Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with the students of the Department of Languages & Literature, as well as the English Club, of the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). I know I’m not supposed to have favorites, but this event was definitely one of them!
My nerves were on edge beforehand since I came down with a cold earlier that week that had my brain feeling like a clump of cotton balls. I don’t fall ill often, but my body decided to shut down after two non-stop weeks of work and visitors. My kryptonite is not having me time, and after so much forced extroversion, I felt like a videogame character on its last legs. Red and blinking.
I was already worried I might come off as incoherent to the UNI students, as the event’s afternoon start time in Iowa was 1:30am for me in East Africa (something I willingly agreed to in the planning phase). To mitigate the risk of keeling over mid-talk, I took a powernap followed by a cool shower and downed a 1am dose of Kenyan coffee…all prospects of sleeping later on be damned. I was ready to go!
And so were the students. Their questions were varied and thoughtful, covering a range of topics like the story’s origins, the influence of travel on my writing, and trigger warnings. One question in particular remained with me long after the event. I’m paraphrasing it from memory, so apologies if I misrepresent it in any way.
Student: “How do you write about diversity in your stories? I’m trying to write something at the moment, but I can’t help but feel like I’m doing it all wrong or that I’m going to leave someone out and offend them.”
This question made me happy and sad all at once. How amazing, on one hand, that we are thinking about diversity and collectively prioritizing it in our stories. How depressing, on the other, that many of us feel like we aren’t getting it right and that the roadblocks we’re facing might prevent great art from getting created.
I told the students about my own background as a queer half-Mexican who grew up not questioning why most of the movies and shows I watched or books I read had all-white casts. Even my favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had an exclusively white cast, and I had posters of them plastered all over my bedroom walls. There was no reason for this lack of diversity other than that Buffy, along with many other shows, was catering to a predominantly white target audience.
I think I was so obsessed with what Buffy was doing in relation to gender and sexuality that I unconsciously chose not to see the total lack of racial and ethnic diversity as a problem. In a diverse setting like California, that should have felt off, even in the nineties and early 2000s. But most of my favorite WB shows were like this. Dawson’s Creek. Charmed. Seventh Heaven. (Yes…throw stones at me. I watched Seventh Heaven.) The ever-popular OC did the same thing a few years later. When it came to popular TV, whiteness was in. Diversity was out. And people weren’t calling it out, the way we can easily do now with social media.
Now we have movies, shows, and books that are veering in the other direction. Sometimes, it feels like these works are overcompensating for the historical lack of diverse representation by ticking boxes to capture as many types of diversity as possible. This can come off as tokenistic, especially if diverse characters play to stereotypes or continue to support white, main characters. But, as the student expressed, there is a very real fear that if all the boxes aren’t ticked, then a piece of work can hurt someone or be criticized as exclusionary. I think this is a very precarious place for young artists to be in, as it might leave them in the state this student finds himself in – paralyzed and unable to create anything at all.
I once had an editor who told me I had no business writing about characters who did not look like me. She also assumed I was 100% white, rendering my Chicano heritage invisible. The taste that left in my mouth was, well, asqueroso. If I followed her advice, I would only write narcissistic works with a bunch of me’s running around. How limiting. Thankfully, I have chosen not to do that, and my work is better off for it. I’ve also chosen to decline working with said editor on future projects.
The UNI student wanted to know how I captured diversity in my novel. I said I found it easier to do in a futuristic setting where the characters were no longer bound by the kinds of rigid categories and labels that currently divide us on racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, and gender identity lines. Even then, I could link most of my characters to people I met in high school or other stages in life. Fictional characters are rarely perfect copies of real people, but each one shares certain human traits that help make them feel multidimensional.
This would have harder for me to do coming fresh out of high school in a predominantly white Republican town in New Jersey. However, having gone to college (which was incredibly diverse) and having lived and worked across Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe, I’ve met so many people and personalities from all walks of life who inspire the characters I create. Creating nuanced characters requires time, experience, and research. I always recommend running manuscripts by beta readers who can relate to the experiences and backgrounds of the characters I’m creating since they can pick up on issues with representation that I might not see.
Though I don’t think there is one right way to do anything in writing, I offered the students a few helpful technical recommendations in terms of how writers describe characters and what traps to avoid. One of my pet peeves is when Black or Brown characters’ skin is described as mahogany. Yes, mahogany. I have never looked at a Black or Brown person in my life and thought, “Wow? They look so wonderfully mahogany.” In our day-to-day lives, we do not tend to compare humans to plant life because there is very little worthy of comparison. I love tree bark as much as any nature lover, but I will never use it as a source of inspiration when describing someone’s appearance.
You’d be surprised how many writers describe people this way, I guess because a word like mahogany sounds pretty or, perhaps, exotic, which makes it even more problematic. Even worse is comparing Black, Brown, or any skin to food. Why would I compare something like human skin – which I will never eat in a thousand years – to something scrumptious and edible? And why have I seen Black or Brown skin compared to things like chocolate, fudge, or coffee, but I never see white skin compared to coconut cake, meringue, or flan?
Another trap is when writers only describe the skin of Black or Brown characters, with white characters granted a privileged, status quo position that doesn’t require their skin color to be mentioned at all.
In Deficient, I opted for cues in my descriptions of characters, and I was very deliberate about not jumping to descriptions of skin color in a world where this would not factor prominently in the characters’ minds. This means the reader has to do a bit of the thinking, as the character who forms in their imagination is ultimately subject to interpretation. Instead of describing a character by the color of their skin, I spend more time on their personalities while offering light descriptions of things like eye color or hairstyle. If it’s necessary to call out a character’s skin color (and it often isn’t), I make sure I do this with white characters as well Black and Brown ones. In Deficient, there is no reason for Alejandro to view people differently based on the color of their skin, as he no longer lives in a racist society. What holds immense weight in his world are differences in ability status – something Alejandro, a “Deficient,” gives considerable thought to throughout the book.
Recently, I came across an interesting phenomenon with one of my characters – Landon Waters. In my brain, Landon looks like the character below:
But I was surprised when readers (often white) would tell me – “That’s not how I pictured Landon at all. I thought he was white.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if I misled my friends. So I went back into my manuscript and looked up some of the ways I described Landon.
- “Landon’s umber eyes narrow.”
- “Landon shakes his head, and the silver arrowhead in his ear dances with the movement.”
- “Landon grits his teeth. His chest puffs with each infuriated breath, and his muscles are thick and taut.”
- “Landon scratches at his hair twists and a few awkward seconds pass.”
I was very intentional in not describing Landon by his skin color, but for that reason, readers got to imagine him the way they wanted. And several white readers saw him as white. Was that because of my writing? Were the cues not strong enough? Or was it because readers interpret and imagine characters according to their own lived experiences and personal biases?
A part of me can’t help but feel like I sold Landon short. Maybe I should have made it more explicit so readers wouldn’t get it wrong. Then again, I think there is something special when readers get to use their own imaginations and have their conceptions challenged.
I don’t have a problem reading and watching stories that don’t feel the need to tick every single diversity box. I think back to one of my favorites – Brokeback Mountain – and I admire it for what it was. Yes, it was a gay white cowboy movie set across the 1960s to 80s based on Annie Proulx’s incredible short story. Would I have watched it and loved it had one of the cowboys not been white? Totally! That said, it would have added a twist to the story that might have seemed farfetched in a deeply racist and homophobic context. What a movie like Moonlight did for me was all magic. It captured the difficulties of a Black protagonist grappling with the challenges of sexuality, identity, and abuse in a way I had never seen portrayed. Both movies offered something special. Both made gave me a greater appreciation and understanding of complex human experiences shaped by social constructs, and I felt more complete for having witnessed them.
If you don’t feel like you’re ticking all the boxes in one story, that’s okay. The foundation of your story is the intention behind it, not the number of boxes that are ticked along the way. A single story can’t do everything, and there are ways to explore other aspects of diversity through future stories, which is what I’ll be doing in sequels of Deficient. If there are opportunities to diversify casts in ways that are authentic and add representation to the story, why not? Any character from Buffy, including the vampire slayer herself, could have been from a non-white demographic, and it would have made sense for the story and added something special to it. (I’m sure any future retellings of the slayer saga will be much more representative than the television or movie versions.)
Equality, diversity, and inclusion in artwork are good things, but creating diverse works of writing doesn’t have to be a fear-inducing or paralyzing process. Embrace it, the same way you do with the diversity in your life, friendships, and families. Create what works for your specific piece of work and intention, and don’t worry about what others think. Trust that what comes out on the page will have something special on offer.
I saw Landon as white, as well!