Creating actual diversity requires a great effort to avoid unintentionally tokenizing your characters. Tokenism, even when unintentional, is what leads to adding "diversity" for the sake of diversity. How do we engender true diversity in our literature?
Panelists: Tamora Pierce, Justin Grays, Kerry Peterson (mod), Jei Herald-Zamora
CONvergence is an annual convention about Science Fiction and Fantasy, held at the Doubletree Hilton and the Sheraton in Bloomington, Minnesota. This year's theme is To Infinity and Beyond: Epic Tales of Space Opera. Today I was on two panels, "Speculative Fiction Against Colonialism" and "Avoiding Tokenism in Comics & Sci Fi Characters" - in both of the panels, I said that I would gather the books and/or sources that were discussed and put them up on here.
