I’ve had a few conversations as of late about random things — Doctor Who,

Borderlands, James Bond — that have all revolved around some version of the
following argument/counterargument pair:

ARGUMENT: You know, it’d be great if more mainstream media had ethnically or
sexually diverse casts.

COUNTERARGUMENT: Yes, that would be great, but one must not forget that one
shouldn’t just throw in minorities for for no reason. Doctor Who/Borderlands/James
Bond/whatever comes off phony when they arbitrarily start throwing minorities
around just to show how progressive they are. It feels condescending and arbitrary.

I’d like to make an argument to the counterargument:

So what?

I’ve been told once or twice that the bisexual or gay characters I wrote for
Borderlands 2 were arbitrary and forced. This is one hundred percent true. I did
not have any particular stories to tell about human sexuality — I just randomly
chose a few characters and decided that they weren’t heterosexual. I had no
“reason” to do so other than the belief that a cast of sexually diverse characters
is better than a sexually homogenous one.

Did it hurt the story? Maybe. Maybe it feels arbitrary that certain female
characters mention their wives, or that certain male characters just happen to have
several occasions to mention their boyfriends. I’d like to think that I knew this
might have been a problem when I wrote the characters in the first place — that by
making the cast more diverse and drawing attention to it, I’d be making the story
worse.

On the upside, though — and this is going to sound tremendously arrogant, but stick
with me for a few more paragraphs – while arbitrarily diverse casts might make the
story worse, they make world better. Not the in-fiction world, either; I mean, you
know, the world. The actual one. The one you and I are in. Real life.

Diversity is important not just so the groups you represent through characters can
have someone to identify with (though that’s also pretty great), but also so the
majority can see them in a positive light. It was important that black people could
see Uhura and identify with her, but it was just as important that white people saw
her as an equally talented, intelligent, important member of the crew. Pop culture
is an incredibly ubiquitous and powerful tool that artists can use to shape their
audience’s perception of the world in ways both bad (many parents think children
are kidnapped and murdered with alarming frequency, when in reality your kid is
more likely to be struck by lightning)* and good.

If you believe as I do that art can change the way people look at the world, then
arbitrary diversity can only be a good thing (assuming the minority characters you
write are positive and interesting in their own ways, of course, but that’s a
different challenge). If a writer arbitrarily makes a particular character a
transgender, homosexual woman rather than a cisgender, heterosexual man, and if
that character has a positive effect on an audience’s perception of transgender
women — no matter how small the effect — then that writer has made the world a
slightly better place.

So what if it’s arbitrary? So what if you make your audience acknowledge that a
character is black, or gay, or transgender? No one ever complains about the other
99.9% of media “forcing” heterosexual male whiteness down anyone’s throats, so why
should a black Doctor Who be considered arbitrary and forced whereas another white
Doctor wouldn’t be? Arguments like this imply that there are only two reasonable
courses of action. One: make your story about meaningful diversity — build
everything around the experiences of whatever minority group you’ve chosen and
explore it fully. Two: don’t include any underrepresented groups and make all your
characters “normal”, because to do otherwise would be distracting and forced.

To which I say: bullshit. I’d rather be arbitrary than maintain the status quo
through inaction.

Now, non-arbitrary diversity is obviously way better than arbitrary diversity on

the whole making-the-world-a-better-place front (I imagine it’s pretty hard to come
away from Gone Home or Mainichi without a more coherent, specific, and empathetic
view of lesbians and transgender women, respectively) , but Nichelle Nichols’
anecdote tells me that every little bit helps. Uhura’s role could have easily been
filled by a white male — there’s nothing quintessentially black or feminine about
the role she plays on the ship — but because it wasn’t, the world got a little bit
better.

UPDATE: A few commenters have pointed out that Mae Jemison, the first black woman
to travel in space, specifically cited Uhura as a personal inspiration for her
decision to become an astronaut. Which is cool.