a story of one of the many reasons why real diversity in YA lit is importantĀ (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?Ā
i donāt 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 couldnāt 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.
in my head, hermione is still white. why? itās not because of emma watson or the fact that for many americans british automatically = white. itās 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 didnāt 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 didnāt hurt me, per se, because i am white, i am the majority in YA lit, i didnāt explicitly need a black hermione or a gay dumbledore. but it did hurt me.Ā it hurt my ability to think about the world in bigger ways, ways that i didnāt start learning about until i was a teenager. it limited me, which then limited my viewpoints.
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. whenĀ i finally read the books, i almost expected Blue to be characterized as a certain race because of all the fan art iād seen. but just like hermione, blue is never explicitly characterized as a certain race.
so what happened?Ā I read the books and automatically pictured Blue as a WOC.Ā 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.
And if this is such a no-brainer, good thing to me, a white girl who doesnāt need to fight to find representation of myself,Ā THINK OF HOW GOOD DIVERSE REPRESENTATIONĀ IS FOR SOMEONE WHO NEEDS THAT REPRESENTATION, FOR SOMEONE WHO DOESNāT AUTOMATICALLY HAVE IT WHEN THEY PICK UP A YA LIT BOOK, FOR SOMEONE WHO EXPERIENCES MARGINALIZATION IN REAL LIFE SO THEY CERTAINLY DONāT NEED THAT MARGINALIZATION IN THE FICTIONAL WORLD.Ā
this is why real diversity in YA lit is important.
at the end of the day, diversity isnāt about me. itās about the people that get a voice when diversity happens. itās 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 elseās. diversity has benefits, and a side effect of those benefits is that everybody is better off.