A while ago there was a dust-up about an MMO where your character's race and gender were randomized and locked to your account (so you couldn't refresh to get a new one) and I'm thinking about that as an example of 'diversity' through a majority lens and for a majority audience.

The game creators meant it as a diversity initiative, and there was a lot of "you don't feel represented by your character? Gosh that must be SO HARD" when white men inevitably complained that their character didn't look like them.

They wanted to make people a little uncomfortable; to make them actually sit and think about WHY it was so important to them to play a white male character.

And yet.

What did they assume about their player base when they made that decision?

Because for people who are not white men, playing characters that don't look like us is not a novel or thought-provoking experience.

Neither is being told it shouldn't matter to us what our character looks like when we express that it's bothersome not to have the option.

You'll see this a lot in diversity initiatives: systems that only concern themselves with how diversity or representation will benefit the majority--how it will do THEM good to be 'exposed to' diversity, with little thought given to what the marginalized get out of the exchange.

We see the same thing pop up about representation in literature, especially kid's books: people will talk about how it's good for white people to read outside their perspective and uh? sure?

But that is the least important reason to improve representation in literally any genre.

Which is a thing to be mindful of when working on literally any diversity/inclusion project: what is the goal? Are you looking for the absence of tension or the presence of justice?

The video game is an especially good example of this because it wasn't even about the demographics of their player base, but of *characters.* It was ENTIRELY about appearances.

But a lot of times, orgs trying to change their actual demographics ar all about appearances, too.

Which is why a lot of these initiatives end up failing: diversity-for-appearances doesn't last long. People who aren't fully included will leave.

But the fact that they fail isn't the problem. The problem is that they chew marginalized people up and spit them out in the process.