When I was a kid, whenever I used to complain about something, my mother would tell me, “Life isn’t fair!” Even as a young child, this filled me with instant rage and I would retort, “Well, it should be!” At six or seven, I couldn’t articulate why that phrase filled me with such fury, but I’ve given it plenty of thought since then. First of all, I know life is not fair. You’re not telling me anything new with that statement. Secondly, it’s shrugging your shoulders and giving up. In other words, it’s a copout. Yes, we know the world is not fair, but we don’t have to contribute to it. We’re not automatons who just unthinkingly do whatever the world tells us to do. We can make decisions for ourselves and one of those decisions could be to make the world better for one person. We can make that decision every day!
If we all had that mindset, there wouldn’t have been the Civil Rights movement or women’s suffragette movement. Or more recently, the #MeToo movement. Or trans rights coming to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. looked at the inequality around him and said, “Well, that’s just how it is. Life is unfair!” Or Gandhi. Or Rosa Park. None of the major societal improvements would have happened if someone hadn’t stood up and said, “This ain’t right. What’s’ more, I’m going to do something about it.” We need the disrupters who are willing to put their lives on the line to be the change they want to see in the world.
On a smaller scale, that’s what many marginalized creative people do with their works. They don’t see what they want to see out there, so they create it. I do that with my writing. I make my protags bisexual Taiwanese American woman-shaped people with black cats. Is it limiting? A bit, but it’s better than writing about boring and bland straight white dudes. Honestly, if I never read another book with a straight white dude protagonist (or watch such a movie), it’ll be too soon. I was in college when I first made the decision to only ready women of color (preferably Asian women) in my free time. In the mystery genre, that wasn’t possible in the ’09s, so I widened it to white women as well. I did read white dudes once in a great while, but it had to be someone highly recommended by someone I respected. A white dude once said to me in a tone of high dudgeon, “Isn’t that just as discriminatory as not reading minority authors?” I looked at him in disdain and said, “I bet I’ve read way more white straight dudes than you have women of color.” He had nothing to say to that because I was speaking the truth.