The Probem of Diversity in Writing

This is going to be kind of a long post, and one that takes a position some may consider controversial, but I hope the reader will bare with me.  I’ll try to be as clear and concise as I can be.   Today I am going to talk about the problems inherent in the belief that  a story must have a diverse cast of characters drawn from  various races, genders, religions, sexual preferences and economic strata, or be considered bigoted.  I’ve seen good writers called racist because they didn’t have the whole set of humankind, all presented in a positive manner.  This is not a notion I hold to.

                The idea of true diversity in a written work is a lot harder than it might initially seem.  If the idea is to make everyone feel represented in your story, race is only the beginning.  Let’s take just the African American segment of our ambitiously inclusive story for the moment.  We need both a clean cut good looking educated professional type, and a tough, street savvy type.  In a tv show they might be played by Blair Underwood and Ice-T respectively.   We also need a least one black woman, preferably more than one so we can have a professional type, and a hard working single mother. At least one of the characters should be religious. At least one needs to be gay.  In this case we can probably get away without having a republican, but we really should have at least one. Some poor and some well off, some athletically gifted, some not, some young, some old.  We’re looking at somewhere around five or six African American characters all portrayed positively, and some pulling double duty as both athletic and gay, or professional and religious, ect .  Now we have to do this again for the Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern characters with the added complication of cultural origin and religious sect. You can’t represent a Peruvian with a Columbian. There’s bad blood there.  You can’t represent a Shiite with a Sunni or an Indian with a Pakistani. 

               You can see how if we tried to write this story, we’re already dealing with a cast of 30 or 40 characters, all of which require development and attention and screen time.  It’s not really a viable scenario. The most you can hope for in terms of diversity is to pick your battles.  What kind of story are you telling? Is it better served by having a gay character or an Asian? Or even a Caucasian.  Maybe you’re Tyler Perry.

                So let’s say you’ve decided to write a story, and you’ve cut back all your diverse groups as deeply as you can without getting pestered by those Berkeley critics.  You’re writing a story about a commercial flight that goes down in the Himalayas where this small group of survivors must work together to make their way to civilization.  We’ll say we have a 35 year old white engineering consultant on his way to a project in Asia somewhere, a black marine lieutenant retuning from leave where he met his new daughter.  A Hispanic lady doctor on her way to a clinic in India, a 47 year old Japanese salaryman with Sony, and a 21 year old Egyptian Muslim woman who works as a photographer for a Newspaper in Cairo.  This is a suspiciously diverse group with no repeats, but let’s role with it.  Given what you know about these people, how well can you write them? Does each of them have their own unique voice and presence? Do their thoughts and actions and dialogue match their cultures and backgrounds, or are they really just white people whose physical descriptions are Asian, Hispanic or Black?

                About 12 years ago give or take I stumbled onto a fanfiction writer named Chris Dee. Note the name. She writes the Cat-Tales series which is based on the DC comics Universe and centers on the relationship between Batman and Catwoman.  We eventually became friends and even collaborated on some graphics projects, but when I first spoke to her after reading a few of her stories I paid her the immense compliment of not knowing she was a She.  You see, in those first few stories I read, I perceived an insight into the way I thought as a man that I had not formerly encountered in fanfiction written by women.  I think that if you are going to be a good writer, you owe that level of insight to all of your characters.  That can be a problem, because I don’t know very many writers who can write a young Muslim woman from Cairo working in a man’s profession so well that young Egyptian women will be surprised that you are not one of them.   I think your story is better served, and your readers in turn, by writing characters that feel natural to you. When a character comes to you organically from the needs of the story, everything comes more smoothly; the actions and dialogue often write themselves. Shoehorning characters that aren’t right for the story for the sake of diversity will disrupt the flow of your creativity.  Imagine poker night with your buddies. Imagine the cigars, and the beer, and the nachos, the boasting and the dirty jokes. Now imagine your wife made you let your mother-in-law play.

                I am not saying that diversity should not be a part of your writing. I’m saying write the characters that work best for the story, no matter what they are. There wasn’t a white guy in sight in Slumdog Millionaire and I could care less. I loved that movie. It’s a deeply human story, and I’m a human being. That’s enough for me.  That is the golden rule of writing for me. Tell a human story, and the rest will take care of itself.  

                Diversity in and of itself is a good thing. It brings fresh perspectives, new ideas and a greater understanding of the people we live with. It makes us more fully human.  There is something ugly however in the way it is being pushed into the arts though.  It is the expectation that your reader can not rise above his prejudices and should not be expected to.  It’s like segregation for empathy.  “Don’t worry about those characters sir, well find you someone who looks like you to care about. “ That’s one of the things that drives me crazy about the scholarly journals that discuss the shows of Joss Whedon .   There’s always someone who says “Joss covers a lot of themes of female empowerment, and has positive feminist role models, but his lack of characters of color means he fails on Race.” To this I say if you can watch an episode like “The Body” and not empathize with Buffy because she’s white, then Joss Whedon is not the racist in the room. Also you should call your mother.  Believe your reader can be better than that.   Believe that if you write a human story, the innate humanity within your readers will find it’s reflection within your characters no matter what they look like. People will surprise you sometimes if you just give them the chance.

Usually I like to include some kind of picture or video to help illustrate the theme of the article, so here’s a video of people from every corner of the earth just being human.