I’m a white 18 year old who’s read my fair share of YA and am currently attempting to pull together a novel or two of my own, so I think my opinion is valid. Also, I live in South Africa. 75% of my friends are black. We’ve only had 17 years of democracy and racism is widespread among the older folk. But here’s the thing: most of the youngsters I associate with don’t see colour.

It’s the underlying issue in racism that nobody seems to get. As soon as you MAKE it an issue, it will be. When I write, I don’t describe the colour of my characters’ skin because they could be anything – purple, for all I care! Unless it’s important to your storyline and you can’t make your point without it, I don’t believe you should even allude to the race of your characters. It doesn’t matter, and we, as educated young people, don’t find it important.

Most of the problems addressed in YA are universal and appeal to ALL teenagers. I promise you I wasn’t rooting any more or any less for Cinna and Prim because of the colour of their skin.

Also lost, or ignored, in this conversation is how one defines diversity. Take three common romanticized European settings. Celtic Britain was very different from Hellenistic Greece, which bore no resemblance to medieval France. There is diversity in the white community as well.

And, having read a lot of Tolkien and Tolkien style fantasy novels…elves, dwarves, trolls, goblins, and orcs (the majority of characters in The Hobbit) look very different than Anglo-Saxon based humans.

A writer should be congratulated for overcoming his or her shortcomings in the imagination department. I agree. However, that is the individual writer’s issue. Ms. Ockler claims not to encourage “affrimative fiction quotas”, then promptly turns around and softly suggests if a writer does not have enough characters of color in his or her novel, then said writer is a racist. I disagree.

Race is not a difficult topic to discuss. Diversity is important. It is also important to see the whole picture, to understand that science fiction, fantasy and YA literature is building upon the foundation that has been laid down. As these genres acquire a more diverse audience, there will be more diverse novels as a result. There already are. And, yes, that is an invitation to list your favorites. Word of mouth = more book sales.

I think the better option is to look toward the future, to where one is going, rather than to keeping looking backward, pointing fingers and staying stuck in the past.

I agree with Ockler and Morgan. Writers should be more conscious and brave about writing characters which are representative of the audience they write for. If there’s no setting related reason to not have diversity and especially if your story takes place in some variant of “today” or “near future” diverse characters should probably be included. Like the Ockler stated you might as well just write stories explicitly about yourself or maybe a struggling author if you only write what you know. Research and people watching is part of the job it will help you grow as an author.

I believe the problem our vulgar friend Den had was that the article did not address the embarrassingly small percentage of published minority YA writers as a problem to be fixed. Regardless of whether or not doing so would provide more people of color in YA fiction, it is a problem to be fixed not just noted and passed by.

H Durocher, please hug your niece for me. Then go out and find her some stories with diverse casts. I suffered from the same issues when I was her age. When I was a teen I loved fantasy fiction with elves and magic as well as sf. I identified with many characters but always felt a bit other because Tolken style fantasy mostly takes place in a romanticized ancient European setting where people who looked like me were rarely included (when they were they were usually men and from far off). Even worse was I never read a fantasy book that described a girl of color as desirable for a relationship. I grew up in a predominately white town and I assumed myself to be default less desirable. While books aren’t the only media which contributed to this attitude, it sure would have helped if I had some positive reinforcement.

I’m not saying that authors should take responsibility for the mental state of every minority. But now that I’m grown it does kind of irk me that in a fantasy setting where authors often invent a world from the ground up (geography, history, culture, rules of magic or physics) that many neglect to add diversity of phenotype.

That’s not what she’s saying at all. She’s encouraging being aware and thinking actively about one’s cast of characters.

Okay. While I’m white, I’m a queer disabled woman. Until I started reading various essays on diversity in fiction, it never occurred to me to write characters like me. It never occurred to me to write anything other than able-bodied straight people. Part of that is because I had internalized “That won’t sell”, which I have heard over and over, but part of it also was that I rarely see books with queer or disabled characters as the protagonists. (This is not an invitation to list the few that you can think of. They are out there, but they are not common.)

So I started thinking actively about what I was writing. And instead of assuming a character would be white or able-bodied or straight, etc, when creating my characters, I would think about it. I would ask myself questions about the characters. How would the character change if they were {fill in the blank}? What would they experience? Did it “feel” right?

Some characters were very vocal about being straight or white or able-bodied, whatever. Some, thinking of them in such a way clicked. I have also thought “Oh hey, a black lesbian character would be cool…” and figured out where she fit in and learned more about her and I adore her. I also decided to say screw it and write a character like myself for once (queer and disabled and the hero of a goddamn fantasy book because fuck it, us crips can be awesome too) and she really took on a life of her own and I love her too.

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t thought actively about it and considered other pathways than the majority, the default. It has, imo, made me a stronger writer because now if I do something, it is for a reason, and it further strengthens the character, rather than just being “because I didn’t think about it and went with what came naturally.” Naturally is informed and affected by society and its ideals.

Besides, it’s rather patronizing to think that readers of color can’t enjoy a great story just because the main character has a different ethnicity. Great fiction transcends boundaries.

I am saddened that some of the folks who have taken the time to comment here choose to be blind to the complex world around them. It is as if they have purposefully buried their heads in the ground. If I have not experienced this problem, then the problem does not exist. What a horrifying state of denial.

Example: I’m a white editor who publishes books that move me and resonate with me. I don’t give a damn about the skin color or culture of the authors or the protagonists, but the books that resonate most with me are those written by people who have a similar mindset to my own. It’s never even occurred to me that my author list is entirely white, but–surprise!–it is. Without meaning to, I’ve given an edge to white authors, and likely those with other similar experiences to my own (male or female, small-town or urban, etc.).

To put it another way: The only people who don’t think white privilege exists are white people.

I don’t think the problem is what readers demand, because I think most readers are just looking for great stories. The problem is the lack of diversity in the publishing houses themselves, and the lack of awareness about how white privilege is unconsciously perpetuated.

My beautiful brown-skinned niece cherishes a dream of having straight blonde hair “that runs through your hands like silk.” She is seven. Did she come up with this blonde fantasy all on her own without any influence from the media, books and pop culture? Please.

We all want to read and watch (at least some) stories about people who look like us, because it tells us that we matter. Each writer can only write what they are capable of writing, but should we all stretch our imaginations a little to embody characters who are different from us, as Ockler suggests? Yes!