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As a child, my dad told me he hung onto the wings of an airplane and flew all the way from his pueblo in Honduras to Los Angeles, where we’ve lived ever since. For a long time, I believed this to be true.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager when I told the story to my friend that I realized this was likely impossible. As I grew older though, I understood my dad’s need to coat the story with fiction and fantasy. It helped make an otherwise difficult reality easier to digest.

Since then, I’ve often wondered how much fiction is grounded in truth. I understand the benefits of creating a reality with filled with possibilities and different outcomes.

At the same time, I wonder if someone is able to respectfully retell experiences they didn’t live through without being inaccurate or appropriative.

The cushion that is fiction can lead writers to support their stories with the argument that it’s a made-up reality, that is, that it’s just a movie, just a TV show, just a book. But it’s never “just.” And as mainstream media moves towards more inclusive narratives, the danger of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation increases.

Cultural appropriation is the act of adopting certain aspects of a culture in a manner that disrespects the cultural significance and inaccurately represents a community. My favorite explanation is this video by the wonderful and intelligent Amandla Stenberg.

We’ve seen cultural appropriation play out in mainstream media as artists use other cultures as costumes in music videos, fashion shows, and books, among other mediums.

Inclusive Fiction

In an effort to ensure that fiction doesn’t misrepresent any given culture, sensitivity readers and inclusive fiction teachers have taken on the role of ensuring that the fiction being shared with the world is responsible and accurate. Sensitivity readers look over one’s work and make sure that their work accurately represents the community or identity the author has chosen to explore.

K. Tempest Bradford is an inclusive fiction teacher and writer. She teaches courses that educate writers on respectfully including different cultures in their fiction.

Fiction plays a large role in society and how individuals view themselves and others. “It’s so important to see yourself somewhere,” said Bradford, “you need to have a mirror in order to have a cultural understanding of yourself.”

Recently, we’ve seen inclusive fiction take the stage with movies like Black Panther, Moonlight, Coco, and Moana, among others. By giving agency and shifting the mainstream lens toward marginalized communities, that mirror Bradford mentions is being provided for underrepresented communities.

Although there’s still a long way to go, inclusive fiction does have the ability to show communities what is possible.

Black Panther, explained Bradford, is important because it shows what’s possible when a person from a culture that is their own gets full agency without other people interfering. The result is a celebration of their culture that is an expression of their community without stereotypes or assumptions.

Although writing fiction from outside of one’s own immediate community can be a fine line to walk, it doesn’t mean fiction writers should give up. It will, however, require a lot of research, cultural consultation, and self-awareness.

“Even though we need more people from marginalized communities writing their own stories and getting those published, “people from dominant paradigms need to learn how to navigate this stuff, too,” says Bradford. “Because representative fiction should reflect how the world is and the many identities that make it up.”

Often, writers take on the “salad bar” approach. This means they find an “interesting” aspect of a culture, whether it be tattoos or a spiritual ceremony, and pluck it out of the entire community without any cultural context. This then creates a shallow, inaccurate, and insensitive representation of a community.

Ebonye Gussine Wilkins, CEO of Inclusive Media Solutions, writer, and sensitivity reader, calls this form of cultural appropriation in fiction “cherry picking.” By picking what they want to highlight and what they wish to neglect, she says, writers are being disrespectful in a lot of contexts.

“Someone might be taking part in something that is not from their identity,” continued Gussine Wilkins, “but they’re either doing it in a mocking way, not giving proper credit, or ignoring its historical background and once again cherry picking the so-called “cool” parts in order to seem like they are worldly.”

As a means of avoiding this approach to appropriation, Gussine Wilkins highly encourages “socially responsible media,” that is, “making sure you’re fact checking and getting the respectful engagement of people from the community you’re writing about.”

This salad bar, cherry-picking approach that both writers mention is an extension of a colonial mindset, says Bradford, “A lot of people seem to think that everything is up for grabs. Even though we are allegedly not a colonial power, that colonial mindset still exists within a western culture so that mindset plays out when writers decide to try to take stuff from other people’s cultures to include in their fiction.”

So before writing any fictional piece regarding a culture different from your own, make sure you’re doing so in a respectful and intelligent manner. I talked to two inclusive media experts, Bradford and Gussine Wilkins, to compile a checklist that you need to keep in mind to make sure you’re not culturally appropriating in your writing.

1. Do your homework. Research, research, research.

Don’t come from a place of ignorance, be responsible, and make sure to inform yourself. Find some way to get the information about the community that you’re trying to portray from a source that isn’t biased.