I touched on this in my DiFR review of To Stand in the Light By Kayla Bashe. Diversity is vital for everyone, whether you belong to a marginalized group or not. Yet many people not only question, but are highly resistant to the idea of greater diversity in books and other media; a sentiment which continues to baffle me. As such I thought I’d throw my own hat in the ring and talk about why this issue is so important to me and why it should be important to everybody else.
I think those who are not a part of marginalized groups often have a hard time understanding the need for diversity because they are already able to see themselves everywhere. Our media is dominated by cis het able-bodied, non-neuro-divergent white people, with men in this group getting more space than women. For those who fall into that camp it can be easy to overlook the necessity of diversity because they have never known what it’s like to not see themselves in the media they consume. Marieke Nijkamp, founder of DiversifYA and VP of #WeNeedDiverseBooks wrote an article for the NaNoWriMo blog called We Need Diverse Books: Why Diversity Matters for Everyone where she spoke about this issue:
“But when our stories don’t include characters readers can relate to by shared experience, shared background, shared ability—in fact, when our stories continuously erase those characters—we teach readers […] that they don’t matter.
We rob our readers and ourselves of the chance to discover reflections in stories. We choose to keep them invisible and alone, when it’s those exact stories that can tell them they are not alone in the world.”
(emphasis mine)
In my review of To Stand in the Light I mentioned how reading about the character of Bean Sprout was like looking into a mirror. I saw more of myself in her than I ever had in any other character I have ever read. Seeing her battle through trials that I myself have faced gave me a renewed sense of strength. Seeing her struggle with thinking all her friends must hate her reflected my own. She feared that other people would find her annoying, or a bother. I fear that people will find me a burden, or more trouble than I’m worth. Different words but ultimately the same meaning: we feel unworthy of the love our friends and family give us. Over the course of her story, Bean learns how false and damaging this mindset of hers is and learns to work past it with the support of her friends.
She teaches this same lesson to her lover, Shadow, who hates themselves because of their demonic appearance, believing they are a monster. Bean tells her that “being loved isn’t about deserving. It’s about how you make someone feel. About the love that you give back” (ebook location 1581/1970) I started crying when I read that, because depression and anxiety have twisted my mind to believe I don’t deserve the love I receive from the people in my life. But seeing Bean struggle with this same issue. Seeing her learn this lesson and then put it into words to begin teaching another the same thing, so that both of them can begin to heal from their own depression and anxiety… well, it taught me that I’m not invisible, I’m not alone, other people share my struggle. And if other people so much like me can overcome these struggles then it gives me hope that I can do the same.
Here’s another, less dramatic, but equally important thing I learned from this book. I learned more about my own mental divergence, ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD (apparently ADD is an outdated term, something else I learned) as a kid but never learned much about it beyond difficulty focusing. All efforts in treating my ADHD were centered on the idea of making me more focused. No one ever taught me more about it and I never encountered anyone else who I knew had ADHD, character or not. I knew hyperactivity was a thing with ADHD but it didn’t get associated with me because I didn’t give off physical indications of being hyperactive. For me it was all mental hyperactivity, and I certainly had no idea that impulse control had anything to do with ADHD.
Bean herself was diagnosed with ADHD over the course of the book and learned how to work through it with the help of medication and different study practices. Seeing how she used ADD and ADHD interchangeably, plus seeing how her manifestation of the divergence differed from mine, prompted me to do more research of my own. From that research I learned how impulse control and a hyperactive mind, not just a hyperactive body, are also major aspects of ADHD. This may not seem like much but consider that I grew up not knowing these things. I grew up having great difficulty controlling my impulses and like Bean I thought I was just an idiot as a result. Now I know better, I have the facts to back it up and that means I can start the healing process to change how I view myself as well.
All of this was not possible with past characters because I never related and connected so heavily with a character until Bean and because I had never before read about a character who dealt with these same issues. Hell, Bean is the first character I have ever come across in any media who has ADHD and is stated clearly as having ADHD. I connected with Bean so closely because she is a diverse character, and that diversity happened to match up a great deal with my own. For the first time, ever, despite being an avid reader, I saw myself in a story. Seeing Bean as myself allowed me to use her as a lens through which I could see me overcoming my own struggles. This is why diversity matters so much in the media we consume.
One of the arguments I’ve heard against diversity in books comes from some white people when they read about black characters. They say they “can’t relate to the character” because the character is black. We’ll leave aside for now the fact that more exposure to characters of color would help them, and everyone else, learn to relate to POC. Instead let’s just turn this around for those people who struggle with this concept. Imagine you go to the library to get a book but every single book you come across has only black people as the protagonists. You go to the movies and all the characters you see are people of color except for maybe one white guy who gets killed off half way through.
Imagine you are a man and every single story is about a woman or genderqueer individual. Imagine that you are able bodied and every character you come across is an amputee or in a wheelchair. Imagine everywhere you go you see people who look nothing like you, with experiences nothing like your own. I’d bet you would start to feel alone and invisible too. That you would feel starved for a cis het white able-bodied character you could relate to.
Remember, the struggles you have with relating to diverse characters are the same difficulties marginalized people feel when reading most books out there. And if you’re thinking, “can’t they just go pick up a book with diverse characters, aren’t there plenty online,” well it’s not that easy. Nijkamp explains:
in the US—more than half of the children born will be non-white, less than ten percent of books published are about characters of color or written by people of color. And while one out of five teens will deal with a serious debilitating mental illness, perhaps only one out of twenty books even recognizes mental illnesses exist…
For most of us, whether we’re disabled, LGBTQ, people of color, part of a religious minority, indigenous peoples, it is achingly hard—often impossibly so—to find a story about us. Not just about us, but stories that reflect the world we live in. Stories where we’re seen.
I discovered I was bisexual about the age of 24 but didn’t start getting involved in the community until a few months ago. I have been searching for books with bisexual characters for several months now as I seek to learn more about my sexual identity. Sadly, I haven’t found much and most of the books I have come across aren’t available at my local library. Sure there are some available online, but I don’t have an income right now since I lost my last job, so I can’t afford to by books online. Even if I could, I still live with my parents so I don’t have the space. when it comes to finding characters who are genderqueer/genderfluid, or those who have anxiety, or ADHD, or depression, it’s even harder.
Sure there are literary works out there that might focus in on one of these as a “problem issue” where the whole story is about the protagonist overcoming issues associated with said aspect, but the problem with that is two-fold:
One: I am not just bisexual or just genderfluid or just depressed, etc. I am all of these things all at the same time. Sure there may be moments where one aspect is more at the forefront of my mind. But I don’t become less bisexual just because I’m having an anxiety attack. I don’t become less genderfluid just because my depression has reached a point where self-loathing makes me want to hurt myself. Reading stories where, if these issues show up at all, they come one at a time, gives the impression that they can’t all exist together when I am living proof that they do. We are not single-issue people. We are a multi-dimensional rainbow pattern of diverse nuances and characteristics, marginalized or no, and to deny any one aspect of who we are is to deny the whole person.
Two: it tells people with these issues that they can only exist as “problem characters” in “problem stories.” It tells us that we can’t be the heroes of our own stories outside of these issues. we can’t ride dragons, or be superheroes, or fight trolls, or overcome the ultimate evil because we aren’t the cis het white able-bodied, neurologically normal, dude. The most we can ever aspire to is being a mere side-kick who gets killed off by the big bad to show how evil they are and spur the “real hero” on to victory. This is the message we receive from the homogeneous mass of books that are out there currently; that unless our story is directly related to and centered on us being LGBT or POC or disabled or neurally divergent, then it’s not a story worth telling or worth being heard.
That’s why we need, not just diversity, but intersectional diversity, across all mediums and all genres. Transmedia writer and author Andrea Phillips discussed Why Diversity in Fantasy Matters and addressed the overall impact diversity, and it’s lack, have on our culture and society.
Listen. Every story we tell becomes a part of our consensus culture. […] Stories are our way of telling one another how to be human, how to understand the world.
But we also use stories to reinforce some awful messages: men are inferior parents, brown people are terrorists, no doesn’t always really mean no. We hear these messages again and again, and we start to believe them. In a sense, every story we tell is true. They become true, like it or not.
[….] Writing about a world where people of all stripes are visible, are represented, are richer and deeper than a grab bag of tired-out archetypes, is just plain the right and decent thing to do.
You’re not just making a better story. You’re making a better world.
This is why diversity across the board is so important. It has the power to change individuals and it has the power to change our cultural narrative as a whole. They help people in marginalized groups find acceptance and learn more about themselves, as it did with me. They help those outside these groups to understand them better and see them capable of far more than just a one off side character, to see them as more than just one of their differences. In short, writing diverse stories and reading diverse stories brings us all closer together and makes us all better people. It shows us that we are all capable of being dragon riding superheroes who fight trolls and overcome the ultimate evil. And isn’t that what really matters?
Sources:
http://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/99143321739/we-need-diverse-books-why-diversity-matters-for
http://www.deusexmachinatio.com/blog/2014/4/24/why-diversity-in-fantasy-matters
http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/FAQ
http://www.diversifya.com/
Read more:
http://www.diversifya.com/
http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/
http://weneeddiversebooks.org/
http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/
http://www.diversityinya.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/02/we-need-diverse-books_n_5253934.html
http://www.babble.com/parenting/the-lack-of-diversity-in-books-and-movies-hurts-all-of-our-kids/
https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/diversity
Mars WaterDragon 