Sidebar IV: Crouching Author, Hidden Minority

Sidebar IV: Crouching Author, Hidden Minority

Welcome readers! This sidebar is gonna be a little different, since it’s usually just me babbling about the topic and our good editor doesn’t even see them until I post them. Today, our editor Dr. Ben Allen will be joining us in the conservation since he has relevant experience (God Frigid, just tell them I’m gay, it’s fine.) I served during don’t ask don’t tell Doc, habits are hard to break. Anyways! We’ll be talking about minorities in fiction, most specifically minority characters you didn’t realize were minorities until the end of the story (*coughcough*Dumbledore*coughcough*). Dumbledore is a good example of that, as is Aceh from Ready Player One. Let me get into this.

Minority characters and representation can be a touchy topic. Certain types of people are underrepresented in lot of fantasy and science fiction stories. In all honesty I tend to be harder on science fiction and stories set in the modern day like urban fantasy (Because presumably cultural mores in the future and now are such that, say, gay characters are likely to be out of the closet, and travel between regions that might have different racial and ethnic groups is easy. As opposed to say, fantasy, where black people might have to cross a desert to reach NotEurope(™)). Although I’ll note that Rome in its heyday had a substantial African population, given that the Empire ruled a part of Africa. A varied population helps bring home the idea that your city is massive and important folks, just a thought. Now I’m not saying you should have a bloody racial or gender quota or what have you but having discussed this with fans who are of a different race or orientation then myself… I see where they’re coming from. If there’s no one like you in fiction, it starts to feel like your society is trying very hard to pretend you don’t exist and that would bother most people (While that is true, it’s a bit more than that too. Science fiction, fantasy, comics of various sorts… those are our versions of mythology. They tell stories about who we are as a people, what our values are. They give us heroes we can identify with and look up to at a young age when we’re figuring ourselves out. It’s harmful to be excluded from that.).

So I’m hoping most of you can see how this is kinda of a big deal, I mean imagine that for years you’ve been reading about characters that you like and identify with but there’s a gulf there because of a difference in experience (let’s not pretend that race, gender and more doesn’t change your life experience either folks) but you finally find a character who does match up. Maybe it’s a character that’s open about their faith and it happens to be your faith and this character practices it, not just pays it lip service. Now imagine this is the only character you’ve ever found that does this. How exciting would that be to finally have that? Now imagine that instead of seeing the character go to service, or pray or do rituals connected to that faith… The creator of the character just mentions it a year or so after the series has ended (ROWLING!!!!!!). How would you feel about that? The experience wouldn’t be the same at all would it?

And now for non-parenthetical commentary. What Rowling did is… look, it’s what I’m going to call post facto tokenism. It’s like, she felt like she had to include a gay character for the sake of diversity, but didn’t want to make the effort of actually having Dumbledore’s sexuality impact his character in some way or matter in the plot. She gets the props for including a gay character (after the fact), but didn’t take any of the risk. It’s cynical and insulting. I can see why it might have been difficult to include in the main story, but she’s a good enough writer she could have done it in the sections about Grindelwald. There could have been a conversation about Grindelwald and Dumbledore being a thing, and Harry being either confused or astonished by this. Hermione could have been pleasantly surprised at how progressive the Wizarding World is in this respect, while dismayed at his taste in men; not that she has much room to stand on. Seriously, why did Ron exist? (Ron isn’t the worst choice she could have made, it’s all the other men she’s attracted to that are questionable if you ask me but we aren’t getting into that). And this is in a setting where people of every other possible group is represented in some way. There is even a lengthy episode in book two that goes into the oppression of an entirely fictional slave caste. Now, in Fantastic Beasts part II, we have a not-explicitly-gay Dumbledore, in a plot arc where it bloody well should matter! I just have to hope Jude Law (that sexy manbeast) puts All The Subtext into his performance in such a way that it transcends the script, or I’ll be pissed. For fuck’s sake, Newt Scamander is a textbook autism case(And he’s awesome!) but noooo! Can’t have gay Dumbledo(Ahem) I’m ranting. I’ll stop.

Now I can see how a writer would be hesitant. It’s a lot easier to screw up writing a character with a different gender (look how often it’s done!) or race then yourself and writing someone with a different orientation is considered in and of itself a political act in the anglosphere. Writing a character of a different race can cause some of the more faint hearted writers to be leery because well, if that character is primarily negative or has a memorably negative personality trait, you’re inviting the audience to wonder if you’re making a statement about that’s character race. Honestly this can be counteracted pretty easily though, by having more than one character of each race (which is why avoiding tokenism is good for the author as well as the audience). There’s no reason your group is limited to one black man, or one Jewish girl or… You get the idea. Additionally if you present your minority characters in stealth mode, you can claim to be colorblind or trying to present the moral that these differences don’t matter.

Except they do matter, obviously. Being gay, or trans, or black, or jewish informs who a person is, and it informs their relationships with their society and other individuals. Someone who “doesn’t see race”, for instance, is also putting the blinders on with respect to how race impacts the experiences of their characters, and that isn’t just bad writing, it is itself a form of racism by way of erasure. Try telling a black guy, heaven forbid a black woman, that their experiences are irrelevant (Telling them that their experiences are the same as yours or that their race didn’t impact those experiences is also a bad idea. I’m gonna suggest trusting me on that one.). Try telling me mine as a gay man don’t inform who I am. It won’t go over well.

Now not every story needs a super diverse cast. If you’re writing a historical fiction set in the countryside of 1620s England, then having members of the Zulu tribe show up is gonna be a little.. Odd. Interesting mind you, but odd. But if you’re writing a science fiction set in the far flung future of 3422 and traveling to other planets is as easy as flying a plane is today… Why not have several different ethnic groups interacting? Why not have some diversity in your characters? For that matter when writing fantasy, remember that before the Bronze Age Collapse, you had people traveling from Britain to Egypt to sell Tin. It was a long, dangerous journey (in literal row boats) but it was still done often enough that it wasn’t considered outrageous for those people to be there (As another example, there are cultural artifacts from the Middle East that show up in Scandinavia, indicating there was trade in both directions, either directly or through intermediaries.). Still that said, not every story needs a diverse cast and nor should this turn into a checklist you need to check off.

That said, if you’re going to include a minority character you should bite the bullet and let them be openly a minority character and don’t shy away from it. Just throwing their minority status on the table at the end of the story is frankly more of a checklist behavior than anything else. If you want to include a minority character but you’re not confident you can do it correctly, talk to us. I’m writing a Psi Corps fanfiction right now (The Corps is Mother the Corps is Father), and I have a section that deals with what it means to be Jewish inside the Corps. I’m only (very)vaguely Jew-ish (the hyphen matters). So what do I do? I ask a friend of mine who was raised Orthodox to check it over and make sure I got it right. There’s something to be said for writing what you know, so you might not want to dive too deep into a subculture you don’t have direct experience with for your viewpoint character (especially with a first person or third person limited perspective), but an outsider’s perspective is fine for secondary characters.

So in conclusion, the trend of hidden minority characters might seem like a good compromise but in the end doesn’t really work on any level. It’s better to either just have the minority character in the story (this excludes stories where the character hiding their minority status is plotline within the story, but that means you’ll have to actually write about it) or just not have the minority character at all.

So what do you think readers? Feel free to leave a comment or an argument below. But either way, keep reading! See you next Friday.