The We Need Diverse Books™ Walter Award Judges Committee Has Confirmed Selections For The Inaugural

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Day 3 of #authorlifemonth #authormonthlife brought to you by the amazeballs @missdahlelama My last 5 star read. Whoa, so I haven't been reading lately but I definitely remember what my last 5 star read was. The Sista hood: on the Mic by E-fierce aka Elisha Miranda. So a little confession I read and review YA and friggin love it. The themes usually present in YA are themes I wish were present in NA and adult novels more often, my three favorite being cultural identity, racial identity and sexual identity. By our adult years it's like we're supposed to have it figured all out but In my unique case I don't. And this is one of books that I always bring up in my YA presentations when I publicly speak on books. Why I connected to it: 1.An Afro-Latina main character. ( I'm an Afro Latina of Cuban ancestry and this was the first time I read a girl in a book who was Latina, DARK SKINNED not mulata but negra como yo w/a big kinky Afro. I cried reading that because from the cover you can't tell the main character is black) 2.Characters that come from a lower socio-economic background. 3.Queer female characters of color, especially Black and Latina characters of color. (This is the kicker. This is also one of its kind for me because usually #lgbt books are never about black and Latinas. I wish more people knew about this book 😪) 4. Characters that reflected the Hip-Hop culture without being offensive, appropriating or stereotypical. The Sista Hood on the Mic follows Mariposa Colon aka MC Patria, an Afro-Puerto Rican girl from San Francisco, CA with a love for Hip Hop and making a name for herself but she needs a fly crew to do it! That is where The Sista Hood comes in. This was a book about a girl but most important it was about a girl who maybe likes girls. A girl who valued friendships with girls. This book is about empowerment between girls and I think it's sad that more people don't know about this book. The friendship between the girls is something I think is missing from YA. Everything always seems to be centered on getting a boyfriend and while Mariposa wanted to be with someone, her friends were more important. That's, like, a big high five for me!

Almost, almost got my name right. And I said it all Latin-y with an accent and I didn't spell it. Just missed the d at the end😊 #Starbucks #Libertad

My story: 6 teen American girls of different backgrounds find each other and go on a quest to make the world a better place. The girls' backgrounds are: Native American (tribe TBD), Jewish, Muslim, African American, Latina (specific heritage TBD), and white Christian/lesbian. The Native American is the leader but each girl will play a unique roll and shine. Is it ethical for me, a white-passing Jewish girl, to write this story from a 3rd person omnicient perspective if I do extensive research?

Writing from many different heritage POV’s in the same story

I’m concerned about the one-of-each approach to choosing your characters’ ethnicities. Unless there’s some specific plot reason for so much disparity, like “representatives from different groups pick their best and brightest to Do A Thing”, it starts to ping my “why so many different groups/lack of multiple people from same marginalized group” meter.

For example, having two Muslims and two Jews seems more realistic to me than one Muslim, one Jew, one Latina, one Native American, etc. Putting it another way: if a Black girl wanted to change the world, I don’t instantly picture her choosing a group with no other Black people in which to do that in. The Black people I know who are trying to change the world are definitely doing it alongside at least some other Black people even if not everyone in the group is Black. The same thing goes for lesbians – not every lesbian would feel safe joining a group of entirely straight girls to accomplish social change.

Another way you can do this having some of the groups overlap, like having the character you listed as African-American be Muslim too (leaving you with two Muslims: one Black and one not), having someone besides the white Christian girl be into girls, etc.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing this in omniscient as long as you’ve read books by people in the groups you’re writing about to get a feel for how they write themselves, as opposed to seeing them through the White Gaze as we’re all programmed to do. (That’s another reason to cut back on the number of groups represented—less voices to master.)

–Shira

I have a few gut instincts with this. My biggest one is I’m looking at “make the world better” and “Native American leader” and wondering if you might not be pulling from the idea that because Natives had a culture that spans working with nature for so long, you’re potentially pulling from Noble Savage roots for making her the leader. There are a lot of subtle biases for Natives that include headstrong warriors, magical natives, noble savages, and basically a whole bunch of “positive” stereotypes that make Natives look like the best possibility for saving the world.

We’re not.

We’re just as divided on how to make the world a better place as the average culture. Our techniques don’t work for the industrial world, because they were built at a different time and place. Yes, they were sustainable, and yes, they were wonderful… but the time for them is gone. We need to rebuild society and while Indigenous attitudes of “respect/work with the earth” should be a core part of that… we don’t own that attitude. And we don’t know how to go about it instinctually. The world is different and we’re struggling as much as others.

My next biggest instinct is how you appear to be tokenizing everyone. It feels checklist-y, to me, because sure you have a white Christian but she’s lesbian, so she’s not majority group. Everyone you’ve said only has two things that make them marginalized (gender and either race or orientation), which means you seem to be writing archetypes instead of people. When you only have one of each member of the group, they become the representation for the group, meaning you actually have less freedom to create good characters. You end up so focused on getting the representation Correct and Respectful that the characters become stick figures, unable to breathe and be people because you’re scared of misrepresentation.

If you look at the difference between shows that only have one primary female character, and ones that have multiple female characters, you’ll see the difference. Sailor Moon, for example, has 10 female characters to pull from. Usagi would be utterly irritating if she were on her own, and probably unwatchable because most girls aren’t like that. Some are, but not all. However, most girls aren’t like Sailor Mercury, either— but some are. The pattern continues throughout the Senshi, where they are all very specific types of girls and each one on their own would be average to even poor representation, but together they create an actual cast of diversity that represents girls as a whole incredibly well, simply because there are ten of them.

Apply the same principle to your work. If you want to be representative, give yourself breathing room. Tokenization happens when there’s only one person of a group “thrown in” because people have some invisible quota for how much diversity a work needs. You won’t be offensive if you swap out one race/religion for another, and in fact you could even have better representation because now you have more “hold points”, so to speak, for each race.

Related— don’t be afraid to have people be two things. Nothing wrong with a Native lesbian and a Black Muslim, especially since Muslim is a religious marker and not any indication of skin tone.

Finally, watch out for internal conflict in the group. I can’t speak for others, but Natives can highly mistrust Christians as a whole, no matter how much this girl is non practicing. Do keep in mind Christianity is an organization that hurt Natives very deeply, from missionaries trying to destroy our religions to many residential schools being religious, and in Canada they only closed down completely in the 1990s. Christianity has left very recent scars on our communities and not all of us can get over that.

Check your motive for including her. Is it to prove that not all Christians are bad? Will you slip in a motive that she learns to overcome white guilt? Is it to teach these marginalized groups a lesson about not being judgemental? Is it because you feel you need a member of the dominant religion in the group, for whatever reason? Pardon me for the potentially inaccurate questions, but I’m wary of why the mix is the way it is. You have a ton of potential for it to go really sour, and I want to pose questions to make sure you’ve checked your own potentially subconscious biases.

~Mod Lesya

So excited for this! Please join us tomorrow if you can!!! #largefears

Mindy Kaling talks about her journey in her career as an actress in Hollywood and challenging the status quo. 

See the full video here

The journey never stops..

16 Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels by Award-winning and Break Out Authors! https://tinyurl.com/yakpkqnb thndr.me/n8jkqr http://thndr.me/n8jkqr

Wow this is probably like the coolest thing ever! Growing up on Street fighter Dhalsim was always one of my favorites to play with! Big ups to @nubiamancy for sharing this on your TM and thumbs up to @panteronacosplay for killing it as #Dhalsim

Aziz Ansari dropped some major truth about television’s diversity problem over the weekend. Speaking at EW Fest, he discussed how Empire, while progress, does not miraculously solve representation on screen. He also shared how he wasn’t in Transformers because of his stance on accents. 

Micro-aggressions, Unpacking privilege, and The Knee Jerk Response

Micro-aggressions happen all the time. Everyday. Even by people you think are your allies. For example: Black woman says:  I am so upset about the violence against the Black community. White LGBTQIA woman responds: What about the LGBTQIA community? What about violence against us? This is a micro-aggression. This is an invalidation of the Black Woman’s statement even though the White woman is right about violence in the LGBTQIA community. However, by co-opting the conversation, by making it about her own marginalization at that immediate moment, she has asserted her white privilege and any chance for a conversation ends abruptly. To be a good ally, we must learn to listen and support each other when people who are hurting are talking. Your time to talk will come soon enough, but don’t take it at the expense of others. Don’t let your privilege co-opt a conversation on race. I will give you a more personal example. I grew up during the race riots between the Korean American and Black community in NYC. My parents owned a store and we lived in the apartment above it. It was a scary time. At school I got into an argument with a Black classmate. She said it was incredibly hard being Black and having to deal with racism. In my young, resentful and admittedly self-centered mind, I didn’t like what she said. So I responded – “Well Korean Americans get hate and racism from both the Black and White communities.” That was a blatant micro-aggression. I invalidated her by pushing my marginalization over hers. And I was completely wrong. But at that time, I was unaware of my privilege. In my mind, my marginalization – being Asian – was just as bad as being Black. I was so wrong. Now I know that I have a privilege and if I I could go back in time, I would apologize to her. But I can’t and so the only thing I can do is keep learning and try my best to do better. I am Asian American, straight, cis-gender, educated, middle class. And even though I am a woman of color with invisible disabilities, I am also deeply aware of my privilege, because I am a woman of color who is not Black or Brown. I am also a woman with disabilities that are not visible. While these marginalizations make my life extremely difficult, I still have privilege and I must constantly remind myself to never forget that. It is not easy, and it is not supposed to be. But you check your privilege because it is the right thing to do. To be a good ally. Recently, I have noticed a troubling trend among white allies who, perhaps unknowingly, talk over and invalidate WOC by playing their own individual marginalization card. And in general, I’ve noted that it always comes on the heels of Black Women talking about race and intersectionality. This troubles me deeply because it causes resentment. It also bothers me when other WOC (especially other Asian women) aren’t as supportive of Black Women as they should be. I saw this happen in an online group, a good friend of mine (who is Black) tried to speak on race and found her whole discussion derailed in a heavy pile on by white marginalized feminists who co-opted the conversation. It was so frustrating that I posted the Huffington post video on White Feminism with this statement, “I think this video should be mandatory viewing for everyone especially because sometimes I think white feminists who are also LGBTQIA+ or disabled forget that intersectionality applies to WOC also, and that no matter what your marginalization is you have never experienced not being white. And if that statement makes you mad, you need to think about why.“

What I received back was a whole lot of angry Knee Jerk reactions. And what I mean by that is the “How dare she try to tell me that my marginalization is not as important as hers!” “How dare she try to police diversity!” “How dare she not check her privilege!” “How dare how dare how dare…” I call this a Knee Jerk reaction because these are not all bad people. These are people who are invested in the diversity movement themselves. So they are not the enemy. And yet they responded with a knee jerk reaction to being called out on having white privilege. But instead of getting so angry, accusing me of being a bully, demanding that I be banned and reported (for what, asserting my opinion?), and trying to silence me, they should have done exactly what I asked in that last sentence. They needed to think about why it made them so uncomfortable. They needed to reflect on their own privilege. What they did instead, was focus on their own marginalization as if it somehow negates their white privilege. The problem is that nothing negates white privilege. The poorest, most marginalized white person in the country will still not have the racist issues that the Black community faces. They will not be poisoned knowingly by their government. They will not live in fear that the police will kill their young children and never be punished. They do not have to worry about having the highest incarceration numbers in the land, simply because of the color of their skin. They do not have to worry about the school to prison pipeline because of inadequate resources in public schools. But because these issues do not actually affect white feminist’s personal lives, it is easy to focus solely on their own individual problems. After the responses so vividly proved my point, I left the group because I cannot stay where people believe that silencing the voices of POC instead of promoting open discourse is ever acceptable. Of course, this is not the first time I have been silenced and made to feel unwelcome by white feminists. Truth is this is commonplace for WOC. But it hurts more when it is done by people who say they are our allies.

I know that I will receive hate mail and harassment, but on this I feel too strongly to stay quiet. Because I stand in solidarity with the Black community. And we all need to speak out when wrong is wrong. The thing is, if a white person’s response to someone talking about White Privilege is to say “I’m marginalized too!” then they don’t get it. Because that is, essentially, how privilege works. It wants to take over the conversation and invalidate other people’s struggles. And if your response to that is “why is race more important?” I want to point you to one of my new favorite blogs -Reading While White. They address this very issue as follows:

This is a great explanation because it doesn’t say race is the most important issue, what it does is make clear is that race is the most all encompassing. That it crosses into all identities, all marginalizations. Intersectionality means that POC also exist in the LGBTQIA and disabilities communities. It affects all races, not just white people. But white privilege, even within those communities, wants to dominate. Unpacking your privilege is a hard thing. It is not easy. Nobody wants to think of themselves as being in the wrong, they’d rather think of themselves as being wronged. So you stay secure in your self-righteous indignation of “How dare yous” instead of thinking about how systemic racism and your own privilege has seeped so firmly into all aspects of your life that you can’t even see it. In order to be a good ally and make a difference in the fight for ALL OF US, we must recognize our own privileges and make a public stand to fight for what is right. But we cannot do that if our white allies don’t recognize what white privilege is and how deeply entrenched it is in our world. So I challenge white allies to really do some serious and probably very uncomfortable  self-reflection. When POC ask you to check your privilege, do you get mad and immediately demand that they check theirs? When POC talk about their experiences do you roll your eyes and snidely comment about how it’s not always about race? When someone says something racist, do you just stand there looking awkward and ignore it? When the status quo is racist, do you just accept it? When people talk about taking action, do you just nod your head in agreement and do nothing? When POC speak on oppression, do you respond with your own tale of oppression? 

In order to be a good ally, it is important to know when to speak up and when to shut up and just listen. And if you aren’t sure what to do, all you have to do is ask. How can I be a good ally to you? How can I support you? 

In conclusion, I will leave you with Daniel Jose Older’s The 5 Stages of Confronting Your Own Privilege. Here’s hoping that we can all get past number 1.