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Are We Still Talking About Diversity in Storytelling?
It’s 2020 and we’re still talking about race and representation in arts, what’s that about? No, really?
Previously published on Thoughts from the Criminology Team [edited]
As someone who has loved the art of storytelling for all his short twenty-four years, on characters you are often told “it’s not about the colour of a their skin, but the content of their character” that keeps you engaged. Growing up I struggled to find characters like me in the stories I read. Malorie Blackman has been fighting the fight for the best part of twenty years. Yet, still in one of my favourite genres, YA Fiction (Young Adults), Black men are not a commonality. And that’s just the first layer. What about characters in coming-of-age stories for little Black girls? What about those children with darker skin who happened to be dyslexic, dyspraxic, or even on the autism spectrum? And this was one of the reasons I read Creative Writing at university. There were no characters like me growing up, so I attempted to write my own.
