Avoiding Stereotypes by Avoiding Tokenism

If you only have one of any particular ethnicity on a team, none of them will avoid negative repercussions. 

We’ve spoken about tokenism before, and this is a prime example of why you should avoid it. Having only one member of any ethnicity on a team means all of their traits are representative of their ethnicity, so you’ll be enforcing the worst of the behaviour.

On the flipside, avoiding having the Token PoC be any sort of “meaty” role in fear of avoiding stereotypes denies them their humanity. Part of good representation is letting us be the messy people we are— which includes sometimes doing stuff that fits stereotypes, even if they’re negative. The problem isn’t the “they have negative traits.” The problem is “there’s only one of them of that ethnicity.“ 

By having 2+ of any one ethnicity, you give people the room to be themselves because there’s another member of the team not like that. It breaks down the unconscious associations between the character’s ethnicity and the negative traits, by removing “of course [character]’s behaving like that, they’re [ethnicity]!” with “but [other character] doesn’t do that, and they’re [ethnicity], too.” 

(You will always get people insisting the one who doesn’t behave in the morally reprehensible way is just “one of the good ones”, but this helps cut them down— also why it’s important to have a diverse background cast with similar variety in personality types, jobs, and moral alignments)

Fear and Representation

I’m going to talk about a deeper issue I see here, which is fear of messing up. You don’t want to hurt people by doing it wrong, don’t want to be yelled at for reinforcing negative things.

This fear hurts you more than it helps you.

We get a lot of “how do I avoid stereotypes” questions. We get a lot of “how do I not hurt people” questions. We don’t answer the majority of them because if you write from a place of fear, you will not represent PoC well.

Writing good representation is not handling a bomb that’s about to explode if you press it wrong. Writing good representation is about a curiosity, love, and respect for people not like yourself. You’re curious about their stories and are invested in telling them. You love them as people, as their genuine reality. And you respect them enough to want to do them justice in your writing.

If you approach writing diversity with fear, you will not let us be human. Because by fearing writing us, you end up creating model minorities because you just can’t let them be evil, that’s bad. You other us even further by not letting us have the same internal lives and same shades of experience as white people.

People mess up. People have complex morality. Not letting us mess up or have other moral alignments than goodie two shoes strips us of our personhood.Put all types of us into your stories. Some things you Don’t Do— like Jewish blood mages and Natives who are so much simpler but so much happier because of it— but if you approach us like people with different backgrounds, you’re at least on the right track. And if you make it that multiple people of the same ethnicity exist, then you don’t have to worry about one character being the be all end all of representation.

The thing about these types of questions— “what stereotypes do I avoid"— is you’re not really asking What Do I Not Do. You’re asking “can you tell me what to do so I don’t get yelled at for it”, as if there are magic lists of 100% Safe Traits for different ethnicities.

Safe Traits are not people. Until you ease down your fear of being Safe, of Not Reinforcing Bad Things With One Character, you will not be able to truly tackle representation in your work. The work you have to do is much deeper than putting in “acceptable representation.” 

You have to redefine “acceptable representation” in your mind. It cannot mean “a character who is safe to write without hurting anybody.” What it can mean, however, is “showing the diversity of humanity by displaying multiple people having worthwhile, nuanced, dynamic, and messy stories to tell that reflect their lived reality.”

~Mod Lesya 

>>  I’m super conserned on how to make my “sneaky and shifty” spy character of the team. What races/ethnicities would you guys reccomend I avoid putting into this role to avoid the worst negative stereotyping?

I’d especially stay away from making this character Jewish since that’s already a stereotype for us, and East Asian since there’s a negative trope about East Asians being “inscrutable” (i.e. “you can’t tell what they’re thinking so they could totes be plotting bad stuff!”)

Standard disclaimer that if you have a cast of many many Jewish characters or many many East Asian characters you can make one of them sneaky because the rest of them will show that it’s not an inherently Jewish (or East Asian) trait, but it sounded like you wanted a variety of ethnicities for this project so probably best just to stay away from making the Spy either of those two groups.

–Shira