More On Diversity In Stories: George Kirrin, Jewish Hogwarts Students, and “Background” Inclusivity
Last week, when I was sharing some thoughts about Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, I mentioned that including diversity of sexual orientations in a story doesn’t necessarily mean including sexual acts. I’d like to expand on that.
The place and profession where I’m most cognizant of being inclusive is in the classroom. As an instructor at a multicultural, urban university, I teach students from many backgrounds who have diverse identities. And, sure, there are times when I take big steps to understand and celebrate different needs or when I intervene in classroom activities to shut down intolerant words or actions.
But the everyday way I make all my students feel welcome is by considering the words I used to throw away.
When I give example scenarios in class, the imaginary people involved often have names from cultures other than my own.
When I talk about the professional lives of engineers, they are sometimes “he” and sometimes “she” and sometimes gender unspecified.
When I assign students an in-class activity about being wedding planners, I refer to brides and grooms but also brides and brides and grooms and grooms.
Small words, but they let students hear that people like them are included in the instructor’s world. That I consider them normal and worthwhile. The way I didn’t feel when teachers, leaders, or instructors referred to professionals in my own career only as “he” or bemoaned the difficulty of accommodating “all these different holidays” with an eye roll or mentioned that “girls” (implied: normal girls) like dolls.
When writing, it’s easy to think of inclusivity as deliberately adding something different to the story: choosing a protagonist of colour, deciding to writing a heroine, being open to her having a girlfriend instead of or perhaps as well as a boyfriend. And it’s easy to think that diverse stories need to address plots in which that diversity is an element. Tropes like coming-out stories and transition stories, narratives that deal with the effects of racism, sexism, and/or other prejudices on the protagonist, and stories about people finding their place in the world despite their differences (like many main characters who have different physical or mental abilities) are all needed, but so are other kinds of diverse stories.
Stories where the character’s diversity is the main plot help share experiences many readers from privileged groups might never encounter, but stories where diversity is only one plot element of many are important too.
When I was a girl, there was nothing I wanted more than to be the sort of person who could have an adventure in Narnia with my cousins. Even then, I could tell I wasn’t quite the type Aslan was looking for. I didn’t go to boarding school; I didn’t celebrate Christmas; and I didn’t want to be innocent and passive like Susan and Lucy.
The closest I came to seeing someone like me as the hero in the kind of stories I loved was in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. George (full name Georgina), the “tomboy” cousin with short hair, traditionally masculine interests, and a not-very-ladylike temper*, spoke to me more than the female characters who were dying to pet cute animals, wear frilly dresses, and set up house for the boys.**
George wanted a piece of the action. She snuck out to join the boys in spying on ruffians. She had her own freakin’ island. She wanted to be the one to clock out any mofo who dared look sideways at her beloved dog, Timmy.
The story never shied away from including the social interactions that a girl like George might encounter negotiating gender norms — her preferences had to be re-explained to every new character. But these incidents weren’t the main plot. The Five solved mysteries together, and George could be one of the protagonists of those mysteries without either erasing who she was or forcing the mystery to be about that identity.
Although George is far from a perfect example — the Famous Five aren’t exactly feminist, LBGTQ+ friendly, or racially inclusive — she shows the importance of creating a space where characters who are different from the mainstream can be key parts of the world of the story.
Something else was still missing: where were the other characters who challenged gender roles? Where were the successful adult women (or perhaps trans men) like George? Why were all the shopkeepers, mothers, and aunts like Anne instead? Including protagonists who are different from the “default” is great, but they feel isolated unless their world has room for other people like them whose differences are not part of the “plot.”
When I first started writing stories as a kid, all my characters reflected the people I’d been told populated fiction by my favourite books: white, middle-class, physically able, neurotypical, straight, Anglo-Saxon cis-gender boys. Using these characters as mental models erased any thought of exploring other types of characters, no matter how obvious they might seem to an outsider.
For example, not only am I Jewish, but until high school, I went to a Jewish day school. Almost all my friends, family, and family friends were Jewish. The community that surrounded me pretty much 24/7 was Jewish. Yet it literally never occurred to me that my characters, protagonists or otherwise, could be Jews. Even as a young adult, the most I could imagine was a token Jewish character among a generally Christian/Christian-background main cast: sure, there are (a) Jew(s) at Hogwarts, but every character we see celebrates Christmas, and nobody seems to miss school for Yom Kippur or require the house elves to cook kosher.
Of course I knew of and read stories about Jews, but none of these stories were the fantasy adventures I loved. The worlds that spoke to me — Narnia, Hogwarts, the UK of The Dark Is Rising — didn’t seem to have space for us as more than ethnic-sounding names on a list, let alone protagonists.
I wanted to know that there can be Jewish Hogwarts professors, that a kid who wears a kippah could still become High King, that Jewish kids could struggle with learning of supernatural realities that conflict with the tenets of the religion they grew up with. I wanted Jewish characters with agency. Their Jewishness could be depicted as secondarily — and as realistically — as the fact that Harry Potter wears glasses.
And just as importantly, I needed to see that there was a place for me in the worlds of the stories. I needed to see realistically Jewish background characters whose main attribute, again, wasn’t their Jewishness. Where were the Jewish store owners, parents, Quidditch buddies, police, evil minions, soldiers?
In a similar fashion, stories are inclusive only as much as their world is in inclusive. Including characters of different genders, orientations, ethnicities, races, cultures, classes, and abilities is important both in foreground and background. Showing readers that everyone is welcome into the world of the story means that no character, main or set-dressing, should be white, cis-male, heterosexual, able, neurotypical, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon-Christian-background unless the author has considered and chosen those attributes as deliberately and carefully as she might choose different ones.
That means my main character’s best friend’s parents can be two men instead of a man and a woman. It means the computer nerd who hands the protagonist detectives the key to cracking the case can be a trans person. And also Jewish. It means that the class bully and the school board superintendent and one of the main characters who starts her own fifth-grade detective agency can all be Filipina, though their backgrounds might differ in other ways.
Diversity isn’t about inclusion for its own sake. Inclusion is about making sure there’s no “default” setting on people, whether they’re the fictional or real.
* On the other hand, the narrator’s re-iteration that George loved being mistaken for a boy didn’t resonate with me. I hated being mistaken for a boy, because it usually came with hostility. But George doesn’t have to be a perfect character for me: I’m glad she spoke for those who did empathize with that aspect of gender identity.
** I appreciate that George and Anne present different but equally valid models of femininity. The trouble is not that characters like Anne exist: it’s that they’re presented as universal girls and as inferior to the boys.