I studied media several years back, and if you don't count independent studios, the media is owned by five conglomerates, BSkyB, News Corp, Disney, Time Warner and Sony. It's also worth noting that the owner of BSkyB is Rupert Murdoch's son, so we might see that go down to four one day. I've had a lot of SJW rhetoric (including appropriation) shoved down my throat at one point, including this need for diversity. Whenever I bring up that whinging to execs in an ivory tower does bugger all and that they should be getting more minorities in from the ground up, it always degrades into logical fallacies. All in all, I'm extremely jaded when I hear this sort of stuff because one answer always reduces them to fallacious pot shots: -There isn't a big enough pool for their criteria -The ones screaming about how it's awful do not want to be one of the people in that field -They haven't thought about what would be required to maintain their demand (and in some cases, that answer is a communist dystopia) -The activities carried out by the group actually contribute to the problems that they're complaining about (the nine BLM protesters who blocked the motorway were all declared guilty of wilful obstruction of a highway, while it's only punished with a fine, that'll be on their criminal records for several years). Poking around for statistics to do with ethnic minorities in drama school, according to an article from July 2014, 1 in 8 drama students in the UK were of an ethnic minority. That's roughly the same as the number of women in the STEM workforce according to The Guardian in 2015. I couldn't find a graduate rate to compare it to, so I wouldn't invalidate that we need more minority individuals in drama school just yet. Which brings to my point about voting with your cash. I mentioned Cannes being a great place to start since many indie films that have garnered a platform have their first big showing there. If money that previously went to big names starts going elsewhere, they'll notice and diversify, or go bust trying to figure out what went wrong.
And I guess I'm fairly jaded about people who use "whinging" and "whining" and "whenever I...it always degrades..." arguments, especially when currently in a discussion with someone who is not whinging, whining, or degrading into logical fallacies. So I'm going to exercise my jadedness in my standard fashion.
I agree with Bay that the status quo are not as open as they should be to different kinds of actors and writers and stories. But I also agree with Lee that there's no real way to change that beyond slow, natural societal change. There's no acceptable way to mandate changes in the arts or in private businesses. That doesn't mean they should be immune to criticism, but this is a long process and no singular movie or book or anything will change anything overnight. I think it's important here to try not to talk at cross purposes; to not just address the talking points of other more extreme people out there, like those who have genuinely told me that by law there should be x% of children's books with black characters. That's a stupid argument for that person to make, certainly, but continuing to refute them after the fact with the same talking points doesn't really achieve anything either. There's two camps who have check lists of things to say to counter their opponent in their own mind and no-one is really trying to change each others minds. What's worth discussing is how this effect us as individual writers sitting at the bottom and trying to work our way up. I have seen agents who are looking for 'inclusive' works of fictions, in fact I ran into a whole agency who specifically wanted genderqueer and mixed race stories. But I don't think that means that we should even worry ourselves for a minute about making our work more inclusive. I think it's just misguided to throw in token characters and in the end the only goal we should have is to write good books about the people that we want to write about. I don't think we should have to explain why we write the world that we are most familiar with, even if that is just white people doing white people stuff. No-one would ask a former US marine why they write books about fighting in Iraq. It's ok just to write what we want to write, it's ok to look at other cultures and groups and whatever too. If that's what you want to write then write it. And that's the only thing that needs to be said, honestly. You can't win with the hyper-critical busibodies; one lot wants more black characters, the other lot says if you aren't black you can't write black characters. So screw them. Write what's interesting to you; write it well and make it true to the character. That's the only thing you should care about.
@LostThePlot Another way to put it is an old saying, 'If you try to please everyone, you wind up pleasing no one.' In regards as to how it affects us as writers, here's a good quote on the subject from the president of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsude. When we developed games for a worldwide premise we lost our focus, and not only did they end up being games that weren't for the Japanese, but they ended up being incomplete titles that weren't even fit for a global audience. The instant a writer tries to cater for too big an audience, they start losing the plot in more way than one.
Quite. And that's generally the problem with forced inclusion; aiming to please everyone by 'including' so many groups then failing magnificently to please anyone because it lacks focus. Or to put it in slightly more pointed terms; pandering is pandering and even when it's well intentioned pandering makes for poor art. Just going along with the received wisdom of the times is the definition of boring in anything creative.
Okay, while I actually do like the conversation, we have definitely derailed the thread Because it's gone from inclusion/borrowing of cultural mythologies & appropriation, to general purpose appropriation, somehow got over to film & casting industr and seems to be somewhere about diversity of characters & representation and all other sorts of things Maybe we should create a new thread in which to continue the discussion/debate?
I can: 85% of Americans are straight 65% of Americans are white 50% of Americans are men ≈27.5% of Americans are straight white men In a cast of 4 main characters and 12 secondary characters in an American story, you would expect 1 main character and 3 secondary characters to be straight white men. A story with 3 main characters and 10 secondary characters as straight white men sounds like the author worked pretty hard to force a token minority demographic to take center stage.
This doesn't take into account self-segregation in society, both in terms of living, social circles, romantic relationships, and the like. The only way you can go directly from those percentages to a conclusion that they should be borne out in any population of characters in a story would be if human beings were distributed in society as a result of purely random processes. But we're not.
And is the kind of person who self-segregates more interesting to tell a story about than the kind of person who doesn't? Should self-segregation be portrayed as a good thing?
Not more interesting or less. Most people self-segregate to one degree or another. I could write an interesting story about the diverse group of friends I have, or an equally interesting one about family I have in NE Georgia who heavily self-segregate. In any event, the point was simply that the argument based on statistical distribution in the population isn't a very good one. There are good arguments for diversity in fiction, that just isn't one of them.
I think you have to look at it in terms of fiction as a whole rather than as an individual work. It's a sample size question, essentially. With a sample size of one, it's hard to draw any conclusions. But when you look at all of fiction, the thousands and thousands (millions, probably?) of books out there, you begin to see some trends. And if those trends don't line up with population statistics, I think you should ask why.
Especially when you consider that the argument is based on national averages. If you look at statistics on a state or even a city basis, the ethnicity of reach one varies wildly. For example, Baltimore is ~65% black, but Sunnyvale, CA is 0.5%
I don't read books so I can't really speak to that, but I do read comics and I can definitely say that the sudden recasting of existing characters who have existed for decades as white guys into minorities and/or women has been a spectacular failure for absolutely everyone involved. Not because people hate women or black people, simply because people buy Thor to read about that specific character that they have known for a long time, not to see any random person putting on the costume. The stories have been bad too, but it all stems from making a change for the sake of making changes instead of with an artistic vision for what you are going to do with the character. The new Thor being a woman was a textbook example of forced inclusiveness that was doomed to fail. The change was made just to have a female Thor and nothing else was done with that concept. And, from the same world, there's great examples of inclusiveness that is done well. The new Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, is a girl and an arab muslim. But the name for Ms Marvel was vacant (the previous Ms Marvel going off to become Captain Marvel) and so a new character was created to fill that and they made this fun, bumbling teenager with shape changing powers to fill the role and she's awesome. It's just a fun, funny, goofy kinda book that clearly the authors were enjoying creating. She has a unique feel to her with her overprotective Asian family and a different cultural idiom, and she gets into hijinks. It's not her hijacking an existing role, it's a fresh new character doing her own thing not just picking up where the previous character left off. It's entirely misguided to look to statistics from either direction. You can prove whatever you want with them; both that there's too many and too few minorities in a thing. It doesn't help to say how many characters should be any particular thing, because we write fiction and no character should be anything except what the author wants them to be. We don't roll for characters like this is an RPG, we write the characters that jump out to us. And that's all any author can do. No-one is saying that all books should just be about men. People just want to write the characters they want to write and not be assailed with people demanding that they make their characters into other characters. It's not somehow evil to have a book made up entirely of white men, if that's what you want. Reservoir Dogs is like that, The Sopranos is like that. And no-one cares because they are good things with good characters. They have no duty to reflect the wider demographics, neither do any of us. We just have a duty to make a good book. It's reductive in the extreme to characterize characters by their race and gender alone. Stories are about the people they are about. No-one else. And it's ok that you didn't think to write any black characters. That's just as 'real' as a book whose cast includes black, asian, native american, inuit, gypsy, polish, Romanian and Irish Travelers as characters. It's fiction, if those are the characters that you want to write and you make them good characters then it doesn't matter that there's like zero percent of Irish Travelers in the US. If I want to write a book exclusively about black characters set in Finland then that's what I should do, no matter the fact that the stats say there's practically none of them around. Books are about the people they are about. If you want to write about white middle class people then write about that. And maybe later you'll want to write about black families. That's fine too. But each book is just the things that are in the book. And those things shouldn't be beholden to anything except what the author wants to write. People of different races are different, the have different lives. If you write characters properly you can't just change someone's back story like that, definitely not on the whims of demography. Frankly, I refuse to defend the decision to write primarily about white people. Because just asking the question comes with the whiff of a witch hunt; that everyone must demonstrate themselves not to be racist. And I refuse that utterly. It is ok to write about white people. It is ok to just write the characters that you thought up. We do not have to defend what we imagine. And those who try to make us, who see characters only in terms of their race and gender, and who don't seem to understand that people are more than their skin colour; they are the ones we should be asking questions of. When someone says 'add a black character' that to me is racist. That's saying that what matters is their skin alone.
How would you use statistics to prove that there are too many minorities in "a thing"? This is the same strawman that comes up every time inclusive writing is mentioned. I mean, honestly, you're being "assailed" with people "demanding" that you make your characters into other characters? Give me a break. And for someone who refuses to defend the decision to write primarily about white people, you seem very, very defensive. Yes, it's okay for any individual author to write about white people. But it's crap when every author does, or when far too many authors do, or when authors write about people of colour and their publishing companies whitewash the cover, or whatever else gets in the way of inclusivity. It sucks for kids to grow up and not see people who look like them in books (or comics, I assume). Recognizing that it sucks is the first step, but we need to do more than that. So if you don't want to be part of the solution, that's fine... but don't get snarky when other people try to be. And don't start imagining hordes of rabid readers waving pitchforks at you and demanding that you change your writing, not unless you can give me an example of a time when you were ACTUALLY pressured to change a character.
By saying that if you look on a more microscopic scale, this specific community the story is set in is 99% white. Come look out of my office window and you won't see a black guy all day. You don't need to look very far to see people assailing creators to be more inclusive. See Joss Weedon being bullied off twitter for not being feminist enough. No, people are not outside my windows to demand I change what I write. But there are people who are telling authors generally to include specific races and genders. And yes, I have been called racist for saying that my existing characters are white and I won't change them. Yes, to my face. Yes, by plural people. I'm sorry if that comes across as defensive, I don't mean to be. But I really don't appreciate people who think black people are interchangeable telling me I'm racist. But every author is just an author writing what they want to write and there's nothing we can do to change that. The answer is for the people who want to write black character (which includes me by the way, I am presently writing black characters) actually do that. If a thousandth of the people who complained about the lack of black characters actually wrote black characters then we won't have this problem.
The best writers write what they know and what they are comfortable writing about. To take a personal example, between personal experience and elements of Sharia, such as men having a right to beat their wives, I am critical of Islam, however, I cannot express this because odds are someone would threaten me or my loved ones if an expression of those views hit print. So the best thing for me is to avoid the conversation entirely.
And if a bunch of white writers go out of their way to focus on settings like Sunnyvale while ignoring the more common settings, then does it make sense for them to say that race doesn't matter to them? So if I told you that the narrator of my UrFan WIP is a straight white guy who looks like the main character for the first two chapters, but whose black lesbian friend is shown throughout the rest of the book to be the one actually driving the action against the antagonists, would you say that this plan to troll racist/misogynistic/homophobic readers cancels out the character depth that I've put into both my narrator and my MC? Having a plan to write about race/gender/orientation and having plans to write every other character aspect that matters doesn't sound like Tokenism to me. Re Thor from the perspective of a Marvel nerd who loves the Silver Age 616 comics, the new movies, the new Ultimate comics, but who is not completely up on the new 616 comics: isn't the new character having Thor's powers a natural development of themes that have been explored before? 1) Thor Odinson is not the only person capable of wielding Mjolnir, 2) Thor Odinson has lost the power of Thor, God of Thunder for letting his power go to his head before? And isn't Thor Odinson still a character in the stories themselves: working with the woman who's taken on the mantle of Thor, Goddess of Thunder? I'm confused: There are evil Muslims in the world who commit horrific acts of violence, both publicly and/or privately, and who encourage others do do the same. There are good Muslims in the world who despise evil and who work to protect innocent people from violence. There are evil non-Muslims in the world who commit horrific acts of violence, both publicly and/or privately, and who encourage others do do the same. There are good non-Muslims in the world who despise evil and who work to protect innocent people from violence. Wouldn't being critical of the evil people (some of whom happen to be Muslims) be more valuable than being critical of the Muslims (some of whom happen to be evil)?
I'm critical of some elements of the historical laws, just as I am of the laws of the Old Testament, some of them are in violation of human rights laws. In the UK alone we have both Muslims who can see that and those who are campaigning for our law to be replaced with Sharia. I do not judge an individual on what their faith is, because individuals and where they stand in regards to practice of their religion is a sliding scale, but that does not eliminate the fact that there are those who put these laws above all else and think they should apply to everyone.
Joss Whedon is still on Twitter, so I'm not sure where that's coming from... And I'm not sure who the plural people are who are calling you racist... I've written mostly white characters in all my books, and I've never once in my life been called racist. So it's hard for me to relate. So, some of this issue MAY be that people don't want to write characters of colour. But I don't think we should just dust our hands off and give up at that point. We should ask WHY they don't want to write characters of colour. Like, if someone doesn't want to write a character of colour b/c the story to be told only works with white people (hard for me to imagine this story, but... let's say it exists), then, fine. But if someone doesn't want to write a character of colour b/c they think it'll be harder to sell/market, that's an issue. If there are weird little systemic barriers we should see what we can do about them. Like, I can say from personal experience that it is REALLY hard to find stock photos of models of colour, and since most of my covers have people on them, this is an issue. I write the stories anyway, with the characters I want, but my covers with characters of colour are often much less satisfying to me (and much more of a nuisance for my cover artists) than my white characters. This is just an annoyance, but... it's annoying. For sure. And I think we should also be careful about assuming that what people want to write is immutable. Twenty years ago I never would have considered writing or even reading m/m romance, but now it's my main genre, at least for writing. It took me a while to be comfortable including characters of colour in my work, even as minor characters, but I thought it was important so I pushed myself and I continue to push myself. This isn't an external pressure, it's internal. I think it's something that should be done, so I'm doing what I can to contribute. I'm glad you're acknowledging there's a problem; I just don't think I'm as fatalistic as you about our ability to solve it.
I think the cause of the over-emphasis on white people starts with the fact they are the most likely to be literate and have the money to write, or to work in cinema. And who read books and watches films? People who have the money to do it. Minorities being poor makes their representation overly minimal because they have less acesss and less market power.
My only issue with that is then by that logic Asians should probably be right up under them in a close second for representation in literature and media because of their high literacy rates (in US) and available disposable income. For some reason the correlation there doesn't quite pan out
Well population also applies. Likely writers and likely audience is affected by that too. And I'm not saying there isn't somewhat racist influences that occur. So that too.
