Tickboxes
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Every once in a while I see someone complaining that the representation in a certain book, or a certain film or other media, feels shallow and cynical - that the author is merely "ticking boxes" of what kind of people to include, rather than engaging more deeply with marginalized readers' concerns.
This kind of complaint isn't always on the mark - sometimes it assumes things about the author's motivations that aren't correct. But it is possible to just tick boxes - even from a position of good intent - when you could be doing something more.
In fact - dramatic confession time - I used to approach representation this way myself.
First, though, a quick digression. To call something a tickbox or tokenism implies that you know something about the author's intent. It implies that the author didn't have a strong investment or another good artistic reason to put a certain kind of marginalized character in the story; they just threw them in to placate someone. (Presumably the "someone" is either a marginalized reader, or a book critic or other gatekeeper who insists on seeing diversity in books.)
The thing is, sometimes that's a big assumption. Sometimes what's meaningful to a marginalized audience won't be completely legible to a privileged reader. So you can have situations where a privileged reader looks at a book, and doesn't get why the representation in the book is important to its other readers. So the reader concludes that it must be an exercise in box-ticking, because what else would it be?
This can happen especially with stories that don't fit a privileged reader's stereotype of what a story about marginalized people should look like. E.g. queer stories that don't end in tragedy; or stories about BIPOC cultures that aren't an exercise in teaching a white reader about that culture and its history. These, ironically, are often the kinds of stories we need most.
It's also a common accusation against intersectional stories where one character has a lot of different marginalizations at once - but a lot of us are multiply marginalized, and we need those kinds of stories!
And, of course, these complains often assume deep down that, in order to be valid, there has to be a special “artistic reason” why a work contains marginalized people - rather than just “because the author wanted to” or “because they exist in real life.” Privileged people often don’t understand the difference between these “because I like it” reasons and more cynical, externally motivated ones (e.g. “because I thought I would sell more books if there was a POC in them.”)
So definitely be mindful of these dynamics before you talk about box-ticking, especially for a marginalization you don't share.
With that in mind, here's my own confession.
When I was a much younger and less experienced author, I actually kept a spreadsheet of all the representation in my stories. It was more or less literally a series of tickboxes. Diversity was important to me, so I was like - okay, what kinds of diversity exist in the human population? What kinds of diversity need to be included in stories? Am I including them all? How many do I have of each kind? What are my weak points? Who do I need to include more of?
This wasn't the worst approach I could have taken. It was way better than if I'd churned out story after story about a bunch of identical straight white dudes. It definitely gave me a sense (sometimes an unflattering sense) of what kinds of character were easier or harder for me to relate to. But it's an approach that I ended up moving away from, especially as the conversation in the writing community shifted, from representation-as-such to #ownvoices representation, authenticity, and not appropriating other people's stories.
I realized that trying to treat every kind of diversity equally wasn't helpful to me as an artist. I did deeper, more authentic (in the sense of writing about what's genuinely important to me), more nuanced and more useful work when I focused on the forms of diversity that I know intimately from my own life, my own activism, and the lives of my friends.
It doesn't mean I can't write characters who are unlike myself; but it does mean that the things I choose to really dig into deeply, the things that I draw the brightest and strongest insights from, are probably going to have to do with me and my communities on some level. And that getting those insights, bringing them to the readers who need them, is more important than representing everybody exactly equally or in exactly the proportions they show up in the general population.
In fact, sometimes the right approach is to overrepresent a certain kind of person - because people who share a certain kind of marginalization, consciously or unconsciously, tend to stick together.
Mind you, there are some circumstances where box-ticking might actually be the right thing to do. Let's say for example that you're writing a sprawling story with dozens of background characters, and it's set in, say, Toronto - a very diverse city. You could do worse than to start by looking up the demographics of Toronto and making lists of the kinds of people you are likely to encounter there. That probably shouldn't be where you stop, but it can be a good way to get started.
The problem with box-ticking isn't that it's inherently bad or evil. The problem is mostly that it's insufficient; by itself, it won’t take you to the places of real depth and emotional honesty that make for good storytelling. And, at least when I did it, it didn't come from any cynical motive or any attempt to placate anyone. It was about trying, with an imperfect method, to do the right thing.