Read this! or: I appear to live in fantasy-land

sarahtales has written a really excellent essay, from the point of view of an author, about race-sexual-orientation-disability-what-have-you in fiction. Go read it..

Here's a quote:

So, let us discuss the most common fake fictional world of all. It doesn’t involve vampires or werewolves. It involves – well, rent a majority of mainstream movies and you can see it. It’s a world where everyone is a certain way – white, straight, able-bodied – and the really important stories are always a guy’s.

There mayyy be people who aren’t white, straight and able-bodied around in this world. I believe they live on the Isles of Issuelandia, and they are very seldom allowed onto the mainland where the adventures are at.

This is a fantasy world we’ve all been shown a million times over in our lives, so many times it’s had an effect on all of us, whether we know it or not. But most of us, if we stop and think about it, can put our experience of the real world up against the fake default-this-way world we get shown, and say ‘Whoa, these pictures are kind of different!’

The complete brilliance of Isles of Issuelandia aside, I did have to laugh a little at this, because when I sat down and thought about it, my real life is actually rather like the fantasy one she describes, particularly in terms of race. (It hasn't always been like that; college and grad school, which together made up a big chunk of my life, were rather more diverse.) I realized just now that I am the only non-white person on technical staff in my company (out of 90) and one of only four women on technical staff. (Lots more women on admin, but only one other non-white, and she's not full-time.) And not for lack of trying. My company really tries to recruit women and non-whites, and is really excellently friendly towards women and (I've come to realize and very much appreciate since E. was born) moms. When I joined there were three non-whites, but they've all left now (not because of race; I believe they are all working at other jobs with a similar demographic).

Non-work socialization is mostly through church and moms groups right now, which are not quite as bad race-wise, but it's still sort of a "three token Asians, one token Indian, four token Hispanics out of 150" thing.

And although I know tons of gay people (mostly from grad school), none of them are from my current (real) life. Well, church-wise, for obvious reasons, and for some reason everyone at work seems to be straight, too, at least judging in terms of their het relationships, drama involving girls (since they're all guys), and so on.

So, yeah, if you wrote a book about my current life, it would totally be criticized for not having any non-white-straight characters, except the token main one!

(I think the race thing has a lot to do with a) the peculiar demographics of my heavily tech US-citizen industry, b) the really peculiar demographics of the place I live, which tends to be segregated by race and income a lot. Not geographically, so my Whitey McWhite life will probably change somewhat once E. gets in school. The straight thing? No idea.)