We Need Diverse Books: In Which I Take Myself To Task
As promised, I'm going to look through my YA offerings and see how I've done, diversity-wise.
Donorboy:
Well, it's a story about a girl whose two moms die, and the family she had with her two moms is definitely the normal, healthy family that she misses. So good on me for that.
Having said that, this book does kind of suffer from "white is the default person" syndrome. Everybody in the book is white and middle class.
How Ya Like Me Now:
Probably the most diverse cast of any of my books, and the one where issues of race and class are foregrounded. Since part of the plot deals with Eddie, a suburban white kid, coming to live with his city mouse cousin, a lot of the book deals with Eddie getting over his preconceptions about urban life and urban residents. The secondary characters are black, white, Vietnamese, and Cape Verdean. All of the characters present as straight, though Alex is shown to know a gay couple.
I wrote the main characters as white primarily because I was going to be spending a lot of time inside their heads, and I wasn't yet confident enough to spend time in the heads of characters who aren't white. But overall I think I did a decent job with diversity on this one.
It's also my worst-selling YA novel, for what it's worth.
Forever Changes:
Everyone is white and heterosexual in this book. I did, though, make a conscious effort to include class in this book. So Brianna's dad has a horrible job he hates as an assistant manager at Megamart, but he has to keep the job because of the health insurance. Brianna's family doesn't have a lot of money, and many characters refer to the class divide between West Blackpool and East Blackpool.
Shutout:
Amanda lives in a blended family, and this is not the issue of the book; it's just the way things are in her family. No discussion of anybody being anything other than straight, which, let's face it, is probably an oversight in a book about girls' athletics. Amanda makes friends with a black student, and their dads bond over a shared love of comic books.
The Half-Life of Planets
Hank is diagnosed with Aspergers' syndrome, and much of the book deals with the particular challenges someone who can't read social cues faces when falling in love. So that's cool. But everyone is white and straight and middle class.
Notes from the Blender
Neilly's dad is marrying a dude, and Neilly is completely accepting and unfazed. (This was Trish's part, so I can't really take credit for it.) Declan is a metalhead who goes vegan. I think both of those subcultures get a bad rap, and I'm pleased with how I presented him. He asks out a black girl, Chantelle, who drops him like a hot potato when she sees him get violent with someone else. Actually pretty proud of that, though I think I probably leaned a little heavy on the "oh, you're black, so you're an outcast in suburbia too" element. To be honest, I did that a little bit in Shutout too.
Jenna and Jonah's Fauxmance
Aaron is part of a posse of male actors that serves as cover for a gay male actor pretending to be straight. The scenes in the theater company involve a pretty diverse company, racially, sexual orientationally, and age-wise, and one of them checks Aaron about his class privilege. The hardass director is a little person. Not too bad.
Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom
More good stuff about class in this one, as Lucas has no money and lives in a tiny apartment above an abandoned drug store. And Tessa, of course, is a lesbian. And everybody is white, which is what the Indiana town I was basing Brookfield on was like.
A Really Awesome Mess
A decently diverse cast, though I guess there's really no diversity of sexuality presented, now that I think of it. All the characters suffer from some sort of mood disorder or other mental illness, and I think we handled that well. Pretty much no class diversity at all.
Conclusions:
I've got some stuff I'm proud of here, but all of my protagonists are white and straight and able-bodied. (Well, I think Rosalind's probably bisexual, but I chickened out on that in the way I wrote about it.) There's essentially no representation of disability in my YA fiction. (I don't consider Asperger's a disability, and I don't think CF is classified that way either, though I'm not sure.)
I've done a decent job with portraying diversity of sexual orientation, and I don't feel that my characters who aren't white are too stereotypical, though I suppose I'm not the best judge of this. Asians are kinda underrepresented in my work. I think Hanh from How Ya Like Me Now is the only Asian character I've ever written. (Well, the only one I've written that's been published up to now.)
I'm proud of my work with social class because I think that gets neglected a lot, but I'm a little surprised and chagrined at how few of my characters live in cities. I've lived in cities my whole life, and yet only one of my YA novels is set in the city. What the hell's up with that?
Well, I think I may be guilty of thinking, at least on a subconscious level, of diversity as a "problem." What I mean is this: urban life necessarily involves confronting many facets of diversity, and I think in some cases I may have ducked this because I was writing about something else: grief, or death, or soccer, or whatever. And so I'm wondering if I just figured it simplified things to set my stories in a virtually all-white milieu so that they can be about only one "problem" at a time and they won't have "too much going on." Obviously this is dumb. I'm not crazy about how my black characters show up in these stories. I'm glad they are there, and they're not there only to teach the white characters a lesson, but there's something about the "one black kid in an all-white environment" that doesn't sit well with me, though I'm not sure exactly what it is.
Overall, I guess I'm doing better than a lot of people, but not as well as I'd like.
