crankyAnd people wonder why I spend so much time wanting to set the world on fire.
I think it's very telling that the people who say it's wrong to want representation in fiction are almost overwhelmingly white. If I want to read about white people having amazing adventures and doing incredible things, being heroes and villains, simple and complicated, handsome and hideous, loved and hated, all I need to do is pick up a book at random. There is a literally 90% chance that I will get all those things from whatever book I've chosen, especially if I'm going for the "classic literature" of the science fiction/fantasy/horror world. 90%! And that may honestly be low-balling the number! If I were a straight white man, of course I wouldn't see any issue with representation in fiction—I'd be on every page I turned! Even as a straight white woman, I'd be on a lot of pages, even if half those pages would have me either naked or screaming (or both, if I had happened to grab a Gor book). There's no problem with representation here!
But I've never been a straight white man. I've never been a straight white girl, either. I was a bisexual kid with a lot of questions and not very many answers, and it wasn't until I encountered ElfQuest that I actually felt like I saw myself on a page. No, I didn't think I was an elf, although I sort of wished I was, because elves are awesome, but it was Cutter and Leetah and the rest who introduced me to the idea that I could love boys and girls, and not be a bad person. I wasn't indecisive or wicked. I just had a lot of love to give, and my set of criteria for who got it wasn't based on gender.
Let me restate that: I was already bi. I had already been attracted to girls, guys, and a kid in my class who went by "Pup" and refused to be pinned down to either gender (and my second grade teacher never forced Pup to commit either way, which was pretty damn cool of her, given that this was the 1980s). Books did not make me choose my sexuality; books told me a) that my sexuality existed, and b) that it was okay, it was natural, it was not proof that there was something wrong with me. And especially in grade school/middle school, sexuality is invisible in a way that very little else is. No one knew I was queer until I came out. It wasn't even a matter of openly hiding it; sex wasn't on the table, I didn't feel like sharing, I didn't share. No one knew that I was different. Everyone thought that when they read their books about little white girls having adventures, they were reading about me, too.
You know what's not invisible? Race. "I don't see race" is bull. When we read those books about little white kids having amazing adventures, we knew that it was white kids having adventures, because adventures are for white people. At the age of eight, we all understood that our non-white classmates were not represented in the books we read, and very few of us had the sophistication to jump to "this is a lack of representation." Instead, we jumped to "I guess Oz doesn't like black people." Because books shape your view of the world, books remake you in their image, and the books we had said little white kids go on adventures, little kids of any other race are nowhere to be seen.
This is a problem.
So some of us grew up, and for whatever reason—maybe it affected us directly, maybe it affected our friends, maybe it was just pointed out—we started trying to show a world that looked more like the world we actually lived in, where everything wasn't a monoculture. And for some reason, this is being taken as a threat. How dare you want little Asian kids to go on adventures. How dare you want queer teenagers to save the world. How dare you imply that transwomen can be perfectly ordinary, perfectly competent people who just want to not get eaten by the dinosaur that's been eating everyone else. That's selfie culture, that's diversity for the sake of diversity, that's wrong. And after a great deal of consideration, I have come to this conclusion:
If that's what you think, you can go fuck yourself.
That's not politic, and it's not nice, and it may cause a couple of people to go "what a bitch, I'm done," but I don't fucking care. Because I am tired of people needing to thank me for making an effort. I am tired of receiving email that says it was distracting when so-and-so turned out to be gay, or asking why I have Indian characters in three separate series (and the fact that having an Indian woman show up and never speak a line is apparently enough to put Indexing on the same level as Blackout for some people just makes me weep for humanity). I am tired of "oh you feel like you're so open-minded" because I write about gay people, bi people, poly people, people who are exactly like the people that I know. I want to be unremarkable for my casting choices, and only remarkable for my characters being awesome (because let's face it, my characters are awesome).
A lack of representation in fiction leads to a lack of self-esteem, because selfie culture is important: we need to see ourselves, and the people who keep trying to dismiss that as somehow selfish or greedy or narcissistic are the ones who've had a mirror held up to them for so long that they don't even see it anymore. White becomes so generic, so default, that it's not mentioned when describing a character ("blonde hair, blue eyes" vs. "oh, she's black, of course, that's the biggest thing"). Humanity is huge and diverse and amazing, and saying that only a small, approved sliver of it belongs in fiction is a dick move. If diversity is distracting, it's because it's so rare.
We can fix that.
December 12 2013, 14:51:58 UTC 3 years ago
I'm white but have Cherokee ancestry. I was homeschooled, and Dad made sure we were well-educated on Native American history. I remember being told when I was seven or so not to tell anyone I was part Cherokee (I'm 1/8) because people would treat me differently. We technically (long story) lived on another tribal reservation, and I saw how people treated them, the kids who were my friends. I take after my mom's side in looks, and I pass; my sister and half brother don't always, and my dad doesn't always either. If they're out in the sun, and tan, the features become much more obviously Cherokee, and people do treat them differently. It's usually subtle, but it's there.
So as a kid, I would look for books about Native American kids. Guess how much luck I had there? Outside of The Indian and the Cupboard and Julie and the Wolves, which both have problems, I don't remember any. I still don't really see Native Americans in fiction, especially in SFF. When I found Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books with the Indian analogues (I'm blanking on their names), I about cried.
I don't really talk about this much because for all intents and purposes, I am treated as a white person. If I can get my dad to actually give me the goddamn information for genealogy (he's being a dick about this), I'm within where I could register with my tribe. But because I'm not on the rolls, people generally object to me talking about it. I can understand why, because my experience is very different from someone who grew up on the reservation, but that doesn't erase my lineage, nor my desire to read books about people like me.
Partly because of that, I also went out of my way (and still do) to read books about other people that aren't white. Thankfully, I grew up in an area that is... well. I joke that it is crunchy-granola land; very white liberal with a good amount of multiculturalism. So, the librarians would put out on display specifically books about POC, along with books about queer people, etc. Not that I exactly found many SFF books that were multicultural, but I found a lot of kid's/YA that were.
And then I got into reading SFF and the field totally changed.
I'll give SFF credit for writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey, who really did help me realize that being bisexual (although I use queer at this point, since bi/pan has connontations that don't fit me) was not a bad thing. Marion had lots of lesbian characters in her Darkover setting, some of whom I had some very strong fictional crushes on, and Mercedes also had a lot of queer characters in her stories. Background characters, too, which I also look at as much as the main characters. My Dad went through a fundie phase where "gay people are going to hell", and these books really helped me a lot to realize that what my Dad was saying was BS. Because I couldn't see these beloved characters being hellbound, so someone had to be wrong.
I was suicidally depressed much of my teen years. Reading books about people like me? Books that helped me to realize that being me wasn't a bad thing? SAVED MY LIFE.
So FUCK those assholes who say that writing diverse characters isn't important. It fucking well is.
January 21 2014, 06:45:38 UTC 3 years ago