Represent! #4 - “Believe You” (2021)

I've loved @john_boyega since he was Moses in Attack the Block

New books for me to discover! Real topics, real life!

Abortion in YA Lit

Cold out this morning! So glad I got this kitty ears headband that doubles as earmuffs. #whathappenedtosummer excuse the brows😂haven't had a chance to clean up😂😂😂😂 #fallisfinallyhere (at New Haven, Connecticut)

When even the snowmen are #patriots fan (at New Haven, Connecticut)

Mindy Kaling talks about her journey in her career as an actress in Hollywood and challenging the status quo. 

See the full video here

The journey never stops..

This made me tear up.

The Infinity War cast singing Happy Birthday to Chadwick Boseman!

https://twitter.com/MarkRuffalo/status/1333109445010853891

@booknerd529 asked: What does Ben Barnes smell like?

This can save lives of many Black people who were wrongly convicted and arrested on drug possession charges. Please spread!

My story: 6 teen American girls of different backgrounds find each other and go on a quest to make the world a better place. The girls' backgrounds are: Native American (tribe TBD), Jewish, Muslim, African American, Latina (specific heritage TBD), and white Christian/lesbian. The Native American is the leader but each girl will play a unique roll and shine. Is it ethical for me, a white-passing Jewish girl, to write this story from a 3rd person omnicient perspective if I do extensive research?

Writing from many different heritage POV’s in the same story

I’m concerned about the one-of-each approach to choosing your characters’ ethnicities. Unless there’s some specific plot reason for so much disparity, like “representatives from different groups pick their best and brightest to Do A Thing”, it starts to ping my “why so many different groups/lack of multiple people from same marginalized group” meter.

For example, having two Muslims and two Jews seems more realistic to me than one Muslim, one Jew, one Latina, one Native American, etc. Putting it another way: if a Black girl wanted to change the world, I don’t instantly picture her choosing a group with no other Black people in which to do that in. The Black people I know who are trying to change the world are definitely doing it alongside at least some other Black people even if not everyone in the group is Black. The same thing goes for lesbians – not every lesbian would feel safe joining a group of entirely straight girls to accomplish social change.

Another way you can do this having some of the groups overlap, like having the character you listed as African-American be Muslim too (leaving you with two Muslims: one Black and one not), having someone besides the white Christian girl be into girls, etc.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing this in omniscient as long as you’ve read books by people in the groups you’re writing about to get a feel for how they write themselves, as opposed to seeing them through the White Gaze as we’re all programmed to do. (That’s another reason to cut back on the number of groups represented—less voices to master.)

–Shira

I have a few gut instincts with this. My biggest one is I’m looking at “make the world better” and “Native American leader” and wondering if you might not be pulling from the idea that because Natives had a culture that spans working with nature for so long, you’re potentially pulling from Noble Savage roots for making her the leader. There are a lot of subtle biases for Natives that include headstrong warriors, magical natives, noble savages, and basically a whole bunch of “positive” stereotypes that make Natives look like the best possibility for saving the world.

We’re not.

We’re just as divided on how to make the world a better place as the average culture. Our techniques don’t work for the industrial world, because they were built at a different time and place. Yes, they were sustainable, and yes, they were wonderful… but the time for them is gone. We need to rebuild society and while Indigenous attitudes of “respect/work with the earth” should be a core part of that… we don’t own that attitude. And we don’t know how to go about it instinctually. The world is different and we’re struggling as much as others.

My next biggest instinct is how you appear to be tokenizing everyone. It feels checklist-y, to me, because sure you have a white Christian but she’s lesbian, so she’s not majority group. Everyone you’ve said only has two things that make them marginalized (gender and either race or orientation), which means you seem to be writing archetypes instead of people. When you only have one of each member of the group, they become the representation for the group, meaning you actually have less freedom to create good characters. You end up so focused on getting the representation Correct and Respectful that the characters become stick figures, unable to breathe and be people because you’re scared of misrepresentation.

If you look at the difference between shows that only have one primary female character, and ones that have multiple female characters, you’ll see the difference. Sailor Moon, for example, has 10 female characters to pull from. Usagi would be utterly irritating if she were on her own, and probably unwatchable because most girls aren’t like that. Some are, but not all. However, most girls aren’t like Sailor Mercury, either— but some are. The pattern continues throughout the Senshi, where they are all very specific types of girls and each one on their own would be average to even poor representation, but together they create an actual cast of diversity that represents girls as a whole incredibly well, simply because there are ten of them.

Apply the same principle to your work. If you want to be representative, give yourself breathing room. Tokenization happens when there’s only one person of a group “thrown in” because people have some invisible quota for how much diversity a work needs. You won’t be offensive if you swap out one race/religion for another, and in fact you could even have better representation because now you have more “hold points”, so to speak, for each race.

Related— don’t be afraid to have people be two things. Nothing wrong with a Native lesbian and a Black Muslim, especially since Muslim is a religious marker and not any indication of skin tone.

Finally, watch out for internal conflict in the group. I can’t speak for others, but Natives can highly mistrust Christians as a whole, no matter how much this girl is non practicing. Do keep in mind Christianity is an organization that hurt Natives very deeply, from missionaries trying to destroy our religions to many residential schools being religious, and in Canada they only closed down completely in the 1990s. Christianity has left very recent scars on our communities and not all of us can get over that.

Check your motive for including her. Is it to prove that not all Christians are bad? Will you slip in a motive that she learns to overcome white guilt? Is it to teach these marginalized groups a lesson about not being judgemental? Is it because you feel you need a member of the dominant religion in the group, for whatever reason? Pardon me for the potentially inaccurate questions, but I’m wary of why the mix is the way it is. You have a ton of potential for it to go really sour, and I want to pose questions to make sure you’ve checked your own potentially subconscious biases.

~Mod Lesya