Six Tips for Challenging Bigotry With Your Work

Storytelling has a long legacy of fighting for justice, and speculative fiction is no exception. Franchises like Star Trek and Discworld have challenged the way people think and demanded that society improve. When it feels like the path to justice has been lost, many storytellers fight back with their pens. If that includes you, arm yourself with these tips.

1. Don’t Forget the Positive

It’s easy to look at the bad things that are happening and focus your energy on demonstrating the harm. But society needs more than cautionary tales; it also needs positive examples. Without them, people have trouble imagining what a better world looks like. If we can’t imagine it, we can’t make it come to life. That’s why in every piece you write, regardless of the focus, you should raise the bar for cultural progress.

Show the justice you want to create by including a diverse group of characters and breaking the stereotypes they’re burdened with. Illustrate a world where addiction is treated like any other disease and where choosing your gender identity is routine and respected. Don’t make a big deal of these improvements. If you treat them like they’re so normal they aren’t worth remarking on, your audience will start to see them as normal.

Only add injustice to your world if you have time to focus on it. For instance, if you include a caste system in your world, your story should tackle the issue of caste systems and include viewpoint characters from lower castes. You don’t need injustice and bigotry to make your world feel realistic. Your audience accepts dragons; they’ll accept equality too.

2. Clean Up Your Romances

I’m sorry to break this to you, but unless you’ve studied up on gender issues, your romances are probably gross. Society is so full of baggage relating to gender and sex that the average romance reinforces sexism, heteronormativity, and rape culture. If you want your work to have a positive impact, don’t undermine it by contributing to these problems.

We’ve written about issues with romance, so you can start your research there. Then you can do some mental exercises to better judge what’s appropriate. Many of the problematic elements in romances slip by because the writer knows the characters are meant for each other and everything will turn out well. But the characters don’t know that, and neither do people in real life. Change your mindset by imagining each character in turn as a hideous asshole the other person fears. Now when that character leaps on another for a sudden kiss, it won’t feel romantic anymore. You’ll discover that your characters need the chance to say “no,” and when they do say “no,” their love interest should take it at face value.

Pay attention to the power dynamic between your love birds. Is one of them using their greater power to control the other person? It doesn’t matter if it’s “for their own good,” that’s not for anyone to decide for another person.

3. Avoid Villianous Caricatures

Bigotry lives in all of us. If you simplify it into the actions of a few Nazis, you’re contributing to the mass denial of the problem. Too many people won’t acknowledge they’re racist because they think that means using the “n” word. Others won’t believe someone was raped because they think rapists are all strangers that brutalize women in back alleys, not everyday people who take advantage of their dates. Villainous exaggerations convince people that these problems are obvious, and if they’re not obvious, they don’t exist.

Of course, white nationalists and other overt bigots or fascists exist in real life. With realistic and thoughtful context, they can be a productive part of stories. But anyone who doesn’t already despise these groups is beyond your help. If you want to challenge bigotry in these contexts, your focus should be on the people standing on the sidelines. It’s a good time to look at how bystanders are contributing to the problem with their silence. Send a message to those who inadvertently endorse evil, not to those who embrace it.

4. Choose a Single Lesson

Social justice is a huge and diverse subject. It includes a large set of specialized terminology that represent new and complex concepts. The same concept may apply to one oppressed group but not another, and advocates frequently disagree on some topics. That’s why you can’t use a single story to teach all of social justice. You have to choose a smaller, more specific lesson. If you focus on that, you have a chance of getting your message across.

Specific lessons could be

• What it feels like to have your culture appropriated.
• That staying silent always supports the oppressor, never the oppressed.
• The importance of stepping back and listening to people less privileged than you are.

Think about your lesson early, and create a plot for your story that focuses on it. Don’t try to stuff an important lesson into a story you’ve already planned out.

5. Parallel Real Problems With Analogies

Social justice is personal for many people, and talking about its implications in the real world will hit people’s buttons. Once you rattle all the baggage your audience carries with them, it’ll be harder to get them to listen.

That’s where analogies can come in handy, and as a speculative fiction storyteller, the opportunities are endless. By using fantasy races instead of real-world groups, you can communicate what you need to while side-stepping the personal bias of your audience.

If it suits your work, you can still bring your analogy back home. You can make the parallel obvious like in Disney’s Zootopia, which uses species of mammals as stand-ins for races or other groups, or reveal it at the end like the classic comic Judgement Day, which shows the senselessness of racism as a struggle between blue and orange robots, before deliberating reminding readers of race at the end.

Analogies aren’t a match for every story, but they’re an incredibly useful tool.

6. Know Which Stories Aren’t Yours to Tell

Throughout history, the voices of many groups have been silenced. For privileged writers, it can be tempting to try to tell their unheard stories. But all too often, these stories are transformed to fit the desires of privileged people instead of benefiting the people they belong to. So before you tell a story that is unique to a group of underprivileged people, consider these questions.

• Do you have the ability to hire people from the group to consult with you?
• Can you commit to doing extensive research using quality source material?
• Are you willing to sacrifice some of the popularity of your work to keep it authentic?
• Would your story be competing against works that are written by members of the group themselves?

It takes a lot of investment to represent someone else’s experience accurately and respectfully. That’s why in most cases, it’s best to let people from silenced groups tell their own stories. That means leaving stories about transitioning to trans people and letting a person with a disability tell stories about the struggle for public accommodations. It’s great to make your main character a member of a Native American tribe, but unless you’re Native American yourself, I don’t recommend making your story about life on a reservation or about rediscovering tribal spirituality. Instead, consider creating a fictional world with a race that is distinctly different from real native groups but is in a similar situation.

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The basis for any story promoting social justice is being informed yourself. Follow some blogs focused on social justice. Read the voices of other groups. It takes time, but all of your stories will be better for it.