How to balance respecting diversity and avoiding tokenism at the same time
My project has an environmental theme.
My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and eggs. Some environmentally - friendly friends find those scenes very distasteful and opposed to the environmental intent of the project.
I'd like to not lose a portion of my potential audience because of this conflict, so -
(1) I'm pruning out 'meat' wherever I can (except for the villains), but it's not sensible to never have some sort of meat, given the book's setting.
(2) I've changed some of the game to fictional in-world animals, hoping this will soften the edges.
(3) I'm considering modifying a character to be a vegetarian. < this is my question.The character I have in mind is already fastidious.
Question: If I make one sympathetic character a vegetarian, in order to give voice to the environmental cost of meat-eating, will this come across as tokenism?
Where is the line between diversity and tokenism? I would not have this character preach, on the other hand I'd like to acknowledge the sentiment among vegetarian readers while not alienating others. Is it sufficient to have a vegetarian character who gives one single line of "No thanks, I don't eat that" while wiping his hands on his kerchief, ... is this enough to nod at the readers that I recognize the problem?
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Great characters need not be perfect, but they will definitively strive to achieve perfection. If a reader is caught in the detail of all the meat and eggs that your characters eat, rather than dragged along by their enthusiasm and determination towards reaching their goals, then your characters are already tokens.
Unless you are scriptwriting for pantomime shows, your characters have to be believable above all else. Make them faulty. Make them human. Make them struggle for greatness, and make them change to reach what they dream. I would find it much more compelling that meat-eating characters would gradually stop eating meat to be true to their goals, than to believe that every vegetarian is a saint and every carnivore is devil incarnated.
I believe that you can best express and respect diversity in the choices that your characters have to make.
My suggestion is step back on your original track. Try to understand what made your reader so focused on the dietary habits of your characters rather than the story itself, and, to fulfill the goal, give your characters an arc compatible with your intended message (e.g. make them realize their need or wish to become vegetarians).
As for the villains, you can give them a similar arc, but make them refuse to change their habits. If you wish to avoid tokenization you may need to place them in a situation where they face a struggle in making their choice: for instance, it is a family tradition to eat turkey for thanksgiving, and their older grandparents are terminally ill and it will give them a heartbreak to not share that particular meal; or they have been borrowing large sums to run a (very profitable) abattoir and would be bankrupt if they give it up.
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I think it is tokenism, by virtue of the fact that tokenism is indeed your stated intent! In fact you may weaken the tokenism by saying the character is also fastidious; most of us consider a high degree of fastidiousness a flaw or symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, because most such fastidiousness costs time and effort that is essentially wasted and could have been spent doing something more productive.
You can also explicate their motives. For a workable point of view, I offer myself: I am not a vegetarian, in fact I am an enthusiastic carnivore, but I am quite concerned about the environment and our destruction of it. I do not feel guilty about being a carnivore, I consider it natural; nearly all top predators are. If anything, I think man is not the worst of them, we don't eat our meat alive and on the hoof, and at least in most countries "harvest" them quickly and with little pain compared to the typical deaths of equivalent meat animals in the wild (by predation, starvation, disease or accident).
I am for preserving a livable planet with forests and rivers and an atmosphere that isn't going to give me or any wildlife cancer or chronic lung or skin impairment, that isn't 175F at the equator, that doesn't require us to live in boxes with constant A/C and air filtering and piped in water. I don't want 99% of wildlife to go extinct.
Although, if I had the power I would certainly mandate a more humane treatment of food animals and how they are slaughtered; I have no moral qualms whatsoever about raising our current crop of common food animals for meat. I do believe animals have emotions, but I do not believe cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, goats or fish, are capable of anticipating death or imagining their future; death takes no hopes and dreams from them. They can certainly feel fear, but as Temple Grandin showed in revolutionizing the cattle industry, there is no need for them to feel it while being slaughtered: They will follow their instincts right into the necessary position and die so fast their brain did not have a millisecond to feel any pain.
I can be an environmentalist that believes in preserving nature and nature's beauties for their own sake, not just for survival but the enjoyment of future generations, and that can include wild animals galore; I am upset about the loss of so many species. I don't have to be a vegetarian to do that, and neither do your fictional characters.
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Short answer, yes, if you make one character a vegetarian to espouse that viewpoint you are coming close to tokenism.
You haven't said much about the world you are building. But I figure it's either alt-earth fantasy, or a science fiction colony. So you get to explain what your world's population is, and what kinds of pressures exist. Several other answers have mentioned this.
What they haven't said, though, is "show, don't tell!" If a bunch of IT workers go to lunch, they'll probably automatically go someplace with veg, because Raj is veg. And they won't talk about it, it's automatic.
But if Raj takes the day off, one might say, "Hey! Raj isn't here today- how about we go to Hooter's/Arby's/Brontoburgers?"
If you only have one vegetarian character, they are a token. You need to explain how or why. There are more of Raj than of Tony, but if Raj is working in New York, Tony out-numbers him locally.
If vegetarians are more environmentally appropriate, you need to show how. Again, others have mentioned this. But it has to make sense in your world. Why did the Plains Indians live off buffalo? Why do the Sami follow the reindeer? Why do your world's people do whatever they do? And how can you squeeze in your token vegetarian? Or, how can you squeeze in a token carnivore? Maybe he's a Cimmerian from the Northern Wastes, where they live on a diet of Ice-wirms and plunder...
If you haven't read them, I'd suggest Modesitt's "Ecolitan" series. He builds a series of worlds for an ecologist (and pretty much beats the reader with them). But he's good at subtle exposition.
In summary, I think you need to develop a coherent explanation of why your token characters are present, and then provide those explanations in the "negative spaces" of your story: The Jewish character who doesn't mind working on Sunday, so he'll swap work days; Raj the veg, who took the day off so let's get BBQ; the werewolf who doesn't eat meat (except, you know, once a month); the woman who fasts two days a week to appease her gods, in the hopes her child will get better.
Remember that your characters are unique. They need some kind of hook, either stereotypical, or anti-. This comes under characterization, not world-building. If everyone is vegetarian, then you ignore that in favor of what makes them unique. Maybe they're a nudist. Maybe a survivalist vegan? "When the SHTF, there won't be any chickens! What will you do then, blood breath?"
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33861. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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