Diversity In Books

The topic about diversity in books has been growing in the past year or two. People want to see more people represented in books such as the following: more ethnically diverse people, more sexually diverse people, different races. I do agree with those statements, honestly I do. I think it’s an awesome idea to represent more people because no one is the same. However, a lot of trouble started up after someone posted on booktube about how we need less diverse books…

Now I don’t agree with how the person went about filming the video. Their tone seemed to come across as a little judgey and semi-rude. But one statement was said that they don’t care about a characters race or sexuality or religious views. They care about the thoughts the character has. And thus a huge war has been started about diversity. I just need to vent my opinions simply because I saw something on twitter about someone bashing an author and getting blocked by someone and the person sending the tweets was pissed as well as another author was pissed because a reader got blocked.

I barely ever read a book where the characters skin color is mentioned. And if I do, sometimes the character simply says “golden skin” which can mean a lot of things: Being tan, Mexican, Indian, whatever. Yeah I read a lot of book about heterosexual characters but have people ever thought that maybe the author wrote about heterosexual characters because that’s the kind of thing that can relate to? That’s the kind of relationship they’ve experienced and therefore, can express that through writing? Sometimes it’s hard for a white heterosexual author to write a book about a gay African American because they don’t know what’s it like. And you know what would happen if they tried? They’d get bashed for not writing the correct representation!

That is why it pisses me off that people are criticizing an author for not writing diverse books. What if they have zero experience? Then you’ll be criticizing them for representing a character wrongly.

I can’t personally relate to someone based on skin color or sexuality or whatever. Why? Because I’m not like every white girl. I’m not like every straight person. I have different feelings and different opinions and different experiences. If that means I’ll relate to a gay African American as oppose to a straight Caucasian than that’s fucking awesome.I care about who you are on the inside. I wasn’t raised to judge who you are on the outside. If your hearts pure then i’ll accept you just for who you are. If your hearts not pure, i’ll still give you a second chance to redeem yourself.

Again, I understand why people want more diversity. It’s awesome that more diverse books are coming out. Just don’t judge people for not reading them. Don’t hate an author for not writing one. Don’t start drama just to try and get what you want. It’s not helping people come together in the reading community. It’s tearing the reading community apart.