I always feel late to whatever’s trending on TikTok. Admittedly, it’s an app that overwhelmed me when I first created a profile because it seemed like the videos just never stopped playing. But once I got the hang of things, it hasn’t been so bad. And recently, because I’m challenging myself to try different creative things, I’ve been watching a lot more of them to get a sense of how different people will try different things.
An interesting thing, though, is that my “Following” tab is still showing me videos from 4, 5, and even 6 months ago because I just simply hadn’t been using the app for a long, long time. So the discussion around reading diversely is by now old news for most avid TikTok users, it’s been fairly fresh for me.
And yet at the same time, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this conversation – a person who occupies more than one privilege (cis, white, abled, etc.) suddenly feels threatened because they’re being required to consider a vastly different perspective. Happened in my undergrad days, in seminary, and even in my MFA program from a supposedly “progressive” school.
In this recent TikTok (or rather, #BookTok) discussion, creators were responding to a racist rant from another creator (who might also be an author?) who basically said that she doesn’t feel the need to actively engage with books outside her own demographic. Of course, she did not respond well to the pushback and showed her true colors – that her critics were obsessed with race, which is usually only said when one doesn’t know anything about racism or how it works.
Now, nearly every response video I had seen dissected these comments effortlessly because, like I said above, it’s nothing new. Cis, abled white folks have been saying things like this for decades – at least publically; privately they’ve probably been saying it for much longer. Some talked about the practicality of reading from more than one perspective to enhance your own, even if race isn’t a factor. Others highlighted that “diversity” should never equal “non-white”; there’s diversity amongst queer writers, disabled writers, non-Black people of color (hi), etc. It’s actually been pretty nice to see so many allies step up and educate bigoted folks about all these issues while not talking over marginalized creators. It’s taken off a lot of labor for these creators.
Yet what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is the fact that this person (and people like her) was never placed in a situation where she had to imagine herself into the story. Somewhere in one of my journals from middle school (between the ages of 12 and 14, mind you) is an entry of where I wrote about making the conscious decision to no longer daydream about myself as a white person, and that I would imagine myself from then on as the person I saw in the mirror. And when I think back to what could have possibly influenced my imagination to only depict myself as white, I was obviously only ever exposed to white media – TV commercials, TV shows, books where every character was assumed to be white (because any non-white character who might have been mentioned was always written with a stereotype), and the fact that we had been taught almost exclusively white American history.
Even now, over 20 years later, I still struggle to cast myself into my own imagination. More often than not, I have to literally look in the mirror as I’m having a daydream just to get the right sense of myself in my imagination. And yet there are people out there for whom this isn’t a necessity – that they can simply read a story knowing full well that it was made with them in mind. The first time where I didn’t have to do this was when I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony… as a senior in college.
At 22 years old, I had encountered a book with characters who looked like me for the first time.
My hope for those who are genuinely reading diversely not for the sake of scoring brownie points for being seen as “progressive,” but because they want to broaden their understanding of what it’s like to be in a space that wasn’t made for them, is that you don’t make it a tourist stop. Read diversely so often that it’s no longer a novelty that you’re reading a Black author, or an Indigenous author, or a disabled author, or a queer author, etc. Because many things can change; publishers can start publishing more stories from under-represented demographics, educators can switch up their curriculums to include more diverse voices, and fewer books would get banned because of someone else’s bigotry.
But more importantly, there will be fewer kids who have to grow up like I did (and, all things considered, I had it relatively easy). And maybe more of our stories can get told.
Scribal Practices 