Some thoughts on “diversity” in sf/f and discovering that I’m apparently a “writer of colour” and all that. I never actually use these words myself, whether to refer to either myself or anybody else. Though at the same time I don’t object to their use to refer to myself or anybody else either. It’s complicated. I do periodically worry at the meanings of these words, and I guess I’ve been saying stuff like this for a while now:

I have no problem with strategic essentialism in other people, but it’s a tauntaun skin I’d rather not crawl into, if you know what I mean

— Vajra Chandrasekera (@_vajra) November 17, 2014

So let me unpack that a bit.

If essentialism is the pernicious idea that categories are more real than people, strategic essentialisms are a rhetorical technique when you’re aware that the essentialism in question is bullshit but you temporarily accept being identified with a category in order to achieve something, even if that something is just making a point. There are all sorts of good, practical reasons to collectivize identity in this way, but I think it works best when it’s goal-oriented and time-bound. Because when it’s not, then it can also mean just signing up to be reduced to a category for somebody else’s convenience.

This is a high-risk high-reward rhetorical move, in other words. To name a thing is to bring it into existence as a theory-object, and it’s difficult to dispel it after that, never mind to control how it gets used or who else it might get used on.

Consider this category of “POC”, people of colour. This gets used a lot in the sf/f community, who (at least in the circles that I’ve so far engaged with) appear to have generally adopted it as a way to refer to non-white people. I assume this arrived in sf/f publishing via academia/litcrit? idk. In any case, it’s here and being used.

(also I should say that apart from “writers of colour” one also sees “POC writer”, which in particular is a truly godawful construction. “person of colour writer”…? what. I mean, I’m all for mangling language for amusing or interesting effects, but come on!)

It’s a bit disorienting for me to suddenly become a “person of colour” overnight just by wandering into the sf/f scene. I’ve been online in some shape or form for twenty years, but never as myself, never under my real name and identity like this; back in the day it was normal to use pseudonyms, and by the time that convention changed I’d settled into habits. All this—<all-encompassing gesture>—came about because I wanted to publish as myself, under my real name. And when I started to publish in US markets, this “of colour” thing started to become a thing. The very first time I heard the phrase “person of colour” online (fortunately, this was before it was applied to me), I thought it was some sort of slur. This is, as far as I can tell, a common reaction for many non-Americans who encounter the phrase for the first time: a raised eyebrow and a “you called me a what now?” And then, for those who care to find out, googling up a digression about the specifics of the American civil rights movement.

(semi-related: I’m very dark-skinned for a Sri Lankan, but also male. so for me colourism is more a source of amusing anecdotes than anxiety or stress. for some reason, a life’s worth of being the butt of (very mild) colourism has made the whole “person of colour” thing even funnier.)

So, yes: I dislike the overextension of “POC” outside America because it’s so explicitly an American term. I suppose its prevalence in the online sf/f community is a direct result of the sf/f field being so completely American-centric for so long that any international players are still considered incidental? Regardless, it’s a phrase inextricably tied to a time and a place and a history, entangled in the history of “coloured” and probably to “gens de couleur” somewhere in there. It’s a term that’s meaningful only to American minorities who understand its place in their history, who own its reclamation. By all means, use it in that context, where it is an excellent example of a strategic essentialism for the people that chose to use it.

Using it to describe all the billions of non-white peoples of the world, on the other hand, is not a strategic essentialism. It’s just plain old regular essentialism, nothing but a pure statement of American cultural hegemony: by using it this way, you are literally saying that all the multiplicity of histories and differences in the vast majority of the world population are all subsumed collectively into an honorary American minority for, what I don’t know, convenience. The imperial gaze is out of control! All dark-skinned people have dissolved into an undifferentiated brownish sea of sludge! I propose a fully equivalent replacement term you can safely use to describe all non-white people everywhere in every possible context. That term is “mud person”. You’re welcome.

But wait, you say, seriously, what’s an okay way to say it then? Like is “diverse” okay or “marginalized” okay or “minority” okay? And first I gotta say, I’m not the pope of okay here. This is just me talking regular bullshit, not papal bullshit. As someone newly on the receiving end of labels—and as someone new to these labels—I regard them with more interest than censure. I get that a lot of people have clearly already processed these objections and discounted them, given e.g. how frequently I see Asian writers self-apply the term. And that’s fine! I’m not trying to start a land war in Asia. I’m just (belatedly, I suppose) processing it.

(I was going to say that I regarded them with “anthropological” interest above, incidentally, but I suppose I am not so much the anthropologist in this metaphor as the genre-savvy ethnographic subject.)

What interests me is interrogating the language being used, not in policing usage. If you’d rather stick with whatever terms you’re using, that’s entirely your call. I won’t take it personally¹.

Consider the other words. The problems with “minority” are hopefully obvious: it’s useless unless you peg it to a particular geopolitical territory. Here I advise against treating an amorphous, increasingly-online metacommunity like sf/f as somehow equivalent to a nation-state: it is not. It does not have borders. It does have centres and peripheries, but those are very much in flux and to some extent a factor of perspective, the famous echo-chamber effect. It has many different overlapping interest groups, instead of a population. It has no minorities. Sf/f is not a country. It cannot have minorities, or for that matter, majorities. So “minority” is meaningless unless you’re specifically talking about a particular country or city or convention membership or newsgroup or what have you.

“Diverse” and “marginalized” are trickier. First, diversity is a property of a group, not an individual. You need a set of entities in which you can measure variation before you can say whether there’s variety or not. And second, there’s more than one way to measure variety.

So it makes sense to talk about “diversity” when talking about contributors to an anthology or magazine, or a publisher’s roster of authors, or to talk about “marginalization” when you’re talking about some category of writers who you would expect to see in those groups but are missing for some otherwise inexplicable reason.

Consider that second point again. Say I have a story published in an otherwise all-white TOC, then yeah, I guess my inclusion marginally increases the ethnic diversity of that publication. But if everybody else on that TOC is also male, then it does not increase the gender diversity of that publication. In both cases, the diversity or lack thereof resides in the TOC, not in me. Whether it’s “diverse” or not depends on the question being asked. I know this is kind of an obvious point to belabour, but it often seems to cause confusion.

For example, a publisher might claim that a given anthology is “diverse” because it has women in it, ignoring the total absence of non-white people. Or there might be lots of non-white people on it, but nobody who isn’t American or resident in America. Or—look, my point is not that every TOC needs to have one of each kind like some sort of deranged Noah’s Ark, which is both absurd and impossible. My point is just that the fact that the word can be used to describe any kind of variety, combined with the fact that there is more than one kind of variety, combined with the fact that some kinds of variety can be achieved more easily than others, tends to act as a either a blind spot or a fig leaf, depending I suppose on how cynical you are about this being a deliberate rhetorical device. And that’s the problem with nonspecific cheerleading for “increased diversity”, and the reason why it can so easily be subverted.

Which is what brings me back to the first point, that “diversity” is a property of a group and not an individual. But now consider this formulation: “a diverse writer”. Used this way, the “diversity” is reified and placed inside the body of the writer. It moves focus away from the editorial policies and acquisition decisions. It becomes a property that is physically attached to some writers, the diverse writers². And through them, it becomes a measurable commodity that can be bought or sold.

It behaves, in other words, exactly like a nonconsensual strategic essentialism, which is, er, the same as essentialism, the idea that the categories are more real than the people³.

Words like “POC” and “diverse” and “marginalized” and whatnot are all a euphemism treadmill, yeah? The only way off a euphemism treadmill is to stop using euphemisms, or rather to abandon the false categories that were once described by slurs and are now described by euphemisms. Which means recognizing that categories are not more real than people, because individual people actually exist and even the most well-defined category is, ultimately, an imperfect abstraction based on tradition and policy as much as observation.

I don’t have a real answer here, but I do think many of the euphemisms could simply be dropped and that might help a little.

For example, if you really just mean “non-white” sometimes, then maybe say non-white, no? Sometimes it’s important to actually say “non-white”, because by doing so at least you’re acknowledging that the problem you’re trying to solve is a problem of an existing white supremacy. It only promotes white fragility to talk about this stuff without ever talking about whiteness.

(of course, brown-on-black racism in South Asia is also a thing, and casteism/colourism is a big part of it but I think even there, that anti-blackness is mediated through the absent-but-implicit whiteness, i.e., through colonial history and anticolonial nationalisms. to talk about whiteness is to talk about history, not a skin tone.)

Like if you want to talk about the unbearable whiteness of a TOC and if you phrase your argument as “it’s not diverse” instead of questioning the homogeneity of white supremacy, or worse, if you’re asking “where are the diverse writers”? Because of the way these questions recentre the problem, and attach “diversity” as a property to some bodies but not to other bodies, the issue then becomes about baryonic and nonbaryonic humans.

About how much dark matter you need to stuff into a TOC before it undergoes the state change into being “diverse”.

Which just brings up the attendant fauxtroversies, like is dark matter even tangible, really? Can it interact with ordinary matter on the same level? Is this affirmative action somehow? That conversation always ends up being about the reality, the tangibility of the nonbaryonic humans. The phrase “the diverse writer” is a trap because it differentiates that writer from “the writer”⁴, and thereby implicitly leaves room for the question “is the diverse writer a real writer?”

All of this is not intended to make it impossible to say words anymore, as peaceful as that sounds. Uh, obviously that’s not helpful. I think that if you really want to identify people by made-up ethnocategories, maybe it’s better to peg it at nation-state⁵ of residence and/or origin, instead of continent (boo) or race/ethnicity/colour (ugh), with the exception of when the people in question explicitly sign up to be identified under any of those things as an act of (hopefully goal-oriented) strategic essentialism.

Of course, we could all just start calling people by their names instead of their categories, but that’s probably a bridge too far.

Today’s unrelated reading recommendation & palate cleanser: “Item Girls” by Kuzhali Manickavel in Granta: “In the night, she slides her finger into The Dark One, who tries to think about post-racial America, the antioxidant properties of dry beans, steam pressure washers, Maoists. Instead, she thinks of the bite of sugar at the back of her throat, armies of sunlight dancing on her back, the ocean rushing from her mouth like it is ready to drown.”