When I write a story I’m always White. And I’m almost always a man. That’s the tabula rasa of character for me; the template I’m compelled to write with.
But I’m not White, and I’m not really a man either. My personal relationship to gender, race, and ethnicity is complicated, but I don’t think that’s something you’d pick up on if you read my early stories. At least, it wouldn’t be an obvious realization.
Literature is a technology. It’s a transformation of one of the most primeval technologies of all; it is storytelling and memory itself given material form. It’s a technology with the power to forever mark the way you think. As a child I was taught by the media I read and the environment I grew up in that to be American was to shed my culture to fit in.
Sure, elementary school had taught me the idea of America as the proverbial melting pot, as a place built upon unity amongst diversity. But those were just words, the cover story. I was ashamed of my food–it was so colorful and smelly and unlike the cafeteria gruel. My skin wasn’t like my friends’. I was slow to learn English (and maybe this is why I read so much–I finally understood the damn language).
I read a lot as a kid, and the books I read shaped the stories I tell even now. I like language that ebbs and flows–prose that’s almost poetic, that’s stuffed full of magic and metaphor which wriggles around to avoid telling any story directly, to take the long way round to resolution through repetition.
And it wriggles around to help me avoid asking myself questions about race and gender; about whose stories I’m telling and how. I read a lot as a kid, and the books I read taught me that the stories I tell should be about a motley crew of White friends getting into adventures I’d probably get shot at for replicating in the American South.
Why should this change? Why should I write a story about me?
There’s no reason to question what you grew up with, after all.
So I wrote stories about dusky blonde boys in Narnia-esque fantasies. About brunette girls who were best friends with griffins and other talking mythological creatures. I guess that’s where my diversity lied. In the monstrous, in chimerical beasts that lived on the cusp of reality. When I entered middle school, I slowly stopped writing. I still read books, but I watched Animal Planet in my free time more and more. I embraced a love of biology, of studying the nonhuman, of dissecting them scientifically and not linguistically. And writing became a childish thing, a hobby of the past.
Like most other students displaced by lockdown, I flocked to art as escape. I joined my school’s lit mag in my senior year, stretched my literary muscles, now sore after a decade of rest, and cranked out short poetry and prose. Here, too, I wrote the same character I had my whole life. But this time I was aware of it.
Why? I would think. Why is this the story that calls out to me?
A story about a White child who’s gone missing. A middle-aged White man riding a train and contemplating his life. An Italian plague doctor doing his rounds in a pandemic. Where are my stories about the Hindu mythos? About an Indian child growing up in America? Where are my coming-of-age stories informed by my lived experience, instead of imagining another future where I grew up White?
While the books I read as a kid set my expectations, the media and discourse I’d encountered as a young adult had started freeing me from the mold I was trapped in.
More and more movements have shown up to center BIPOC stories in children’s books and mainstream television. To center the queer experience, to spotlight narratives that used be buried deep as undertones. The Internet, and mass communication as a whole, has enabled a new wave of literature that tells the stories of the minority. Entering high school and becoming politically aware was the first step in accepting my voice as a narrator. Choosing to study literature was the second.
Fast forward to 2026. We are in a new age. Traditional literature is dying, replaced with an infinite scroll. Libraries might as well be mass graves. We’re in the digital era now. I exaggerate to be provocative of course, but isn’t that what it feels like sometimes?
After decades of effort, diverse voices and stories are finally being platformed, but it’s too little too late. The Internet and mass digital communication have created echo-chambers of discontent, and the hegemony of Whiteness has crept back in to society.
Constantly in search of new media, we endlessly consume content without taking the time to understand it. Sure, in some regards, people are reading now more than ever, but they’re forgetting how to understand the texts and think for themselves. And we thought national literacy was bad a decade ago!
The kids can’t read, so we give them easier texts. In political paranoia, we ban stories to sanitize education from agendas we don’t agree with. I’m writing diverse stories now, but who is really reading them?
Title Credits
It Won’t Be Long by Tele Novella. This was an essay I wrote for a class on science, technology, and race. We were supposed to write about “how [we] learned about [our] racial or ethnic identity filtered through media, society, and culture.” I didn’t perfectly answer the prompt, but I never do that anyways. The song felt like a good fit.