Why Diverse Representation Really Matters
When you can’t imagine yourself, you cease to exist.
I fell in love with storytelling during the warm afternoons of reading time in primary school. I was reading A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. Filled with the misfortune of the Baudelaire orphans, I was gripped from the very first sentence. I couldn’t put it down when my teacher’s voice whirled me back to the stuffy classroom. I had been to another place, and I couldn’t wait to go back.
Storytelling to me was pure magic, and I needed to create some of this magic.
As a child, I spent most of my time in the wonderous world of imagination, creating stories in my mind. Can’t say much has changed there.
But there was just one problem. I just couldn’t exist in this world. I couldn’t because I wasn’t white.
Growing up, all my heroes were white. Every movie I saw and the books I read followed the life of a white person. Their perspective was the only way to see and explore the world.
For me, only white people could be the central focus. Thus every story I created in my mind revolved around a white protagonist who was nothing like me. I just couldn’t imagine a person like me, a person of color, in my imagined stories and worlds. And since I couldn’t imagine anyone like me in these stories, I was subconsciously eradicating us from my mind.
This is known as symbolic annihilation.
This is why representation really matters.
In 1976 George Gerbner coined the term symbolic annihilation.
Symbolic Annihilation is the erasure of people through the absence of their representation in the media. Gerbner argued that this absence allowed the perpetuation of inequality on a structural and societal level.
The lack of representation within media subconsciously projects the idea that marginalized people cannot have a central place within society or culture. They are not only removed from society but are slowly eradicated from the cultural consciousness.
It is their invisibility that slowly erases them from existence.
Gaye Tuchman further expanded this theory and claimed that the concept of symbolic annihilation could be divided into three elements: omission, trivialization, and condemnation.
Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation
— Gerbner.
For Pierre Bourdieu, this lack of representation through symbolic annihilation is nothing short of violence.
The media a society collectively consumes becomes their perspectives of the world around them.
Studies show that lack of representation and stereotypical representations become a reality for their audiences, especially for those who don’t interact with different groups of people.
What you see is what you begin to believe subconsciously.
Therefore when we don’t see diversity in media, we not only wipe out communities from society but begin to label them as the “other.”
This consequently leads to divisions, hostility, and fear and places limits on children of those backgrounds. As a child, my strong belief that my stories had to have a white protagonist ultimately put a limit on my creativity and imagination.
While we have some fantastic examples of diverse representation in the media, we are still not fully there.
Representation truly matters because we disregard, marginalize and erase people and their true identities without it.
