Hi! I’ve heard the way to avoid tokenism is to include multiple characters of the same race in your story, but what is the best thing to do when your cast is very small? Some of my stories only have 2-3 major characters. Would it be better to make all of them the same race, or is it alright that there’s only one character of a specific race if I do my best to make them well-rounded, three-dimensional, and sympathetic?

writingwithcolor:

Preventing Tokenism in a Small Cast

I like your last idea best no matter what you decide regarding their races: to make the few characters you have well-rounded, three-dimensional, and sympathetic. Whether that does mean they’re all one race, two Black and one Japanese, each a different race, or however you happen to spin it. Do what is best for your story, and don’t feel confined by any invisible rules on how diversity should be selected.

Having more than one character of a race is quite helpful and relieves the pressure of putting all your representation into one person, though. This is why we can’t recommend it enough! You might be concerned about your outspoken, extroverted Black girl is being portrayed in a stereotypical way, but she has a foil in another Black female character who is as quiet as the other girl is loud.

If stereotypes and tokens are a concern for you:

Secondary characters are important too, and count for representation, if you establish them well. Depending on cast size, you might not be able to help having one main, recurring character of a given race but there are other ways we can get to know more characters, even if they’re not in the main cast.

Some ways that even a small cast can be enriched by other characters:

  • Main character’s family member, significant other, or friend shows up for a scene or two (or more). It’s likely your MCs would interact with the people important to them, and more regularly with those they are close with, even if they’re not in every scene/chapter.
  • Main character heavily mentions and describes another character (even if he never appears in the action, we feel as if we know him well.).
  • A character is introduced through flashback.
  • If secondary characters unable to physically appear, they might appear via letters, email, phone calls, skype etc.
  • Secondary characters get “mini-arcs” and growth. Again, they’re not the main focus, but have an appropriate level of action in their lives that we are given closure for in the end.

~Mod Colette

seraphimalune:

curlicuecal:

picsthatmakeyougohmm:

hmmm

Whenever someone posits that people are ‘lazy’ I’m reminded of the fact that if you leave humans in a room with some blocks and no instructions they will literally make up their own tasks to carry out because humans just fuckin love having stuff to do and objectives to work towards

In one of my psych courses we learned about a study where a person was left in a room with nothing but a box that would SHOCK THEM painfully if they touched it. After awhile, everyone touched the box and got shocked to hell and back. Now, this isn’t that abnormal. What’s abnormal is that everyone then sat there for a few minutes and then TOUCHED THE BOX AGAIN. And got shocked AGAIN! Moral of the story: People fucking hate being bored. They would rather be in IMMENSE PAIN than be bored.

‘Lost’ Holocaust diary from murdered Jewish girl partially published in English

jewish-privilege:

Portions of the diary of a Jewish girl living in Poland during the Holocaust were published in English for the first time this week, over 76 years after she was murdered by the Nazis.

Renia Spiegel was 15 years old when she began the journal in January 1939, living in the small southeastern Polish city of Przemysl with her grandparents. The Nazis invaded Poland in September of that year, after agreeing to divide up the country with the Soviets.

Spiegel’s 8-year-old sister, Ariana, who lived with their mother in Warsaw, was visiting Renia in Przemysl when the war began and the city came under Soviet control, with thousands of its Jews deported to labor camps in Siberia and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia’s Far East.

“Heard the jangling of keys, a gate being opened. They went in. I waited some more. Then they came out, taking loads of people with them, children, old people… The whole night was horrific. I couldn’t wait for the dawn to come,” Spiegel wrote on July 6, 1940, about the Soviet roundup of Jews.

Portions of the diary’s English translation, published for the first time in English by Smithsonian Magazine this week, also document Spiegel’s longing to see her mother in Warsaw as the Nazis erected a ghetto for Jews in the city, as well as her budding romance with a Jewish boy named Zygmunt Schwarzer.

…About a week [after June 20, 1941] the Nazis would capture the area where Spiegel lived and make the local Jews wear armbands bearing a Star of David, before establishing a ghetto in Przemysl to which it ordered the city’s Jewish residents moved.

“Ghetto! That word is ringing in our ears. We don’t know what will happen to us, where they’ll take us,” she wrote that November.

Spiegel would continue to write diary entries on her time in the ghetto through July 1942, when the Nazis began preparing to deport the Jews to the Belzec death camp.

“My dear diary, my good, beloved friend! We’ve gone through such terrible times together and now the worst moment is upon us. I could be afraid now. But the One who didn’t leave us then will help us today too. He’ll save us. Hear, O, Israel, save us, help us,” wrote Spiegel.

Having failed to secure a work permit, Spiegel was set to be deported but was rescued and placed in hiding by Schwarzer, who had started to work with the local resistance. But as Spiegel hid with Schwarzer’s parents, the three were discovered and executed by the Nazis.

The diary was in Schwarzer’s possession at the time, and he wrote the final entry.

“Three shots! Three lives lost! It happened last night at 10:30 p.m. Fate decided to take my dearest ones away from me. My life is over. All I can hear are shots, shots shots….My dearest Renusia, the last chapter of your diary is complete,” he wrote on July 31.

Along with Spiegel’s sister and mother, who survived the war by converting to Catholicism and taking on new names, Schwarzer would survive the Holocaust and in 1952 gave them Renia’s diary after moving to New York, according to Smithsonian.

…Renia Spiegel’s diary, which has drawn comparisons to Anne Frank’s, will be published in its entirety in English next year.

“Renia was a little older and more sophisticated, writing frequently in poetry as well as in prose. She was also living out in the world instead of in seclusion. Reading such different firsthand accounts reminds us that each of the Holocaust’s millions of victims had a unique and dramatic experience,” wrote Robin Shulman in a prelude to the excerpts from the diary published in this month’s Smithsonian Magazine.

“At a time when the Holocaust has receded so far into the past that even the youngest survivors are elderly, it’s especially powerful to discover a youthful voice like Renia’s, describing the events in real time,” she wrote.

[Read the full piece at The Times of Israel]

‘Lost’ Holocaust diary from murdered Jewish girl partially published in English

soulvomit:

bunny-butch:

bunny-butch:

Having a halfway decent relationship with your abusive parent during adulthood is so weird. Its like, “oh mom, you’re so funny and cute! You violated me and made my childhood a living nightmare, causing trauma that I will never recover from, but nowadays you’re just a barrel of laughs!”

Like, its so great bc as parent and child you share a lot of mannerisms and personality traits, you’ve got a lot of in jokes, you just also have the heart wrenching awareness that this person will never, ever apologize for how they have victimized you, or even just admit to it

Bonus:

Dealing with your former unrepentant abuser’s old age, as they become needier, more socially/culturally justified in their self-righteousness, and their filters start to erode, and they stop even pretending to be polite

God yes. At one point my parents seemed to repent but in recent years they have gotten angry, said they forgot, and openly denied acts of violence.