a story of one of the many reasons why real diversity in YA lit is important (involving fanart, harry potter, and blue from the raven boys)
so, why is this important to me, a person who can throw a rock in a bookstore and hit a million titles that represent me?
i don’t know the legitimate hurt feelings that come from growing up never seeing a character accurately share my experiences. at the same time, i never thought twice about the fan art and head canons where harry potter characters were not white. i thought it was absolutely lovely when jk rowling came out and said there was no reason hermione couldn’t be black, or when she said that dumbledore was gay. i was happy that other people were so happy that they could see themselves in such a great story and in such great characters.
BUT.
in my head, hermione is still white. why? it’s not because of emma watson or the fact that for many americans british automatically = white. it’s because when i grew up reading harry potter, white was my baseline. not for any malicious reason. only because that was my experience, and i lived in a super white place where i didn’t get exposure to diversity until i was old enough to start seeking it out. i had no reason when i was a kid to picture her otherwise.
this didn’t hurt me, per se, because i am white, i am the majority in YA lit, i didn’t explicitly need a black hermione or a gay dumbledore. but it did hurt me. it hurt my ability to think about the world in bigger ways, ways that i didn’t start learning about until i was a teenager. it limited me, which then limited my viewpoints.
enter The Raven Boys.
before i ever picked up those wonderfully weird books, i saw posts about it on tumblr. FAN ART EVERYWHERE. and in a lot of it, Blue is depicted as Black or Asian. when i finally read the books, i almost expected Blue to be characterized as a certain race because of all the fan art i’d seen. but just like hermione, blue is never explicitly characterized as a certain race.
so what happened? I read the books and automatically pictured Blue as a WOC. I pictured her family as WOC. this came naturally to me because i had been exposed to diverse viewpoints, and so i was able to read about these characters and these stories and picture them in more and real diverse ways.
THIS IS A GOOD THING.
And if this is such a no-brainer, good thing to me, a white girl who doesn’t need to fight to find representation of myself, THINK OF HOW GOOD DIVERSE REPRESENTATION IS FOR SOMEONE WHO NEEDS THAT REPRESENTATION, FOR SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY HAVE IT WHEN THEY PICK UP A YA LIT BOOK, FOR SOMEONE WHO EXPERIENCES MARGINALIZATION IN REAL LIFE SO THEY CERTAINLY DON’T NEED THAT MARGINALIZATION IN THE FICTIONAL WORLD.
this is why real diversity in YA lit is important.
at the end of the day, diversity isn’t about me. it’s about the people that get a voice when diversity happens. it’s about #ownvoices being able to write their own stories, and about people who are not writing from their own experience doing the best they can to accurately capture somebody else’s. diversity has benefits, and a side effect of those benefits is that everybody is better off.
