Writing.Com General Discussion

I don't think it's token nod to have women in a story or POC if it matches the real life ratios in an environment.

if the 3 main races (in an area) are 33% split in a police force, then, the 6 cops in a story better be 2 white, 2 black and 2 hispanic. Give or take. If they are all white, that's messed up. I say that, living in a city where the police force is about as evenly diverse as the city. It's not like Fergusson where it's all white cops, all black civillians.

Consider your own job. What's the ratio of men to women other races. If you were writing about a character with your job, why would the character's co-workers all be white males?

Making this more closely match real-life ratios is not a token nod to race.

Making their presence in the story have to tie to a racial story makes them a token nod, rather than acknowledgement of real life.

Do you sit in your break room seeing racial dramas unfold? Or are you talking about an engineering problem with your fellow engineers.

Now the black engineer at the table probably does have some racial stuff that happens in his life. But if as somebody else stated he acts a certain way around white people, that certain way may include, leaving that at home because he's among engineers who are treating him as an equal, not as a barrier to his side-plot about race.

Now that experience may not be yours as a white guy, but it was mine. Because I worked in a diverse workplace where we were engineers first. And yes, outside of work, I got to know one of the black men, who was very pale skinned and as a child was called Mellow Yellow. Being obviously mixed race wasn't a boon in his neighborhood culture growing up in Brooklyn. That hasn't seemed to be a problem in his adult life.

Would that color his character (no pun intended) in a story? Maybe not. Another writer might think to put a chip on his shoulder. But in knowing the man, I'd be real careful with that, because that's the stereotype. Heck, he frowned on "soul food" because it was made of the crappy scraps the slaves were left with and has now been glamorized. He certainly objected to Juneteenth. His idea of how a black man should be might have sounded like "acting white", but to his mind meant acting educated and respectful.

The point then is, the real world is diverse. Our work should reflect that diversity and than means a writer has to write about those different from themselves.

Not everyone of those characters are in the story to parade a race or gender issue. In fact doing so exacerbates the token-guy problem in that their only purpose in the story then is to wave a flag about race issues.

At some level, it is just as valuable to have Uhura be black and nobody make a point about her race on the show. It is the presentation of people of color in all the roles, performing just as well respected as anybody else. It turns out, even that has value to normalizing diversity for people.