How I Feel About Diverse Books
Hi loves! Today I’ll be discussing different perspectives on diverse books and how I feel about them. Warning, this post may be a tad controversial. I don’t intend to offend anyone and I’m by no means saying that I don’t believe in diversity. We Need Diverse Books defines the mission as:
We recognize all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities*, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.
Coming from an Asian, Australian background, I can definitely see the importance in representing minorities. Because of the lack of representation, minorities are often associated with a lot of different stereotypes. But here’s the thing, a lot of stereotypes exist for a reason. Stereotypes can be a bad thing. But can’t everything be a bad thing depending on how your use it? Stereotypes are also dynamic. Majorities of minorities can change stereotypes. It happens.
What happens when an author doesn’t know anything about the minorities other than the stereotypes that exist? Even though I’m not really a writer, if I were one, I wouldn’t want to feel like I should be writing about something I don’t know about. I understand that in our day and age, we can all do research, but at the same time, authors should be able to write whatever they feel comfortable with writing. As a result, there could be less representations of minorities because there are less people who know how to represent them.
Along with all that, it’s hard to really define something as diverse. I get that statistically, we can figure out what minorities exist. But depending on where you come from, different things will be seen as minorities. For example, even though I live in Australia, my community is 95% Asian. We see a Caucasian and everyone flips out. To me, reading a book about a ‘white American’ diversifies my knowledge of culture to some extent. Another example, if you live in a place like LA, you might not feel like reading a book about a gay person is different.
BUT. In saying that, it’s true that reading a book about an Asian person or a gay person can be monumental in the sense that so few of them exist. I do think that more books that represent minorities should exist. It should be a normal thing. However, it should be expected that their prominence isn’t substantial. After all, that only reflects the reality doesn’t it?
Can authors about minorities that they’re not a part of? What is a minority when everyone’s world is different? How prominent can representations of minorities be if minorities aren’t the majority?
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