Writing Journal: Diversity vs. Tokenism

I reached a milestone the other day with one of my pieces of writing and finished the third draft of one of my novels in progress, or what I call the “I SUCK AND WHY DID I EVER THINK I COULD BE A WRITER?!” draft. I’m one step closer to being rejected by literary agents and publishers all over the United States.

In all seriousness, I feel pretty good about this milestone. I went back through the second draft and did a lot of careful editing, and I can confirm the wisdom in leaving a draft alone for a few weeks (or in my case, months) after you finish it. After writing the first draft, I wondered how I could possibly change anything about it. Then I left it alone for a little while, returned to it, and changed half of the plot, eliminating several story lines that I will probably save for the sequel. After writing the second draft, I sent it to a friend, read my friend’s very helpful comments, and left it alone for awhile. When I returned to it, I edited and rephrased lines on every single page to make my narrator’s voice more consistent.

In short, the editing process is both frustrating and comforting. It’s frustrating because it’s a reminder that I’m still not finished. It’s comforting because I know I can return to that paragraph I didn’t like and change it after getting a little distance from the story.

There is, however, one aspect of the story that I’m still unsure about and I don’t know if there’s an easy fix, or if it needs to be fixed at all. This has to do with characters and diversity.

The novel in question is about a group of high school friends who happen to be vampires (because the world needs another young adult vampire novel). These four students have recently transitioned and they are all in eleventh grade. The demographics of the group consist of a white half-Jewish boy, a white Jewish girl, an African-American boy, and a Puerto Rican-American girl. They all became vampires in different ways and have different philosophies about being vampires. And that’s all I will say about the plot because I’m afraid I’ve already said too much.

Anyway, this novel is written in first person and told through the point of view of the white half-Jewish boy, but the story doesn’t end there. I have plans to write a four-book series where each book is written from the perspective of a different character. The white boy is the first character who gets to narrate, but the other three characters will get their turns to speak in the subsequent stories.

The decision to make my cast of characters an ethnically diverse group was both a conscious and unconscious one. I was vaguely aware that I didn’t want to write another young adult vampire novel all about white people, but when brainstorming a list of characters, I didn’t have a checklist of which ethnic groups I wanted to represent in my story. I did some free-writing and eventually, the characters formed themselves, as cliched as that sounds. In fact, the narrator of the first book was originally written as a girl, but as I kept writing, the character’s voice seemed distinctly male, so I made the changes and the character became a boy.

I received confirmation that the character “sounded like a boy” when I showed excerpts of the story to my thirteen-year-old students last year. They enjoyed the excerpts for the most part and liked the characters, but when they started talking about the actors they would cast in the potential movie version of the book, they commented that the black male character “sounds really hot”…and came up with a list of good-looking white actors to play that character.

Confused, and feeling a little uneasy, I reminded them that this character was black. Their response: “Really? He doesn’t sound black.”

Those of you who are reading this post might be having unpleasant Hunger Games-related flashbacks and remembering those racist tweets from fans who were extremely upset to find out that Rue was black. But here’s the kicker: most of my students were themselves black, and they still didn’t know that this “really hot” character was supposed to be black.

Whose fault was that misunderstanding – theirs or mine?

Maybe it was my fault. I didn’t spend a lot of time describing the character’s physical attributes. I didn’t even directly state that he was African-American. I said he had “very dark skin.” Maybe those who accuse me of having too much white liberal guilt have a point, and I’ve become – gulp – politically correct.

Or maybe it was their fault. They thought the character “didn’t sound black” because he spoke more properly (for lack of a better term) than they did when talking to their friends. Maybe they had some of their own stereotypical assumptions about other black people.

Or maybe it’s – wait for it – society’s fault. The media is so dominated by representations of white people that maybe a lot of readers, even a lot of people of color, “default to white” in their minds.

I’m guessing it’s probably a combination of all three factors.

They didn’t, however, make the same mistake about the Puerto Rican-American character, probably because her first and last name are both so unmistakably Spanish that they could tell she was Latina even if they skimmed over the physical descriptions. Still, I don’t actually know if the name I chose for her character is common in Puerto Rico. I picked a name I liked, then decided she was Puerto Rican. For all I know, the name I picked for her is a lot more common in Honduras or El Salvador or another primarily Spanish-speaking country. If I do some research and find out that her name isn’t very Puerto Rican at all, what do I do – change the name I’m attached to, or switch nationalities for the character as though it’s as simple as changing her favorite food?

I also don’t know how much Spanish I should use when I write her dialogue. Would it make sense to have her drop a few Spanish phrases here and there? Probably, but when? At what point do I cross the line between “authentically Spanish-speaking” and “HI I AM AN AUTHOR AND I LOOKED UP SPANISH PHRASES ONLINE”?

For that matter, who’s to say that I have the details for the Jewish characters correct? After all, I didn’t grow up Jewish. I also didn’t grow up male, yet I’m writing from the perspective of a male character. Yet I somehow feel more comfortable contacting a male and/or Jewish friend to ask, “Hey, does this detail sound right to you?” than I would contacting a black or Puerto Rican friend to ask the same question.

I’m probably overthinking this. The best thing I can do for ALL of my characters is to give them layers, realistic flaws, complex relationships, and understandable motivations. When looking through my draft, I think I have accomplished this goal for the most part. I don’t want race/religion/gender to be the defining aspect of any of those characters, but neither do I want race/religion/gender to be completely irrelevant to who they are as people. Whether I succeed in that goal, I suppose only time and audience reception will tell.