“In 2014, Nkechi Okoro Carroll was an executive story editor on Bones when she met an up-and-coming scribe named Lena Waithe at a WGA Committee of Black Writers event. The two hit it off, so much so that Okoro Carroll got the future Emmy winner — whose major credit at the time was writing for the Nickelodeon series How to Rock — hired as a staff writer on her Fox procedural, making Waithe the second black woman in the room. “Aren’t you worried she’s going to take your job?” a fellow writer on staff asked Okoro Carroll.
“You should be worried she’ll take your job,” retorted Okoro Carroll, now showrunning The CW’s All American. What the duo felt was not competition but kinship: “We often felt like unicorns,” Okoro Carroll says. “When someone asked me to recommend mid-level female writers [of color] for a job, I was appalled to realize I didn’t know many names.”
Together with Erika L. Johnson, then writing for BET’s Being Mary Jane, the women decided to create a network of black female TV writers themselves. Twelve assembled for the March 2014 inaugural meeting of what came to be known as Black Women Who Brunch (BWB); today, the membership nears 80. “This group is the proof” against and antidote to “people saying, ‘We can’t find any black female writers,’” says Johnson, now a co-executive producer on NBC’s upcoming The Village.
BWB holds potlucks at Okoro Carroll’s house every few months (usually about 30 members are available at one time) to toast triumphs and troubleshoot challenges. “It’s not just a community we’re building, but a resource,” says Waithe. “We really are able to recommend eight or nine black women for certain jobs.”
In August, BWB took its first off-site trip — a weekend getaway to Palm Springs. And in November, 62 members gathered for THR’s biggest photo shoot ever, where they revealed what they wish their colleagues knew about being a black woman in the business.
I’ve been wavering back and forth on whether or not I should post this because it’s very personal and possibly not as informed as I would like it to be. And it requires a little prefacing.
I’m nonbinary.
I write nonbinary characters. (I don’t have a single story which doesn’t include at least a protagonist or love interest who’s nonbinary, usually with a number of nonbinary supporting characters.)
And these nonbinary characters come in all forms and styles and pronouns and self presentations, from humans who believe they aren’t defined by anyone else’s perception of their gender, to characters whose entire society doesn’t differentiate between male and female, to agender demi-gods who use gendered pronouns because they feel like it and their to genderfluid parents who wear dresses to the opera.
Through the process of writing these characters I’ve subjected them to quite a few beta readers. And what I see in my feedback is a consistent trend of binary readers worried over whether my portrayals of nonbinary character might come off as offensive, while nonbinary readers don’t bat an eye.
Now, I’m certainly not saying that it’s bad for people of binary genders to be critical of how nonbinary characters are portrayed, because I love having people watching out for me and my nonbinary fam.
But I’m also worried.
I’m worried that binary writers aren’t writing nonbinary characters because they’re afraid of getting it wrong.
If binary writers are worried a nonbinary writer is getting their own representation wrong, then how much more are they criticizing themselves for perceived flaws in their own nonbinary characters?
Please: Write nonbinary characters. Specifically, write nonbinary protagonists and love interests.
There is such a broad scale of nonbinary identifying individuals, who’ve all had very different experiences, who all present themselves in different ways, with different pronouns, for different reasons. We are more diverse than you can imagine.
And yet we have essentially no representation. We are dying, dying, for characters in fiction who’s similar to us. The most devastating way you can mess up is to not care enough to try in the first place.
Edit:
I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts for a day because I needed to edit it and boy. Boy am I pissed.
Just fucking pissed.
After having a binary person (one who only writes a nonbinary villain no less) attempt to call out my #ownvoice representation, I couldn’t be more angry.
(I mean, I could be more angry, as proven by that time a TERF broke into my personal messages to write me two essays on why my identity isn’t real and I actually just hate myself enough to pretend it is, but that’s a different story altogether.)
So I amend this:
Please, please write nonbinary characters. But please, for the love of all things good, don’t try to tell other writers how to write these nonbinary characters if you aren’t also nonbinary.
Write us characters but don’t fucking step on us in the process.
I cannot express how much I love the fact that Homecoming made Aunt May a woman in her forties, someone who might actually have been a sister to the parents of a fifteen year old. It changes the dynamic so much from the comics, because we get a sense of May as an agent in her own life, a woman who has a career she balances with her family, a woman who should’ve had decades more with her husband, a woman who is trying to be Mom to Peter instead of a kindly grandparental type. I can accept white-haired retiree Aunt May for an adult Peter out in the world, but this baby Spiderman ought to have a mom, and moms who watch this movie deserve to have Aunt May.
Talking to a guy who knows my parents but doesn’t know me very well, and he tells me that his friend (indeed, a very nice and talented actor) recently put out a horror movie. And I’m interested until I hear the words “So it’s about this guy with OCD…” and at that point my mom and I give each other a sidelong glance.
I say, “I don’t know, because I have OCD and it’s a pretty serious thing for me.”
To which he follows up, “Oh, you don’t have it like this guy! You’re totally functional!”
Okay, dude. Yes, I am standing before you in a fancy club, dressed nice, and looking relatively balanced. But you do not know me. You do not know OCD.
You do not know that I have been non-functional, and that in order to maintain my current balance of sanity, I take daily medication and see a weekly therapist, and I still have downward spirals and panic attacks.
OCD can add to a story, for sure. The Aviator is a great example–albeit, it was on the voyeuristic side, kind of “check out what a weirdo this guy really is”, but his condition was portrayed in a realistic and *sympathetic* manner, because it focused so hard on his anxiety and entrapment.
I don’t need a horror movie about my disorder for a couple reasons.
1. I already live the horror movie that is OCD.
2. Just like people with psychosis, schizophrenia/schizotypal disorders, dissociative identity disorders, and any other number of mental disorder that makes us act in unusual and yes, sometimes frightening ways, I don’t need it to be the hinge for your horror flick, a handy device that makes more people like you scared and misunderstanding of people like me.
3. And for people with the above disorders who may not be diagnosed, they don’t need to be told that they are dangerous monsters and cause them to avoid treatment out of fear. (This goes double for people who experience paranoia or delusions as part of their symptoms.)
This post ended up way longer than I meant, but really, truly, hear me out creators:
MENTAL ILLNESS IS A TRAIT AMONG AN INFINITE VARIETY OF PEOPLE. IT IS NOT A CHARACTER FLAW, AND IT IS DEFINITELY A POOR PLOT DEVICE FOR THE HORROR GENRE. YOU CAN DO BETTER.
The horror genre has done SO POORLY when it comes to how it treats characters with mental illness and it seriously is one of the areas where it really REALLY needs to do better
Can I just say right now that I would like to see more representation for asexual men?
Asexuality in general is erased enough, but it feels like no one even considers a guy might be ace. Chalk it up to toxic masculinity, maybe, but there’s this pervading feeling in so much of society that any man who doesn’t want sex is less of a man.
Give me my ace men, please. I want ace representation, but it shouldn’t be just for white women, y’know?
i really really mean it please write muslim characters, it’s really not that daunting literally all you have to do is throw in a few casual qualities.
have them squint uncertainly at the meat options in a restaurant and ask if there’s pork in the sandwich. have them mention on the phone “oh, i’m gonna stop by the mosque first for prayer but i’ll be there soon.” have your hijabi girls squeal over cute scarves in mall store windows and swoon over sparkly pins. have them kindly reject a glass of water and say “oh, i’m fasting today.”
just don’t make their religion their only defining aspect. like??
for most women, wearing hijab is about as casual as wearing a shirt or pants. give me a badass woman on a mission to save the world just like you’d write literally any other badass woman on a mission to save the world— this one just happens to keep her hair in a headscarf and is careful not to eat certain foods?
and not all muslim women wear scarves, a lot of them just choose not to or they decide not right now but they’ll do it later? like, give me a girl who’s absolutely determined to break a world record and halfway through the story she shows up in a headscarf for the first time and it’s no big deal.
give me a kid who’s on the search for an ancient magical artifact and also they get anxious at some point cause they’re busy but prayer’s gonna start soon and they don’t wanna miss it. have them whip out their phone and search for the nearest mosque. have them find some quiet place to pray alone, like in the corner of a hotel room they just booked while their travel companion’s watching TV with the volume turned down low.
just?? do a bit of research (when are the prayer times, when is ramadan, what are halal foods, mosques in texas, etc.) and write!!! muslim!!! characters!!!
willowfoot 