The Representational Diversity movement has been gaining traction in the last handful of years. Essentially, there is a growing number of people who feel as though they are underrepresented throughout the visible world, at least in the USA.
Now, I am not writing/speaking on the matter to say that this is not the case. As I have said before, I would never say that somebody’s reality is incorrect/imaginary when people share with me their feelings/experiences/reality. That is their reality, I accept it.
Again, for reemphasis, I do not disagree with any thoughts/feelings regarding under representation in the world or where this mindset is most dominate from my point of view in the USA. With that being laid out twice now, I’ll proceed.
The folks that have these thoughts/feelings can essentially be summarized as essentially anyone that isn’t a cis straight white male; I feel like this is a solid encompassment of the demographic.
These thoughts/feelings are definitely substantiated, otherwise these thoughts/feelings would not exist.
We all know the common things said, “It’s a straight white mans world”, “I can walk down a hallway with pictures on the wall, or open a history book and it’s all straight white men”, “We want to see more of us”, “Everyone else has been held down for far too long”, and similar sentiments.
This topic often brings up heavy discussion because “cis white men aren’t able to understand.“
The issue here is that cis white men typically require time to understand these claims. They don’t know what it’s like to not widely see people like themselves represented in history and media. They don’t know what it’s like to be treated differently based on their physical/gender/sexual traits, that is until more recently.
Of course the other demographics besides the cis straight white male are around, but in comparison the proportion of these under represented groups are far far less.
This is for a number of reasons, some reasonable some not, but regardless of the reasonableness it is still the case.
So why is this the case?
I’m not going to be able to completely dissect hundreds of years of many many happenings that have brought us to today, but I hope to present some of the biggest points.
How the USA came to be
Plenty of us living in the USA are aware of our history. We are a country founded by largely cis white immigrants, that’s just how the dice fell at the time.
Now, we have to remember that a large population of those people in America at its inception were enslaved POC. As early as 1708 slaves outnumbered whites, and by 1730 there were twice as many slaves as whites in the colony.
So there were more slaves than whites, and yet the representation wasn’t there. We all know why. These people were not considered people fully across the nation but considered property, and they were oppressed/held down. To a lesser extent this can also be applied to women, non-binaries, and other white skinned immigrants (we can’t forget the discrimination applied to the Irish and other white immigrants who have come over to the greatest country that has ever existed [you can disagree with this statement, but I believe it due to the fact that, no matter the obstacle before them, immigrants take the substantial and potentially dangerous risk to come here and live the American dream] and faced similar relative discrimination/oppression).
While we didn’t start off so well in regards to rights and opportunities given to these groups. Fortunately, as time has passed, we have learned, improved, and changed; these changes never came without a fight, but nonetheless, America heard the disgruntled voices and after enough “discussion” gave them everyone the same rights and opportunities.
After enough time, on paper, everyone “supposedly” (does) has the same opportunity. This is of course as everyone knows, relatively “recent”, but it is the current case as of today. There is no other country with as many individual rights and non-discriminatory practices as America, point blank. America may be a nation of freedoms and individual liberties, but it is mainly a nation of laws/rules and the same laws/rules apply to all.
Yet we still have these thoughts/feelings of under representation and even opression, so why is that? A couple reasons at least.
Culturalism/Tribalism
For a large part of the USAs history, they were the dominant tribe. They have customs and beliefs. There were some misguided religious beliefs where if you had dark skin you were less than human (not backed/directly in any religion that I was able to find). As a largely Christian nation (remember that the USA was essentially started for religious freedom from a controlling government), the prevailing thoughts were any non-binary folk are not in line with God’s plan.
Non-binaries being not in line with God’s plan and being mistreated due to this is also a very misguided religious belief. This can be seen within the common beliefs that “God doesn’t make mistakes” and Jesus said to love everyone.
Regardless, this was the prevailing thought at the time and as such is what made it acceptable at the time to mistreat these folks socially. These other types were unjustifiably (though thought fully justified at the time) seen as a threat; if someone sees someone as a threat they will take a defensive stance to maintain their status quo/way of life. The seeing and reaction of threats still exists to this day, it would do one well if they could realize the reactions they have and discard the negative reaction to threats unless that individual gives you proper reason to believe that they are a threat.
So even when people received equal treatment by law, socially (where law can’t tread) the treatment was maintained until it was weened off through…
Time
There really just hasn’t been enough time for these people to step up as others. Whites had it first, they had a head-start, and they also held others down. People have to be educated, old ways have to change, the older things are (the deeper the roots) the more time it takes to change.
Culturalism/Tribalism and time essentially combine to become the next point…
Privilege
Say what you like, privilege exists and everyone possesses different levels of it. Understanding you have privilege is purely the ability to put yourself into someone else’s shoes– if you are able to properly do that then you should understand that everyone has a different time of life based on who they are.
For example, working and education.
Whites have had a huge head-start. Being completely free from the get-go they were able to have finances for more opportunities. Education-wise, same thing they had more than anyone else barring exceptions. This was across generations, for every (good) parent always wishes and does everything possible for their child to have more than they had. I would like to make a note that while the cis whites had greater privilege in a couple of areas, there was just as much disparity between different classes of white which I feel sometimes people tend to forget.
As a metaphor, most whites were able to climb further up the ladder before others were even able to see it; even the disparaged ones, if only climbing a rung or two.
Due to this, even when opportunities were granted, whites were still in control and running the world. Not even necessarily due to any nefarious reasonings, sure some were certainly being nefarious, but as every generation is born; the world is just the way the world is and they are disconnected from the negative original intentions and are innocent of the sins of their ancestors.
In not being LGBTQ+/POC, innocent new generational whites cannot understand their experience. They are taught that everyone is equal and that everyone should be treated the same, they have been treated as such throughout their lives and know no difference. They cannot imagine that anyone would be treated differently (until as of late) and would have such a dramatically different experience.
Anywho, whites were further up the ladder and so more of them were/are in positions of power and thus authoring the narrative.
With whites authoring the narrative, they get to tell it how they like. This can be seen in somewhat in history but I consider this semantics personally. For one, you can’t help history, you can only learn from it. For two, while certain narratives/events/people were coming to the “limelight” and cherry picked for public consumption, the other records of the events are available and other narratives exist for people to find. While this makes a good point for reform within our public education systems, I find it hard to find sympathy for those who don’t seek to educate themselves individually outside of the educational system. It is only ever the individual’s fault for any ignorance of their own, though I must say that sometimes the blind just never realize that they’re blind until someone else mentions they can see.
I digress, the point is that cis whites had privilege to author the narrative and this can be seen in many important places. The arguably more important place compared to history that this can be seen is in all of our media.
An important thing to note is that any narrative is merely a perspective, the narrative changes when the perspective changes– any narrative is not actually reality (reality isn’t words).
Authoring the narrative
When someone is writing the narrative, they’re the hero of the story. It is THEIR story, and told/portrayed from THEIR perspective. The hero looks, acts, and sees like them.
Now, these are stories and the thing that happens when one listens to stories is the listener/reader puts themselves in their shoes.
Now, unfortunately (from this author’s perspective) people are visual creatures; we have a saying that says “seeing is believing” after all. Humans tend to focus most on what they see more than anything else. Which is kind of funny, you can take someone out on a walk and ask them to recall what they saw and there’s simply too much information to relay. Luckily, our brains do automatic filtering for us and while taking in all data relays/retains the most important to our active consciousness. This is necessary for our survival, but it also a setback because our brain is “throwing away” everything other than what it deems important and what’s important is subjective. In essence, we notice what we choose to and even if we are not actively choosing what we notice our brain is doing it automatically for us based on its prior experiences/training.
What some people choose to perceive as important
What’s the first thing you choose to see when you look at a person? Well, hopefully you just see a person, but usually it’s not what people see. Usually people immediately see age, skin, and a gender. Though it can’t be seen just by looking at some people, some people also try to “look” at sexual orientation as well.
I have a whole slew of thoughts on those last three, but I’ll go down a dissertation rabbit hole on perception another time. The important part is that most people typically perceive a skin and gender (though people don’t actually “see” sexual orientation this applies there too).
With this in mind, let’s think about what people think when they see characters in a story (doesn’t even have to be the hero/main character).
They think, even without realizing it sometimes, “Can I relate to this person?”, “Do I want to be like this person?”, “Is this person like me?”.
Now, let’s think about the LGBTQ+/POC with these thoughts. The majority of all media until relatively recently (I would say at least by the 80s-ish) had very little, if any, representation of the majority of these groups.
So you’re a LGBTQ+/POC person living and not seeing yourself around hardly anywhere.. Now, I can not personally say that I know what this experience is like but I would imagine since people are people regardless of any of their characteristics and people are mainly visual, that they would feel at least very alone and unimportant if they give importance to their skin color/gender/sexual orientation and don’t see anyone else to relate to out in the world. Potentially even thinking that there’s something “wrong” with them for being different. While I am composed of a minority demographic, I am white passing so while I can’t relate to these feelings specifically, I have felt alone before and I have felt as though there was something wrong with me– but I likely don’t feel these feelings as often or stongly as those who couldn’t open a book/magazine, watch a TV show/movie, to see people who think/talk/look like/act like them.
Let’s think of it in terms of the now ever-popular super hero movie genre (though this can be applied to all genres). How many LGBTQ+/POC super heroes are there? (not many)
Cis white peeps, you know what it feels like to see badass super heroes doing super hero things. You watch them do their thing and can easily imagine yourself in that position, at least for me, it made me feel powerful and taught me many lessons. Doesn’t have to be super heroes though, any character in a story doing things is easy and feels good to relate to.
Side fun fact: This is why Spiderman is so important and rose to such heights of popularity. As Stan Lee said “What I like about the costume is that anybody reading Spider-Man in any part of the world can imagine that they themselves are under the costume. And that’s a good thing.”
It is important to see others like oneself out in the world, it makes one feel welcomed and accepted, like you belong in the world. It is important for individuals to be able to imagine and see through others the things that they’re capable of.
I will say, that based on the movies/media I have seen from times long ago that while they certainly weren’t extremely prevalent everywhere, there has been many a representation of POC/LGBTQ+ in the mainstream media. You can search back through the media and old history to find a good many respectable representations of POC/LGBTQ+ out there. The very good works concerning these folk made it out into mainstream media, and with the love from the country. While a good portion of these representations of POC/LGBTQ+ folk can be certainly tasteless and racist, we must remember that some of these portrayals were just how it was at the times– this of course doesn’t excuse these works, but it can help us to better understand them and use them as a source of learning/education from where we’ve been. An example of this is Tom Sawyer. Let us not forget the music industry and all of the POC/LGBTQ+ that rose to fame and glory despite any discrimination.
Where representational diversity begins to get murky
So it is important to shoot for equal representation, I think most people are of the mind that everyone should be included and loved. It’s great that we’re having a movement of inclusion and I couldn’t be any prouder of my fellow siblings here on this Earth plane for supporting that. Though there are a couple places where I believe we need to clear the waters.
1. Diversity Guidelines
There are those who believe that now that we have discovered a “disparity” we now need to fix it and the way to fix it is to build diversity guidelines. Diversity guidelines ensure there is a good mix of demographics. It is every company’s/organization’s right to set whatever diversity guidelines they please and I understand the good sentiment, but I believe these guidelines are cumbersome and hold back talent. For example, Harvard recently came under-fire for the school’s admissions process forces Asian Americans to clear a higher bar to get in. While the court ruled in Harvard’s favor, in my opinion it was a tough case. For, should the school really pursue the admissions of students for the sake of adversity over the admission of students who are “more qualified” to attend that don’t make it in purely due to their ethnicity/race/gender/sexual orientation? Should a “more qualified” candidate not be hired for a company because of their ethnicity/race/gender/sexual orientation purely so we can have al the colors in our crayon box? I’m no expert, but that sounds discriminatory to me as well.
The problem here is delicate too because right now organizations are making it their goal to be diverse, but can a train line really help it if the demographic is mostly men who want to be train conductors or oil rig welder? Does this translate to nail salons needing to require a certain number of men on their staff? Obviously there is a different approach to each industry and there is no blanket answer to cover all industries and everyone will need to do their own part in their own way. Perhaps a better answer is to foster more learning of the different fields to all children, for example how there has been a push to encourage girls/women to be in STEM majors for example, a largely male dominated field— however how can we overcome the human biological tendencies of different genders to have different grouped interests and pursuits?
Is that something we need to overcome? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s better to just make everything open to everyone and not guide them, but let them go where their interests take them? Then at that point, which I feel is where we’re at or getting close to, we can not worry about demographics tending to lean certain ways in certain professions because it’s just the way things naturally are. That of course raises the question, what if someone in a minority demographic wants to pursue a path in a direction that has a different majority graphic? Is the fact that there is a different majority of demographic make it unwelcoming to others? Depends on the individuals I would suppose.
There is no one answer and I’m not attempting to say there is, I’m just asking valid questions for ponderment. I do feel though that there is a fine line between having diversity guidelines and not being discriminatory to a demographic. I also feel that we are attempting to force things in a way that we would like to see them rather than in the ways they naturally occur. Especially these days where there are very few professions where one can not be hired based on their race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation.
2. The perpetuation of the narrative of under representation
Just a reminder, I’m not contesting the reality of under representation. What I mean with this point is now more people than ever are beginning to agree/see/hear the narrative of under representation. Many may think this is a good thing coming to light (and it mostly is), but I personally feel something to be aware of in perpetuating the narrative of under representation is also in a way saying, “Hey, because of your race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation you are held down. Other people are preventing your success and you have less opportunity than others”.
This is an important viewpoint to note because people often believe what you tell them. If people are told, “most people are racist”, “you’re going to have a harder time”, “you have less opportunity” then they will believe you. They will believe it because this is what they will look out for and since they’re looking out for it, this is what they will see. This is very unhelpful talk for people we are supposedly supposed to be building up. A much more helpful round of talk for them would be, “it doesn’t matter what your ethnicity/race/gender/sexual orientation is. The only thing that matters is that you are a human (American) and you have the same equal unalienable rights as every single other human out there. There is nothing you can’t do. You are smart and you are powerful. There may be people who stand in your way, but there will always be a way around them.”
The latter approach is far better, we cannot teach people, especially young minds, that the world (or at least the USA) is out to get them or is going to treat them differently for being “different”. This is not to say we shouldn’t make them aware that there are individuals out in the world with prejudices that they will encounter. It is to say that the opinions of individuals with prejudice don’t matter– we are a nation of laws, and EVERYONE is equal under the law in America now, no ifs ands or buts. These are the rules of the game here and despite any bad players of the game, the rules of the game… well, rule.
I find this to be especially egregious because, as I touched on earlier, the narrative is being weaved in such a way to take away the credit and representations that have been there from the beginning. The way the narrative is being weaved you would almost think that there are no representations of POC/LGBTQ+ at all and absolutely no headway has ever been made, but this is not the case. There are plenty of individuals throughout history that have made their mark respectably in the world despite being “oppressed” and we can’t discredit or be blind to all of those who achieved success or contributed to the world before this topic sprang up.
3. Nobody is going to come and solve all of these “problems”
Nobody. This is because not everyone is buying into the narratives presented and also because everyone has different understandings/feelings of the situation. So the “problems” voiced/presented seem inapplicable to some (everyone is created equal and has equal rights) and at the very least nobody can agree on everything. Changes are being made, but who really knows best? Are these changes really for the good? Where and what are the most important things to change?
Are we ok with building requirements and forcing inclusion practices on everyone and artificially creating/forcing welcoming environments for all instead of letting the genuinely welcoming environments that propagate/ naturally? We probably are so long as we do it right, but in my mind we’re going to do it in the same way that we build most houses on hills– flattening the natural ground underneath it rather than working and building with the natural hill as it is (a sad happening in my book).
My proposed solution
This is a solution but may come off as more of advice, take it as you will.
Now, most of what I type is directed at the individual level as well, that’s important. I do not write for the general populous, I write for the individual. For things to change and be for the better, it is usually faster to change it at the source. It is important for the foundation of a home to be strong and structured and individuals are the foundation of all groups. We must change individually before we see the change in the whole.
So, the burden of changing the world doesn’t depend on the government or any private corporation. The burden of changing the world falls on YOU!
If you saw a leak under your sink, would you wait to fix it till someone else sees it and takes care of it? Or would you immediately take the proper measures (calling a plumber counts) to get it fixed?
You could call a professional to fix it of course, and likely they will do a good job. Let me tell you though, as a person with a carpenter as a Dad, many of these “professionals” don’t do a good job and it will need to be fixed again in the future– it’s a costly mistake to pay a plumber twice you know?
The only way to mitigate and KNOW that your sink is fixed is to fix it yourself.
But do you immediately jump in and fix it yourself? Maybe, sure, so long as you know what you’re doing. Before fixing something you need a proper understanding of what it is you’re fixing– the more complicated the thing you’re fixing, the more you need to know. You’d like to fix things correctly, yes?
So, in desiring to solve the problems you see in the world you need to first see the problem (is it something that has to change?), then you must understand the structure and the problem therein, then you must decide how to fix it (what is the best course of action), then you must execute it correctly (take action), finally you will have to keep a close eye on what you did (is the fix working as intended?).
In regards to representational diversity, this is a lot to understand/incredibly complex– we must understand where we came from/how we got here, we must understand where we are, and we must understand what the ramifications of any changes might be.
This can be pretty intimidating, especially if one doesn’t possess the relevant knowledge. Not only is it intimidating, but in cases like this, people think they have a clear understanding of a problem when they often don’t. The fix here is to not look at the big picture stuff.
To truly begin solving the problems you see productively/successfully, it would be better to focus on those problems closest to you (the ones you have a clear/proper understanding and relevant knowledge of) and grow from there. Nobody starts at the top of the mountain, everyone must walk their way up from the bottom.
See a problem? What have you done to solve it?
You must be the change you want to see in the world, again nobody is going to change things for you.
If you think there should be more women/POC/LGBTQ+ represented in certain places THEN GO BE THAT PERSON. Set the example!! Don’t just look at places and say, “We need more people like that in these places! I am a woman/POC?LGBTQ+ and I want to see people who look like me there!!”
You (and plenty of others) are perfectly capable of stepping up and bringing the representation you so wish to see in the world. YOU can be the inspiration for others. YOU HAVE THE RIGHTS and YOU HAVE THE CAPABILITIES.
You can be someone who says, “Hey look! I did it! You can do it too!”. If you think you can’t do this for some reason, you’re right, but only for so long as you think that. In this day and age within the USA nothing and nobody can stop you so long as you are within the rules and what you’re doing doesn’t infringe on the life/liberty/pursuit of happiness of another.
We were born free, but society, culture, religion, and beliefs taught us limitations.
Break free of any limitations you see, they do not exist.
You want change? STOP wasting your breath/energy asking for change and GET UP and GO MAKE IT.
You can do it, there is no reason you can’t, only self-imposed limitations that exist within your mind. I fully believe in you, the only thing you need to do is believe in yourself– is there any reason not to?
Wishing you all the best,
FCP 🙃
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