We've got another #WriteInclusively guest post in line! :D I love these posts, and am actively looking for more. Especially if you are a writer of color, please please contact me! I'd love to have you guest blog.
Take it away, Katherine!
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Let’s get this out of the way—I’m a white writer
who thought I could write diversely and failed. Here’s how:
I was raised in a liberal household in the greater
San Diego area, where over a hundred languages are spoken and white people are
less than half the population.
I grew up watching Sesame Street and The Cosby
Show and I spent more time singing along to Boyz II Men at middle school dances
than actually dancing with anyone.
I don’t have many friends but I’ve had
acquaintances of all races throughout my life. One of them, a high school colorguard
teammate, used to let me ask her anything I wanted to know about being black on
the long bus rides to competitions and parades.
When I moved to Wisconsin for a few years in my
twenties I called out relatives left and right over their nakedly racist
comments (the 2008 election was…fun).
There has never been a time that I didn’t consider
myself progressive and open-minded, but most importantly, I’ve long been aware
my place in the privilege pecking order—I don’t have it the best, but I
certainly don’t have it the worst.
So when the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign started
trending on Twitter last year, I charged into it with that righteous sense of
sincerity tucked in my back pocket. I watched as pleas from writers and agents
and editors and librarians and parents gathered into a great chorus, amplifying
the ugly truth of fiction’s diversity problem: it’s not simply the lingering
effect of tradition or an innocent oversight. It’s a tragedy of human
potential.
Because diversity isn’t a movement or an agenda or
a phase. Diversity is inevitable. White people only make up about 16 percent of
the world population but control every pillar of power: politics, business,
religion and entertainment. Think of how fast civilization could progress if
all the ideas and wisdom and stories of the remaining 84 percent were just as welcome.
This cry for representation is the backbone of #WeNeedDiverseBooks,
and as the campaign gained steam, I sympathized with the participants,
retweeted them, nodded my head in solidarity. And when the time came to apply diversity
to my own work, I assumed I was beyond ready for the task. But white privilege is
almost invisible to those it benefits, and sometimes it reveals itself in
unexpected ways.
Like writing dozens of characters in numerous
short stories and novels that are uniformly white, not from some conscious
decision but because, well, I’m white too. It’s an utterly weak excuse, which
is why I tried to rectify it when I embarked on my third novel. It wasn’t easy,
but after half a dozen revisions and two passes through my critique group, I
thought my first attempt at writing believable people of color was a success.
This confidence lasted through the first six months or so of querying, boosted
by a relatively high request rate. It didn’t even tarnish when almost every
pass was attributed to a lack of connection with the main characters because
that’s allegedly the most subjective—and thus best—reason to be rejected.
And then #WriteInclusively came along. Reading
through SC’s tweets and conversations, it became clear that I had fallen into
the tokenization trap. There’s no other way to put it: my characters, while
lovingly rendered, are POC on the outside but not on the inside.
Their appearance and other surface details reflect
diversity, and although their struggles revolve around the main plot, not their
identity, that’s not really the problem. It’s that I missed an opportunity to
incorporate all the struggles POC face on a daily basis into the layers of their
characterization—the microaggressions and fears and compromises that could have
made my thriller that much more thrilling.
Alas, that manuscript is already out in the world,
in the hands of agents, one of which was active in SC’s Query Kombat
tweetstorm—I might have cringed permanent wrinkles into my face. But I’m eager
to discuss a revision strategy in the event I get The Call, not that I’m
entirely sure what that strategy will be.
Because the easy lesson in all this is to be more
thoughtful and respectful when blending diversity into my stories. The harder
lesson is to understand that I’ll never get it right due to the myopia inherent
in white privilege. Diverse characters in a white writer’s novel will never
have the impact on #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #WriteInclusively that diverse
characters from a diverse writer’s novel will. And that’s fine.
So what can I do? I’m tempted to stay in my lane
when it comes to main characters, especially when writing in
third-person-limited POV and absolutely when writing first-person, because when
I write white characters I don’t have the specter of inauthenticity hanging
over me. I feel much safer incorporating diversity into the supporting cast,
and I will strive to write them with the care and consideration they deserve.
How? By opening my eyes and ears and heart and
imagination. By listening to POC and reading their stories. By following them
on Twitter and engaging in conversations. By learning, growing, trying harder,
writing better. No doubt I’ll stumble more along the way, but there’s nowhere
else to go but forward. And there’s no excuse not to try.
Katherine Memmel is Fiction Editor for Black Heart Magazine and content manager for an international trade publication, with short stories featured in various online venues and an erotic romance novella trilogy (under the pen name Katrina Sparks) available soon from Enamored Ink. Tweet her!
Thank you thank you so much for the post!!! Some key points in my opinion were the idea that We Need Diverse Books (instead of a focus on diverse authors) has led to tokenization of people of color in literature. It is so so important to realize that people of color aren't just a change of skin, but have different experiences all together.
What were your thoughts? Comment below!
