We get a lot of asks from people with lived experience in one aspect of marginalization— LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, physically disabled, ex-religious people—and the asks boil down to, essentially: can I take all of my own trauma and put it on someone multiply marginalized? This question has many facets, which this guide is set to outline. Within any space centred around a marginalized identity, white supremacy and colorism still play a very large part within those spaces. Imani Barbarin of Crutches and Spice observed that white disabled people can only exercise the full extent of their white privilege within disabled spaces, because white supremacy has ableism built in and views disabled white people as lesser; white people are denied the ability to be completely white in abled society. As a result, the only opportunity they have to exercise the full extent of white privilege is disabled spaces. The same goes with LGBTQIA+ spaces; they can end up colonialist because of white people in those spaces assume that their methods of coming out and living in their identity are the only way that exist, when people of colour can (and often do) have totally different but still perfectly valid ways of living in their identity. Again, white supremacy has hom*ophobia built in, so white LGBTQ+ people don’t have full access to white privilege unless they’re with other LGBTQ+ people. As a result: if you pick an identity that you have power over, you are bringing all of those power dynamics to the table in your representation. Even if you share a marginalization with the character, one aspect of discrimination does not an understanding of all discrimination make. Identities are all intersectional. Representing multiple axes of marginalization is much more difficult, because you will have to unpack your own power, realize how many other ways of existing there are, and leave your own ideas for how the story should go at the door in order to respect experiences you don’t have in full. You have to listen to the people you’re representing, or else you won’t be writing representation for them. Insiders to any given group are taught a lot of “truths” about outside groups without spending much time listening to those groups, which results in a lot of problems. What might have been said or observed once or twice travels around people in a game of telephone, fanning xenophobia because it’s so much easier to critique people over there than ourselves. So yes, you heard that Over There, the practice is x. Apply some stereotypes, spread it around as a societal “everyone knows”, and suddenly you think you know a lot more than you do about any one group. For example: the Public Religion Research Institute polled over a dozen religious groups in the United States on whether they support LGBTQ rights in 2019, and the results were that people who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and basically every religious group you could think of except Jehovah’s Witnesses were in favour of legal LGBTQ+ protection. They even polled in Christian denominations separating out white, Hispanic, and Black—and all of them agreed: LGBTQ+ rights needed to be put into law. (Source: Broad Support for LGBT Rights Across all 50 States: Findings from the 2019 American Values Atlas ) Throws a wrench into “everyone knows that [insert group here] is hom*ophobic”, doesn’t it? The problem is, these biases are going to colour your initial research stage. If you “know” that x group believes y, then you’re going to “naturally” slot them into that role in the story, then come to us asking if that’s okay. Instead, what you need to do is poke your own assumptions: Once you’ve done those steps, you’ll be in a much better place to see if you’ve even made something realistic, or if you’re projecting your experience too much as a 1 to 1 in situations where it just wouldn’t happen that way. Any identity you have as a white person is going to look different for someone not white. Being queer, Muslim, and Black in America looks a lot different than being gay, white, and Protestant in America. Those combinations of identities will look different again if you’re in a Muslim-majority country vs Muslim-minority, Christian-majority vs Christian-minority. The traumas of being a certain identity in a society that doesn’t like you are racialized. White is not the default experience of how life happens, and a Hindu person with a strong connection to their family and wants to maintain some connection, just with boundaries, will have a much different set of priorities than an exvangelical who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18. Even if you get a Hindu person who wants to get away from their family the minute they turn 18, the logic for getting there and the hurdles to overcome will be different, because they’ll have been raised differently. If you start to assume that you know how they’ll reach that logic, then you’re probably playing a game of bias telephone, as detailed above. Mental illness, gender, disability and basically any identity under the sun will have a different expression in different cultures. A cross-cultural study on schizophrenia’s auditory hallucinations showed that the voices people hear are shaped by culture. In Accra, Ghana and Chennai, India—people mostly reported their heard voices as a positive thing. Meanwhile in San Mateo, California, not one person did the same. (source: Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says) Different cultures will define “man” differently. Cultures might have third genders that are more widespread and accepted than non-binary people in North America and Europe. Expectations for a parent will be different. Expectations for children will be different. Expectations between friends will be different. Disability (physical and/or mental) accommodations that are built into culture will be wildly different depending on cultural values. Wealth and class struggles will also be different. All of these things will deeply impact a majority* character from a marginalized group, let alone one multiply marginalized. If you can’t answer how a majority character would behave based off cultural practices, then answer that before you work on a multiply marginalized person from that group. * majority= cis, het, pale, financially stable, aka, somebody who has the most institutional power within that group even if they are marginalized in broader society (if they’re in a society where they are the dominant group, then they are privileged) I know many marginalized people use fictional stories to be seen on paper, especially in a society where the stories for us just don’t exist. And you’re also aware of how white the representation of otherwise-marginalized people is, so you want to do your part to change that. There are three paths you can take with this: 1- You are writing a story primarily for others, and have worked through your own stuff enough that you can use it as an influence instead of a story basis. You realize you might not know exactly how a Buddhist East Asian person in a supportive family feels, but you know what it’s like to feel supported growing up and want to pull from that experience to show a loving Buddhist East Asian family. Or maybe you know what it’s like to love your parents but never, ever, ever feel safe coming out to them, and you want to show other people stuck in that place it’s okay, and it just so happens that the character this time around is Black. This is a place where you can put aside your own desires and really dig into the research. Because it will take a lot of research. There will be so many little things that you don’t know. It will be diversity on hard mode. 2- You are writing this story primarily for yourself, but it’s just so emotional to think of your own context you want to make it Different, somehow If you are in this position, consider keeping the story private. Not a judgement, at all—we all need private stories. But until you’ve worked through your own pain, you’re going to be relying a little too heavily on assumptions and your own experience to do respectful research. That emotional situation you want to write about is going to look so different once you change the racial demographic, you probably won’t get the catharsis you want while writing it. Which means the story and your healing will suffer, because you’re not able to do research and you’re not able to work through all of your feelings from running into cultural roadblocks. Get catharsis first, then consider doing diversity once your emotions are less intense. You need to be able to put “you” aside, and when your feelings are too big, that just is not happening. That’s okay! Not all of your representation has to be perfectly done for others to consume. But that also means, you don’t have to ask WWC about it. Because you’re not writing a story for public consumption—you’re writing a story to process your own trauma. 3- You are writing this story primarily for others, but you’re simply trying to toss as much diversity in to “fix” the “everyone is white” problem and haven’t really stepped back to ask yourself if you’re representing them, or if you’re trying to show off. This is a place you can very quickly be accidentally hurtful, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe you’re wanting to toss in some background flavour, have some experience with death, decide to change the character’s race because they’re a smaller background part… and then you don’t look at what grief norms are in their culture over yours. You could also find out that your experience has a lot of similarities and get lucky! Or you could get a few things wrong but at least you tried. Or, worst case, you could get it completely wrong and end up not representing anyone. When in doubt, ask. If you’ve never seen x group handle y, then look it up before you go writing about it—same way you’d research any other component of your plot. Fear is not the place to write diversity from. ~Mod LesyaPower Dynamics and Intersections
The Bias Game of Telephone
White is Not Neutral
Healing, Distance, and Diversity
TL;DR
