representation trilemma
As a brown, straight, cis, man, I have some things to say on race, but there are so many aspects of sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry I won’t have to face and will never understand on a truly personal level.
I wrote a DnD campaign once where I intended to feature queer characters. The process of writing it made me realize that there are three ways to deal with minority characters (of a minority you do not identify with), all of which are painful in their own ways:
The first path is to include the character and try and represent them faithfully, however representing them faithfully can be incredibly difficult if you don’t identify as that minority yourself (and even if you do, your experience may not stand for the experiences of others.) This attempt at representing them faithfully can backfire miserably if you mess up as well. I tried to include a genderqueer character in my campaign, but because I didn’t play them accurately, I felt like I was doing a disservice to the character, rather than proper representation.
Furthermore, while I could read up on the experiences of these minorities in an attempt to represent them better, I fear that claiming “Oh I can represent this minority because I’ve done some reading” would end up being arrogance instead of intelligence. Professionals like Critical Role have sensitivity readers and advisors, but obviously that’s infeasible in a casual game of DnD.
The second path is to include the characters as minorities, but not actually deal with their struggles and identities. This feels odd to me because it’s tokenism. It’s inclusion of characters just to say “oh yes I have a gay character in my campaign”.
The third path is simple non-inclusion. If you don’t think you can represent the experience of a certain minority, just don’t include them. Obviously this is problematic as well, erasure is a form of bigotry in and of itself.
The solution I’ve taken so far is a variation on the second path. I include minority characters, but I place them in an accepting world. One of the townsfolk may have a same sex partner, but the other townsfolk are accepting, and it doesn’t come up as a “problem.”
Furthermore, uplifting minority authors is a good way to increase diversity in media in general, though it doesn’t solve the issue of creating better representation in my games.
A bit of an aside, since I’m not sure exactly where this fits in: I was at a conference talking to a trans person who did research on trans people’s experiences online. I mentioned how I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that research since I wasn’t a trans person myself and would probably fuck something up, and they responded by saying that if trans research was limited only to trans people, then barely any trans research would be done at all. I think in some ways, this extends to media as well. While a straight author probably shouldn’t write a book focused on the gay experience, if the only media that had gay characters at all were media authored by gay people, then there wouldn’t be much gay representation.
