My Big Inclusion Agenda
And the Representation-in-Literature Police State
I think we’ve all heard the news by now that people who work on their social consciousness or who take an interest in social justice issues are actually just poseurs who don’t really care about that stuff but instead enjoy taking a moral high ground from which they can chastise and police others. That deep down everybody hates political correctness and just kind of wishes it would go away but some of us are out here capitalizing on its existence to feel superior to those who are just trying to keep it real.
Well, sure, obviously policing people’s writing and language use is my joy in life, everybody knows how much I love police.
The title of today’s article, for anyone who didn’t catch the drift, refers to the Big Gay Agenda of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s during which the LGBTQIA+ community was working toward social acceptance and equality under the laws of the land. At that time, Marsha P Johnson, Queen of the Gays, nailed 95 GCs (gender criticals) to a Stonewall and that’s how we all got Gay Rights whether we wanted them or not. That might not be exactly how it happened but I’m pretty sure I got most of the important points.
Items on the Big Gay Agenda included:
Legalization of same-sex marriage
Legalization of same-sex divorce
Freedom from illegal discrimination as a protected group under federal law
Use of chemtrails to turn all the frogs gay
Americans now legally required to display a rainbow on their dwelling and person at all times during month of June
Right to demand any cake from any baker at any time
Stuff like that. At the time there were Americans who felt this was all very unreasonable but I hope that in the fullness of time many have come to understand that there’s nothing unreasonable about demanding the same human rights as others already have.
As it happens, the book industry—or at least the parts of it I’m most tuned into—is trying to effect a sea change toward equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) both in who it hires and in what it publishes. This is an intentional and conscientious effort: Agents and editors are vocal about looking for manuscripts that include characters of color, characters with disabilities, Queer characters, neurodiverse characters, and so on—and many are looking for #ownvoices whenever possible.
Is that fair? Shouldn’t agents and editors be interested in acquiring the best and most marketable books, whatever those are, regardless of EDI issues?
Reader, let me tell you a story. In this year of our Lorde 2021, I am forty years old. Listen, I lie about my age a lot, that’s a well-known Catherine fact. I’ve probably told you any random number between thirty and fifty, but forty is the real number. That’s the truth. I’m the same age as Megan Markle, Tom Hiddleston, and MTV.
Within my lifetime, MTV had at one point a corporate policy not to play videos by Black artists. Black artists, their reasoning went, just didn’t make the kind of music that MTV’s viewers wanted. MTV was a rock station and there was a perception that Black musicians just didn’t make rock music. Nevermind that MTV played plenty of non-rock music by white artists. It’s just that the market research showed that MTV viewers wanted white music.
We don’t know what would have happened if we as a society had collectively kicked back and said, “That’s fine with us—let MTV play the best and most marketable music, whatever that is, regardless of EDI issues—if that means they play exclusively white music that’s their prerogative,” because Walter Yetnikoff, the president of Michael Jackson’s record label, wrote them to say, essentially, “You can play our Black artists or we won’t let you play any of our label’s artists,” which helped MTV realize—surprise, surprise—people wanted the video for “Billie Jean” after all. They definitely wanted it more than they wanted “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for the twelfth time that day.
All this to say, yes, MTV played music videos in my lifetime I’m that old.
The point is that Michael Jackson’s music, and especially his videos, were among the very best of their time. They weren’t being excluded because there were just too many other artists who were better than him. Maybe that’s what people were telling themselves at the time but objectively speaking and with twenty-twenty hindsight, it’s now indisputable that “we just wanted to play the best music and it didn’t happen to include any Black artists” was a lie.
There are a lot of precedents for this, the above is only one of many. But there tends to be a presumption that all available spots are for the default mainstream human—that’s a cisgender, hetero, white man in case you didn’t know—and until you have accommodate every cishet white man it’s unfair to give a spot to anyone else because naturally you’d only be giving someone else the spot out of some kind of affirmative action. This presumption comes from the belief that there is always, somewhere, a cishet white man who is just inherently better than anyone who is anything else. That’s the origin of “oh why don’t you just let them take the best?”—the best manuscripts, the best prospective university students, the best music videos.
But interestingly, when we begin to make sure we’re distributing opportunity equally, we begin to see that the best wasn’t what we thought it was. This happened when MTV reluctantly put “Billie Jean” on their channel and then had to bump it up to heavy rotation because it was the best. That’s what happened when publishing made a concerted effort to make room for more women and people of color in science fiction and fantasy and now the old guard is crying because the type of author, and the type of story, that we used to think was the best now can’t win a Hugo or a Nebula for love nor money.
If you give all the opportunities to one type of person, and then that type of person has all the successes, you can’t chalk it up to that type of person being inherently better than any other type of person. It’s just that all we had to choose the best from were the efforts of that type of person.
The publishing world is changing. Overwhelmingly, publishing is still staffed by white women and there are still tremendous disparities in which authors get signed (within and across genres) and how much they get paid. But it’s changing. People are actively, intentionally working to change it.
What does this mean for you if you are a writer? I see a lot of questions around this topic and a lot of erroneous beliefs. I’ll skip right to the end and tell you candidly, it doesn’t meant that white people or men are canceled and no one wants to sign white authors or men authors anymore. I promise.
It also doesn’t mean that you have to change the way you write: You don’t. You don’t have to change anything about the way you write and nobody is going to make you. Not me, not the agents, not the publishers, and not the readers. If you do not see a point in having a diverse cast of characters, you don’t have to write one. If you don’t see any reason to use inclusive or respectful language, you don’t have to. No one is saying you have to.
You write what you want to write. Agents and editors sign what they want to represent. It’s that simple. You don’t have to change what you’re doing for them. They don’t have to change what they’re doing for you. This is not the article telling you to change the way you write. This is the article attempting to answer the questions:
Why I should change how I write to be more inclusive?
How do I include diverse characters organically?
You have an opportunity to change the way you write if you want to. You have a choice to take the opportunity or not.
We’re always told to write our own experience—write what you know. That’s generally solid advice, and when it comes to inclusion it’s never a good idea to take something you don’t know and just make something up. It’s hard to know when it’s safe to include a character from a group of people you’re not intimately familiar with. Stray too far too one side and you’re appropriating an experience that isn’t yours, and too far to the other side you’re engaging in tokenism.
If you’ve never met a transgender person, spent time around transgender folks, studied firsthand accounts of transgender experiences, researched political and medical issues affecting transgender folks—then including a major character who is transgender may feel inauthentic or worse if you fall back on stereotypes. But do you need all that to include a minor character who just happens to be trans? Probably not.
A question I hear very often is this:
How can I include a diverse character organically if the plot doesn’t demand it? If something is not relevant to the plot, why include it at all?
In the real world, people don’t need a reason to be Black or Queer or to be a woman or to have a disability. People are just born all kinds of ways, with all kinds of attributes. I wasn’t born with female sex characteristics because there’s a main character somewhere else whose story demanded a Strong Female Character. There’s no reason or purpose that causes people to be who we are.
But being a woman does color my life experience. It affects the way people around me react to my presence, it affects the way I react to the presence of others. As does my sexual orientation, as does my racial identity. All of those things combine to affect the actions I take in the world and the way I perceive what’s going on around me and the way I analyze information.
Your plot doesn’t need to demand a person who is different from you for you to include them. It’s the other way round—when you include a character who is different from you in some way (or different from your narrator or main character or point-of-view character), your narrative gets richer as that character will have different reactions to the people and situations they encounter based on their different experience, and will elicit different reactions from others.
In a detective story, does your plot demand the department include a woman detective? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But if the plot doesn’t demand a woman detective and you include a woman detective anyway, you can explore how being a woman in a man-dominated work environment affects that character’s actions and reactions. Does she get defensive easily because she’s used to being second guessed by her colleagues and superiors? Does she cultivate an ultracompetent, take-no-crap demeanor to deflect accusations that she’s not “man enough” for the job? Is she so confident in her own abilities she’s not even phased by workplace sexism? Maybe she uses her experience as a mother, which none of her male colleagues have, to notice things that they miss; and maybe she’s highly valued for it.
If you can tolerate middle-grade fiction, I cannot recommend highly enough Pet by Akwaeke Emezi or Dactyl Hill Squad by Daniel José Older as examples of diverse representation that is neither shoehorned in nor tokenistic.
Anyway who cares what the plot demands. Is the plot the boss of you? No, you’re the boss of the plot.
Consider, as well, intersectionality: The concept that people have many social characteristics that intersect to form complex identities as well as different opportunities to experience discrimination and privilege.
Nobody has only one identity. Do you ever see a cast of characters where the author clearly was going down a checklist like this here’s my main character, and this here’s my Black character, and this one is my nerdy character, and this one is my gay character, and this one is my woman! Black people can be nerds. Women can be gay. Queer people can have disabilities. Black women can be Queer nerds, trust me, I know several. Equitable representation doesn’t mean assigning one social characteristic to each character to represent all the kinds of people there are.
When you unpack that kind of thinking, you come to understand that many people are holding in their mind the archetype of the default human. In a lot of media that’s, again, the cisgender, hetero white man. Anything that deviates from that perceived norm is other and needs a reason to justify why there’s a difference. But we never ask ourself what is the plot’s reason for our main character being like us. What reason does this character have for being a white man? Does the plot demand he be a white man?
When describing your characters, make sure you don’t just describe the ways in which they are different from whatever is your mind’s default. Don’t describe skin color only for those who are not white—if you’re describing skin tones, describe skin tones. Don’t describe hair texture only for characters who are Black, or eye shape only for characters of Asian descent. And for the love of dog, stop comparing people’s skin color to food.
I’ll leave you with an example from one of the greatest films of all time, Alien, which has the distinction of being predecessor to the greatest film of all time. When the writers handed the script over for casting, Ridley Scott and the casting folks called back and said, “Oh no, there’s a small problem, you forgot to tell us which characters are women and which ones are men.” The writers, who had omitted gender signifiers intentionally, said, “Pick a few to be women and the rest can be men, doesn’t matter which.”
It was a bold choice to cast a woman as Ripley. Notice that the plot doesn’t demand Ripley be a woman, but Ripley being a woman colors the way she interacts with her fellow crewmates and how they interact with and react to her. The way Lambert reacts when Ripley declines to break quarantine procedure is a good illustration of this concept.
Go watch Aliens right now, it’s never not a good time to watch Aliens.
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