How I Work to Be Responsibly Inclusive When Representing Diverse Characters in My Writing

This is my personal opinion, and doesn’t reflect the opinions of others.

Trigger Warning: Sensitive topics such as sexism and discrimination are mentioned.

Representing underrepresented minorities in my novels has always been something that’s important to me. Personally, I like to use a label-free approach where I use background information and cultural history to reveal social identities such as ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc. I don’t like to describe the skin color because I don’t describe skin color for my characters who are white. In my experience and from what others have shared with me, it seems when a skin color isn’t specified, the reader assumes the character is white. But because we don’t include skin color for a character that’s white, I don’t believe we should for a character who isn’t white. I believe a character who is a minority should be treated equally on the page just like they deserve to be treated equally off the page.

If you think about it, there are a ton of romcom and hallmark movies and books that feature white heterosexual couples, where the plot has nothing traumatic in it, where it’s a story simply about their everyday lives. While it is extremely important to get stories out there that are surfaced around trauma and discrimination that minorities face, I also think they deserve to have stories written about them that follow their everyday lives too. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a brilliant example of this, as it follows Janie, an African-American woman, who is on her quest to find true love. There is sexism and other traumas that are mentioned and shown throughout the novel, but it isn’t the focal point. It’s simply Janie just wanting to find love. I want to help create more of those.

I want to normalize diversity. I shouldn’t have to say my book has diversity in it. I should just be able to say my book is a representation of the real world. There are so many cultures out there that it wouldn’t be realistic if all my characters were white, not at all. I want to include everyone naturally without having to say I’m including minorities. Minorities are human beings. I’m writing a book with characters, that’s all I should have to say. Another example is writing a main character with a different body type. I wouldn’t label the character as plus-sized. Instead, I would simply describe their body type as curvy or use adjectives to describe their body. A label adds a negative connotation. I just want to write people as they are, that’s it. And it means the full story. For all my novels, I’ve had to research and talk with my friends in order to make sure I’m telling the full story.

I recently participated in a webinar that was put on by the Grand Rapids Region Writers Group, and the webinar focused on how to represent indigenous characters in writing and how to be responsibly inclusive. I learned so much from it. One of the main points made by the speaker, Kathleen Carty-Fisher, was that oftentimes writers will have Native Americans in their writing but only represent them using little details such as dreamcatchers or reservations. This is tokenism where a writer is only including a character to simply check off a box. It’s extremely offensive and harmful to Native Americans. Writers with this approach take one little stereotype and make it the entire character. Kathleen went on about the importance in researching to make sure stereotypes are avoided. She even said the research process should be detailed and may take longer than normal.

Kathleen talked about how authors should approach their writing with intentionality and informed cultural awareness. She also talked about when writing from an outside perspective, to acknowledge the differences and limits of your lived experience. I really loved that particular point because it’s so easy to forget about the biases we can’t control when we write from a certain point of view. It’s hard to put yourself inside the shoes of someone else. It’s hard to accept you may have privilege the character doesn’t. Being aware of it though is the first step in the positive direction.

She also spent time going over the myths about Native Americans. One is that some people don’t even think Native Americans exist anymore. The invisibility is used as a weapon to justify inaction and harmful action. In literature, indigenous communities are sometimes misrepresented as people of the past. Another myth is that they only live on reservations. Again, this is only because literature always shows them in reservations. When literature is getting out in the world and people are reading it, people’s images of a whole group of people become the stereotypes and it becomes inaccurate. A third thing is indigenous communities are misrepresented as being stoic all the time or as being spiritual. Kathleen had a great way of showing how literature really is power. It’s power to be able to put stories out into the world. It’s so important to make sure minorities such as Native Americans are represented accurately and respectfully.

Kathleen also said it’s important to seek to understand the history of harmful exploitation Indigenous communities face. There are many missing women that go missing in those communities, and there’s very little ever said or done about it. Knowing this is important. A writer should know everything, the full story, before trying to write a story about the community.

Kathleen also mentioned throughout the entire webinar the importance in specifying what specific indigenous community and details of that community in the Native American character. Native Americans all have different cultures even within them and personalizing it and taking the time to really learn the specific culture and the differences between them is extremely important to do.

She ended the webinar with ideas of where to start with being responsibly inclusive. It’s important first of all to make contemporary stories about Indigenous communities. Elatsoe is such a great example; Badger creates a world where ghosts can come to life. I take the ghosts to symbolize how Indigneous people feel. It’s situated in the modern day and the empowering female protagonist thinks back in the past to her ancestors to remind the readers of this. Indigenous characters need to be situated in the present day to go against the myth that they only existed in the past. It’s a way to fight against erasure/invisibility. Oftentimes, Western cultures and Indigenous cultures are seen as having tension, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Another big way to be responsibly inclusive is to make Native American characters as more than just a sidekick and to guard against limited roles.

I know that ever since I went to the webinar, I have even better ways to be inclusive in my writing. I’ve taken a lot of it with me and I also continue to identify more stereotypes in books I’ve read. Having the awareness now to know what it looks like when something isn’t responsibly inclusive has allowed me to better self-analyze my own work and research more to create more inclusive works.