: Re: How to balance respecting diversity and avoiding tokenism at the same time My project has an environmental theme. My characters eat meals, and because of the setting, this includes meat and

@Kristi637

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One form of tokenism is imposing a preconceived set of labels on a character for reasons that have nothing to do with your narrative, or that make any substantive change to the story --the equivalent of spraypainting a character a different color. Unfortunately, this proposal is a dead-on hit for that kind of tokenism. I don't think this is a problem you can put a band-aid over. You've implied that the purpose of this project is to promote environmental awareness. If, then, you buy the argument that eating meat is a significant environmental problem of primary importance, then something doesn't match up. What you need is not a minor character expressing an off-hand preference for vegetables, you need a significant wrestling with the challenges and costs of meat in your narrative.

If this book is just "environment-themed," green-painted just for the marketing, then your target audience is probably going to see through that pretty easily. On the other hand, if you reject the meat kills the environment argument, but you still want to pay lip service to it, that's probably pretty transparent as well.

It's worth noting, however, that the usual argument is not that meat eating is always intrinsically environmentally disastrous, but that the modern factory farming of meat is unsustainable. Without knowing more about your storyline, I don't know if that helps or not, but it's something to keep in mind.

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