"When I was nine years old," Goldberg says, "Star Trek came on, and I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick -- there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!'" - Whoopi Goldberg
Nichelle Nichols was a groundbreaking development in diversity in popular television when she starred in "Star Trek" in 1966
I thought of this quote immediately when I saw Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Ted Talk about her heavily western-influenced writing. Adichie, despite being completely unfamiliar with white western culture, wrote almost exclusively about from its perspective in her early writing, because she simply was not aware that there was room for black African protagonists and perspective in literature. Her feeling of being excluded in full from an entire art form may feel extreme to us "progressives," but her experience is not at all uncommon even in our culture.
The theme of my blog, if you can't tell already, is representation and its importance in writing. I've decided to use this blog post to clarify exactly what that means to me, and why it fits in a writing blog.
Representation changed cinema for the better when it inspired Whoopi Goldberg to pursue acting
To me, representation means finding characters like me in the media I consume. Whether that means their religion, gender, sexual orientation, or simply worldview or personality is similar to mine, can all count as part of that representation. I am very lucky because as a white person, I get to turn on the TV or go to the movies and see people that look like me almost everywhere. However, as a woman that has actual real feelings (and even more than one at a time!), it does get a little repetitive seeing the women that are represented in most media. There are notable exceptions of course, though many of the heroines regarded to break the stereotypes about women in media are few and far between, and even they have major shortcomings, as many were written by men, (re: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, etc). So if I as an abled bodied white woman have trouble finding characters I can truly connect to, I can't possibly imagine what women of color go through to achieve that end.
Representation matters, particularly in literature, when the reader is free to imagine characters however they like, because it gives writers the chance to create anyone they want, and possibly give a lot of hope to young people in minority groups that don't have many people that are like them that they can aspire to be. Books that are taught in schools are overwhelmingly about or by straight white men, and no offense to straight white men, but I think I've had enough of your perspective. I've really got it. I don't need any more. I've never read a book in school about a queer woman of color, but that's the perspective most people so desperately need because it's the one we've seen the least of. Movies and television are overwhelmingly about straight white men, and I think people have really grasped that demographic, being constantly surrounded by it for - well - ever. It's not that every straight white man is the same and that I can't possibly learn anything from a different straight white man, it's just that I really think specific focus on groups outside of that demographic is way more necessary than reading another "classic" that teaches us about literature, but won't really make any difference in the lives of someone like Adichie - that won't in any way contribute to our wholeness as readers and people.
When Adichie found representation through African novels and stories, she was able to write from what she knew and really express herself and grow into the writer that she is today. Had she not found that representation, she would have continued to feel alienated and isolated from the world that she wanted to join because she was a good writer and it was what she liked to do from a young age. What I'm saying with all this is that while it's important to teach "Moby Dick" and "Of Mice and Men," it's only so important because we've decided that these books are the classics, and if we don't read them we'll feel out of the loop when people discuss "Great Literature." but the truth is, "Great Literature," doesn't really have black people that aren't slaves or maids. It doesn't even really have women that aren't love interests or relatives to the protagonists, and if they are, they're horrendously two dimensional, because they're written by men (Tess of the D'Urbervilles anyone?). Perhaps it's time to shift the emphasis from studying "Great Literature" just because we have to, to studying actually good and diverse books that will broaden our perspectives and make room for more queer people, more women, more people of color, in the field of writing.
In the words of Hillary Clinton, "It's hard to imagine yourself as something you don't see."
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