equivalence between writing diversely and being non-human. Heck, it's a primary theme of STNG of the 1990s, introduced via the Original Series Star Trek from the 1960s.

If you read more, if you read widely, diversely, outside your comfort zone you might realize you need to read more.

There's a thing where white straight cis male becomes the default to the point where those readers don't even realize that they are making non-white male cis straight characters into something they aren't.

And that defacto "standard" alienates readers. You absolutely don't have to write diversely, but seriously, look around you. Pay attention to people. Really look. There's a lot more diversity around you than you think.

No one, no one, wants tokenism. But readers do want to have their realities reflected.
 

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If you resent "diversity", I’d argue you shouldn’t try to include it in your writing. It’s too easy to see that resentment creeping in.

After reading a ton of query blurbs on MSWL, it seems like agents are more wary of “fake” diversity than not including it at all. More than one agent posted that they would reject a book out of principle if the protagonist was a (insert marginalized group here) and the author was not. So that’s a thing. I’m a very private non-binary person with an "invisible" disability, and frankly, I resent the fact that I’d have to make a big deal out of these things to get them to look at my work.

I think it’s all about inclusion. Most genre fiction is about wish fulfillment, and if people can’t imagine themselves as a character in your story, it’s just not going to work for them. If you write a story about a female marine, it’s not going to turn off men, because of course men can be marines, so they can imagine themselves in the same position as the MC. But if you only write about male marines, women aren’t going to be able to relate, because traditionally, being a marine would exclude being a women, and they’d spend the entire book with that in the back of their minds.

Personally, I find injecting diverse characters into stories often breaks immersion. Whenever I see the one POC in a Tolkien type movie or show, I always ask myself, “How did they get there?” But I can deal with it, if it means my friend doesn’t have to sit through the whole thing wondering if they would be murdered by the protagonist the second they set foot in the world.
 

JJ Litke

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For anyone who is genuinely interested in diversity, check out this Tumblr: People of Color in European Art History (tagline: because you wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate). I follow their Twitter account, there’s lots of really cool content there.
 

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Regarding "plopping in" a diverse character: I've had that suggested to me, and it sounded like tokenism or "making up the numbers". Either way, it would look like I'm dragging our current world into what is supposed to be a medieval-style fantasy world, thus spoiling the illusion ("it takes me out of it", as some would say).

So, no Othello for you then?

You consider the "medieval world" to have consisted entirely of Britain and Western Europe?

Would it surprise you to learn that dark-skinned people were routinely portrayed in medieval art, but have also been literally erased from textbooks... as in, the dark-skinned people were painted white when reproduced?

In other words... POC in a "medieval-style" world "spoils the illusion" for you because the all-white Middle Ages is just that. An illusion. One created for specifically political purposes.

Look -- as others have said, if you don't want to include diversity in your books, don't. It's not going to stop you being published, or get you in "trouble" -- the straight white male is still seen as enough of a default that it's unlikely to get you any notice at all, positive or negative.

But don't kid yourself that you're somehow being apolitical or failing to "drag the modern world into it" when you write monocultural, monochrome worlds. It is a very political choice to repeat, however thoughtlessly, a very specific political narrative. And you might want to think long and hard about whether that's an alliance you would choose.
 

be frank

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Either way, it would look like I'm dragging our current world into what is supposed to be a medieval-style fantasy world, thus spoiling the illusion ("it takes me out of it", as some would say).

I'm sorry, I'm very confused. Could you please explain which part of either "medieval-style" or "fantasy" precludes diversity?

Do you actually believe there were only straight white people in medieval times? It's almost like you might have learnt that by watching and reading media that only shows straight white people in those settings. Which should maybe tell you something about why including diversity (read: accuracy to the world) is so important.


eta: Cross-posted with a couple of others! What they said, too.
 
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BenPanced

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Dude, you gotta get out there and read more. Isaac Asimov wrote about this in the 1950s, as did numerous other writers, including C. L. Moore (1944!), Anne McCaffrey, Tannith Lee, Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Sheep, aka Bladerunner) etc. etc. etc. This is old old news, and you did essentially draw an equivalence between writing diversely and being non-human. Heck, it's a primary theme of STNG of the 1990s, introduced via the Original Series Star Trek from the 1960s.

Cheeses. Reminds me of the blowback Paramount received over Star Trek Discovery when they decided to focus on a black woman as the primary character. Y'know. ONE OF THE BASIC TENETS THAT GENE RODDENBERRY HIMSELF WANTED IN HIS ORIGINAL SHOW. Heaven forfend the producers of a TV show created for a 21st century audience still try to adhere to the series bible and promote diverse values in its cast and characters.

And never mind the shit that was lost over the upcoming not-heteronormative characters for the next season.

This is a very hypocritical business that can only be changed from within and it's happening at a glacial pace. As mentioned earlier, if you feel you "need" to introduce a "diverse" cast, that tokenism is going to come across very hard and very fast to the readers you want to attract. It'll be too obvious when you're trying to be On Trend (I'd noticed this about a TV show I'd wanted to watch and came away from it offended and horrified). Trust me: this comes across in how your characters interact with each other and how they're perceived by your readers (hell, I'd noticed I had to pull back on some SJW moments characters were having in a trunked manuscript). It'll sound as fake and as phony as the beliefs you're trying to espouse when you don't believe in them.
 

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Either way, it would look like I'm dragging our current world into what is supposed to be a medieval-style fantasy world, thus spoiling the illusion ("it takes me out of it", as some would say).

Dude you gotta get out more.
The Neolithic peoples of Ireland were dark-skinned with high levels of melatonin. Think Middle Eastern or India, with a range of variation, some very dark.

There were black people in London and all over Europe before the Romans arrived in England with Caesar.

There were Black Vikings (they are in fact mentioned in the Sagas and the Irish Annals), and female vikings (we've found their burials, with weapons). There were women who had sexual and romantic relationships with other women in Medieval Ireland and pretty much everywhere else in Europe (we have letters, court cases, and love poetry) as well as men in same-sex relationships.

There were people with disabilities in pre-Classical eras; sometimes they were demonized, sometimes they were seen as divine, and sometimes, they were ordinary people with ordinary lives. We've found references in letters from the Classical era, and we've found their bog-preserved bodies, and skeletal remains.

The world is wide, and time is long, but people have always been varied.
 
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AW Admin

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This is a very hypocritical business that can only be changed from within and it's happening at a glacial pace. As mentioned earlier, if you feel you "need" to introduce a "diverse" cast, that tokenism is going to come across very hard and very fast to the readers you want to attract. It'll be too obvious when you're trying to be On Trend (I'd noticed this about a TV show I'd wanted to watch and came away from it offended and horrified). Trust me: this comes across in how your characters interact with each other and how they're perceived by your readers (hell, I'd noticed I had to pull back on some SJW moments characters were having in a trunked manuscript). It'll sound as fake and as phony as the beliefs you're trying to espouse when you don't believe in them.

Yep. Be real. Be true to your story, and be authentic.

But as writers: look around you. Is it really all white cis-gendered straight men? Really?

And don't use the "European Medieval history was white and male and straight and able-bodied." Because it wasn't.
 
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If you resent "diversity", I’d argue you shouldn’t try to include it in your writing. It’s too easy to see that resentment creeping in.

^^ This. The original post drips with resentment and hate. I honestly haven't come across such a hate-filled post in a long time. It actually hurt my head and my heart to read, and I shudder to think how that would translate in a full-length book. People like me exist whether it has "bearing on the plot", whether you like it or not. And yeah, we want to see ourselves represented in stories. I used to be excited when I saw dark-haired Caucasian characters in books because boy, I was really starved for representation. Sooo, yeah.
 

Sonya Heaney

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It's a slippery slope having female characters in books. The next thing you know we'll be giving robots the vote.
 

JJ Litke

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Here’s an NPR article about the Medieval POC Tumblr I posted a link to earlier, in case anyone wants a summary.

Here’s another article about Black people in Medieval Europe.

Katfeete’s point about the attempted erasure of POC from European art is dead on. More evidence of this comes from DNA ancestry tests—no one’s results are monocultural. People have moved, migrated, and traded all over the world for millennia. Buying into the false idea that Europe has always been lily white is childishly simplistic, and we should all want to do better than that in our writing. This isn’t restrictive, it’s actually freeing. This opens up the possibilities of including varied points of view and perspectives.
 
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Woollybear

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http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2011...-winning-and-bestselling-young-adult-fiction/

Research (see article ^^ and references therein) into the value of diversity in (in this case YA) literature. They point to the value of promoting literacy among underperforming reading groups (which tend to be minorities) by having protagonists 'that look like me.' But also! The value of seeing characters 'who don't look like me' as a means of increasing compassion--or at least raising the issue!

And some other nice insights on the topic.
 
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frimble3

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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.
What hill, and what 6 white guys - remember, Everest was only 'conquered' by the efforts of a lot of POC Sherpas carrying oxygen, gear, and, in some sad cases, climbers. But, nooo, whitey gets all the credit. Although, to be fair, Hilary did give credit to Tenzing Norquay.
There's always self-publishing. (Which is pretty much what most minority writers have done - but, once again, the cream rises to the top. Write your story, see how it goes.)



Whenever I see the one POC in a Tolkien type movie or show, I always ask myself, “How did they get there?” But I can deal with it, if it means my friend doesn’t have to sit through the whole thing wondering if they would be murdered by the protagonist the second they set foot in the world.
You're okay with elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs ents and ring-wraiths, but a single POC knocks you out of the story? Really - maybe there need to be more POC, so they get the same pass that the elves, etc. get: they are just part of this world.

Any place that has a sea-port, or trading of any sort, or, indeed, a beach to wash up on, is going to have people of different ethnicities, colours, or cultural groups.
How did they get there? The same way the white guy got into that movie about China's Great Wall.
 
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