Young Writers Society

Hi,

My name is Kat, and I'm fascinated with writing diverse characters. In fact, I've invented an elaborate system for assigning traits or identities to characters at random.

Send me a character description (and perhaps a brief description of the setting) and I will change your character in a random way.

Kat

Hey, Kat!

I was wanting to ask one question: By "identities", do you mean randomly assigning racial/ethnic and sexual/romantic/gender identities?

The reason I ask is that I'm concerned it could turn into (unintentional) tokenism -- where tokenism is "the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality" (Google). Obviously this relies on the author's involvement with the identity they're given, but it hurts more than it helps to have characters as tokens in a work.

Good luck with this!

Hi Lareine,

Totally! I'm pretty conscious about that, too; you can't really use my system without partially rewriting the characters and doing a lot of research. I think that, used properly, this can actually avoid tokenism. Here's my rationale:

I was partly inspired by old Star Trek, which had an incredibly diverse cast for its time, but often did not give characters (other than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy) very strong presences. Often times a character's presence boiled down to just being "the Russian guy," or "the Black lady." I figured it might be better to create the character archetype first and then apply identities to them. That way you end up with "the book smart Russian whiz kid who's a little intimidated by this whole situation," rather than just "the Russian guy."

You still haven't addressed the tokenism aspect— you're not building a diverse cast. You're saying "so long as I have one of these identities, that's enough."

Star Trek is genuinely different because they had a lot marginalized characters and multiple of their identities. If I asked you the name of the Black character in Star Trek, you'd have a dozen to choose from. Asian you'd have half a dozen. The core cast contained multiple marginalized groups, and not one of them carried the full weight of being The Representation for the group (even twofer tokens like Uhura, a Black woman, wasn't the only Black women on the show when you take broader parts into account).

It wasn't a random selection of traits to put a cast together. Star Trek was purposely designed in a world where the racial barriers of the sixties (when segregation had barely stopped being divided by people of colour and white) didn't exist. They very purposely wrote in as many non-segregated people of colour as the network would allow them to put in for the sole, express purpose of creating a diverse cast where racism didn't exist.

When Nichelle Nichols wanted to leave the show, Martin Luther King Jr himself told her not to, because she was the first Black woman on television who wasn't a maid, instead doing a job that could be literally anyone. Whoopi Golberg cited Nichols as the reason she got into acting, because for the first time she saw a Black woman holding an important television role.

It wasn't done randomly. It wasn't done with a single character profile. It was pushing boundaries that had previously been literally impossible to break before Star Trek. The diversity doesn't look that shocking now because there have been so many strides, so it looks random and looks tokenistic and almost trivial, but you have to understand that at the time, Star Trek faced massive pushback from society that they were being too diverse. People hated the number of PoC bit parts in Star Trek, because they didn't believe those bit parts should be played by anybody but white people.

They did their job right; we can't tell with the modern, relatively diverse landscape they paved the path for. But a system like this is a step backwards. It doesn't have the conscious thought Star Trek did, and instead leaves everything up to chance.

Just to build on the Star Trek bit, tensions between the US and Russia also weren't the friendliest at the time, so even "The Russian Guy" was carefully and intentionally chosen to be specifically Russian. Star Trek has generally done a good job over its many iterations at taking on current controversial social issues in favor of the more progressive stance. So in the case of the original series, there were hard core tensions between all of the groups represented at the time. The idea of all these specific people being on the same team in real life and having equally important roles and voices was absurd. In the reality that was back then, that would have never, ever happened.

The show essentially took those specific tensions and said hey, we want a future where none of this matters and everyone can work together as equals, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. Where no one is judged for that. And we know that's possible. So we're going to make a TV show and display that fictional someday future in the hopes of speeding it along into actuality. We're going to show people what equality looks like. What this brighter future looks like.

So, maybe a better way to spin it would be to look at current social tensions going on in the here and now, and using that as a basis for designing your diversity. What would a brighter future that today look like? How can that be displayed? What's something that would never happen in the current here and now world, but that we hope will someday be the norm? What will that look like?

The possibilities are endless -- we've still got a long way to go in a lot of areas, so you still have the mass variety of options. But by focusing on the relationships between the people rather than the individual characters themselves, you can better avoid tokenism. It puts a lot more intent into the generation, and can amplify the message I think you might be going for.