: Re: Diversity conflicting with authenticity This is not quite the same question as Writing Diversity because it's not my intention to focus too much on diversity for my story, nor am I struggling

@Kristi637

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Shoehorning diversity in may not work, but what you can do is learn to see diversity rather than "unsee" it. While it may seem more authentic to envision places of the past as monoracial and monocultural, many of them were actually more diverse in reality than in the popular imagination. The recently discovered "Ivory Bangle Lady" was a wealthy black woman who lived in Ancient Britain all the way back in Roman times (and she is not thought to have been an anomaly). My own ancestors were part of a (still existing) mixed-race community in rural Ohio, established just after the American Revolutionary War. There were Portuguese missionaries in Japan in the 1500s.

There are also places that had considerable and significant diversity of a kind that can be invisible to a modern observer because it doesn't match the way we conceptualize race and culture. For example, the various native ethnic groups in Kenya would all likely be described as "black Africans" by modern observers, but they traditionally had cultural and genetic differences as large as those between (for example) white Europeans and Asians. Similarly, religious diversity has largely been the rule, not the exception in many places around the world, across a wide span of time, except when other religions have actively been suppressed (and even those times have been susceptible to schisms and heresies).

So while there are certainly monocultural pockets in the world, it's not so difficult or unrealistic to picture at least a little diversity, even in the distant past, or in rural areas. You should be able to find at least one character who is from somewhere else, or has divergent ideas or customs (a traveling salesman or merchant perhaps, or a foreign bride brought back after the war). Failing that, there's almost no place that doesn't have one of the most fundamental kinds of diversity --the cultural differences between the rich and the poor. What you need to do is capitalize on the natural sources of diversity in your story, rather than introducing ones that don't fit.

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