The Benefit of a Team when it Comes to Diversity

There’s been a lot of talk in publishing about the lack of diversity in publishing. And two recent incidents come to mind that show that a lot of the diversity problems that occur happen when you don’t have a team to run things by. When you don’t have a diverse group of people who can give you feedback.

Let’s start with the Romance Writers of America, who imploded after a scandal involving the disciplining of Chinese American author Courtney Milan. The organization punished Milan because she criticized a writer’s book as a “racist mess.” Rather than taking the fact that the author later revised the book to clean up the racism as an indication that Milan was right (and truth is always a defense to slander, libel and other such accusations), they called Milan a bully. While there were many problems with what happened, it represented to many a longstanding problem of not having enough voices in the room, to have a fair take on a subject.

It’s the equivalent of having an all male jury for a crime of violence against a woman. Does it mean the male jury will automatically side with the man? Not exactly. But it does mean, there will be no female perspective in that jury and something that sounds odd to the men, without the context of a woman–or better yet, six women–saying this is normal, and is actually not odd.

Not knowing something doesn’t make you a bad person. However, when something affects a broad range of people, not doing your due diligence and connecting with a variety of folks to get it right, makes you wrong.

The other example of an issue gone horribly wrong was the Barnes & Noble, Penguin Random House initiative to put blackface covers on classic novels. They called them diverse covers, but they changed nothing inside the book. they got the obvious criticism for essentially trying to fool people with black covers to present white works during black history month–what some described as a vile bait and switch. Others suggested they’d have been better off simply promoting black authors, not white authors with black covers.

And while the backlash would have been obvious by talking to a diverse group of people given the freedom to be honest, that didn’t happen. This one was somewhat more disturbing because there were teams at three different companies involved and not a single person said, “Hey, this could be a problem.”

And that’s why having a good team matters. Your team can help you avoid mistakes if you put together the right team. A recent study from Harvard talks about the value of having complementary workers. It noted that employees can earn more money if they are on a team with people that complement, rather than duplicate their skills.

I contend the same holds true when you want diversity. You will get better results, a clearer picture when you have multiple perspectives that can inform your decision making.

The problem in the writing world is that we, as writers, are too often alone. So much of the business of authoring is done in solitary. And when the perspective need only be your own, that may work just fine. But, there is value in having a team to bounce ideas off of, to vett things you are unsure about or don’t have experience with. There is value in having a team who will tell you when they don’t think something is a good idea, when they raise concerns about how you’re approaching thing. Does it mean that you’ll always choose right, or that the other opinion will always be the correct thing to do? No. Of course not. No one is correct 100 percent of the time, but having that other perspective will help you think of things you hadn’t considered before, and it can help move you in the direction of inclusion and empathy, and those are always good things.

Do you have a team you can turn to bounce ideas off of?