Two Thoughts on Diversity in Representation
‘Representation matters’. It is hard to disagree with this simple statement. For centuries, western novels (and latterly films and TV) skewed overwhelmingly white, male and straight in their protagonists, and, indeed, overall, with female, POC and queer characters relegated to secondary roles, if present at all. This is slowly changing: a reader is more likely to encounter a novel or film in which POC or female character is the protagonist, and an all-male, all-white book or TV show, though such a thing seemed unexceptional a few decades ago, would look very weird today. That’s a good thing, right?
I truly do take the force of the argument that representation matters — that a literature in which Black people or Queer people are never front-and-centre, and only appear in marginal, caricature ways, is a broken and damaging thing. But representation, though needful, is not sufficient. Casting a woman as Dr Who, or a Black man as James Bond, does not on its own cure misogyny and racism. We might say: representation is valuable but not a substitute for action. The thing is: I now wonder whether representation is as valuable as I once believed.
I suppose that diversity of representation is taken as having two main benefits. One is that it makes previously marginalised people feel less excluded, which is manifestly both true and good. But two is that it familiarises the majority with the existence and worth of marginalised people and in doing so dissolves the barriers of ignorance that feed bigotry. I’m less sure of this. The notion that racists (say) are only racist because they’ve never seen any people of colour strikes me as jejune. Indeed, I wonder if something the reverse might be true: that racists can use ‘representation’ to reassure themselves that they’re not really racist (‘how can I be racist? I love Denzel Washington’s movies’ and so on). But perhaps I’m wrong.
At any rate, I’ve been thinking, in a preliminary sort of way, about the pros and cons of diversifying representation in culture texts. The pros, including the two I’ve just touched on:
1. Diverse representation more accurately reflects the truth of the world. It has been the case for a long time now, and will (given the fluidity of human migration and commingling) increasingly be the case, that we live in multi-ethnic, multi-faith societies (and it has always been the case that we live in societies in which half the population are women, and a healthy percentage gay, though for most of western history those women have been banished to the domestic space of motherhood and modesty, and those gay people have been compelled to live closeted lives). Diverse cultural representation is, in this sense, truer than non-diverse representation, and truth is better than falsehood.
2. Diversifying representation avoids excluding non-white, non-male, non-straight (and so on) folk. This is a good in itself (for those people who have hitherto felt themselves locked-out of cultural representation) and a larger, social good in the sense that it normalises our collective sense of diversity as the truth of society.
3. Add a third ‘pro’: diverse stories, by virtue of their very diversity, are more varied and therefore interesting stories.
The cons, though.
1. Focusing on diversity of representation distracts from and, perhaps, even substitutes for making actual material improvements in the lives of real women, POCs and so on in the real world. This is not to say that these two things exist in an entirely zero-sum relationship to one another, although it is to argue that we increasingly spend time and, more importantly, invest emotionally in the simulacra of the former than in the actuality of the latter: that we care more about celebrities we’ll never meet than our actual in-the-world neighbours, that we know more about the box office returns of Hollywood movies than the pay-rates of the living-breathing humans who deliver our groceries and take-aways. The focus on ‘representation’ is symptomatic of this larger Baudrillardian social malaise.
2. Diversifying representation in popular-cultural texts allows bigots to claim, and more damagingly perhaps, actually to believe, that they are not bigots — this is the ‘you can’t call me a racist: I love Denzel Washington’s movies’ position. It’s easy to like commercially successful pop-culture texts. Such works are specifically designed to be likeable. But liking such texts, even with today’s now-diverse casts, does not substitute for liking actual in-the-world people from othered ethnicities, religions and so on. Indeed, it may have the opposite effect: ‘I laugh at Trevor Noah, but I hate the Black guy who lives in my appartment block. I mean, you can’t expect me to like every Black guy, can you. And like I said, I like Trevor Noah.’
3. Following on from this ‘likeability’ point: popular-culture successes — movie stars, pop stars, celebrities and so on — are more attractive than the median person. We prefer to watch beautiful people act and sing than ugly people (even the ‘character actor’ marginal characters coded as ‘ugly’, or at least as ‘ordinary looking’, are rarely actively ugly). This, I would argue, is not a trivial point. It is an important intersectionality. We have gone from there being almost no Black people, Asian people and so on centred in big-budget popular culture texts to there being beautiful Black people, beautiful Asian people in these texts. This is shallow, but it is more than that, since physical pulchritude, or more specifically discourses of what is considered beautiful and what is considered ugly, are an integral part of racism and sexism. It’s Gramsci’s point about fascism being fundamentally a confusion of aesthetics and politics, the elevation of an aesthetic ideal (say: Aryan blondeness and blue-eyed pallor) from a subjective preference to an objective political fact, with the consequent exclusion, and even extermination, of those who fall outside this ideal. Criteria of beauty shift over time but beauty as such, as a value and worth, does not.
