Full disclosure here: I am female, cis/het, white (mostly), married, 53, educated, neurodiverse, middle class, and not beautiful according to Western standards. I tell you this not to present you with a set of labels to call me, but to hint at which social injustices I have faced in this society and which I have not.

I also am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (otherwise known as Quakers), and nowadays we’ve thrown off plain dress and plain speech (thee didn’t know that?) but have retained our sense of social justice as something important to work toward.

I carry this sense of social justice into my writing. I carry it imperfectly, given that I have not experienced life as a lesbian, as a black person, as a Moslem, a transgendered person, or a person with visible disabilities. Why would that matter? Because I am an outsider to others’ experiences. I do not experience the small insults others do every day — nobody suggests rape as a solution to my gender preference, nobody calls store security on me while I’m shopping, nobody tells me my religion is satanic, nobody calls me a cripple. Most of us miss these aggressions; others experience these and worse daily.

I want a socially just world. I imagine the world as a banquet, and I want to see everyone at the banquet. I want to feast on gravlax and fufu with palaver sauce, and oh-my-G-d Middle Eastern desserts. I want everyone to feast and to talk to each other and to share. And those who are uncomfortable with the other, I want there to be counselors nearby who will talk to their wounded inner child and their not-okayness and prepare them to sit at our table instead of taking it all away from us.

Full disclosure: I was harassed as a child because I was “different” (i.e. neurodiverse), and female, and fat, and gifted. The harassment accelerated into violence. This could by why I want a socially just world. I don’t want anyone else to suffer. It bothers me that I might not have noticed all the injustice if I had not experienced it.

I have to try the best I can to bring in the topic of social justice into my writing, hoping that I am doing so constructively rather than destructively. Here is what I have pledged myself to do:

1) Don’t be timid about putting people who are not necessarily “dominant culture” in my writing. Admittedly one of my favorite characters is Gideon, an avant-garde Jewish architect who designed exquisite bridges when manic but could not hold down a job when depressed. Less like me, however, is Arminder Kaur, a fourteen-year-old Sikh who dreams of being a “saint-soldier” defending the oppressed.

2) Avoid stereotypes, but thoughtfully include cultural norms for other cultures. One of the sensitive places in writing in this regard are accents. If the only people who have accents are foreigners and African-Americans, you’ve written stereotypes. I can point out that the downstate New York accents I ran into when I taught out there had many interesting pronounciations — “cawd”, “SHU-ah”, “Ant – AUCK – tica”. Remember these if you’re going to put in other accents.

3) Do not make white characters the “saviors” for people of other groups. People who are not white, straight, etc. will be allowed self-determination. Movies from Avatar to The Blind Side feature the “white savior” trope, and it’s really insulting.

4) Dominant culture will not be the standard by which other cultures are judged.  An overweight person will not be harassed into losing weight (as if that worked!),  Guardsmen will be allowed in a pacifist ecocollective if they lock up their guns while on site.

I will offend someone. I will fall short, because I’m human and because I walk around with privilege others don’t have. We all will offend each other at the banquet table because we’re different. But my responsibility is to write for the world I’d like to see.