David Gillon

I picked up on Ellen Oh's Dear White Writers a couple of days late, so missed most of the unpleasantness. I agree with what she's saying, we as white writers shouldn't be suddenly writing non-white protagonists just to jump on the diversity band-wagon. But as a diverse writer who happens to be white, being exhorted not to write diverse protagonists is a bit problematical.

The problem isn't her message per se, I get what she's trying to say and agree with it, it's that her point is applicable beyond ethnicity and her terminology wanders all over the place. Half the time she uses 'diversity' where she specifically means 'ethnicity', and that's a problem because a good two thirds of the stuff published about We Need Diverse Books makes the same mistake, and when that message is repeated often enough, it risks further excluding the non-ethnicity based diversities, and convincing people that if you are white you can't be a diverse author. Normally the core WNDB team have been pretty good about getting this right, this time Ellen Oh seems to have taken her eye off the ball, and other people are being misled by that, such as the literary agency that blogged under the title White Writers: Don't Write Diverse Books. Instead, Read Them. I challenged them on that on Twitter, they admitted it could do with clarification and they would get onto it, and did nothing (so I went to the blog and commented).

That there might be an issue with how Ellen Oh said stuff, is lost in all the sturm und drang of various white people being furious at what she said and unleashing a storm of hate at her for daring to suggest white writers might be trying to treat WNDB as a cash cow. I tried making my point on twitter, but 140 characters is a bit limiting for that kind of nuanced message, so I gave in and blogged about it tonight.

Dear Non-Diverse Writers

(I bit my tongue and refrained from addressing her "There’s a whole lot of angry people on twitter losing their collective minds")