Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the “otherness” of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences. Much like structural racism, it’s more systemic than individual, though individual actions certainly uphold or subvert its existence. An illuminating case study of diversity syndrome in the real world is that of Black authors of what I’ll broadly define as speculative fiction.
A word, first, on genre and race. The term “speculative fiction” has contested definitions: here, I use it to mean anyone whose written imagination is located in the fantastic, whether that’s represented in New York City with six people functioning as avatars of the boroughs (N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became) or in an interstellar hunt for the meaning and translation of a language whose fundamental quality is change (Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17). When it comes to race, I’m a Black writer of speculative fiction—I enjoy examining the experiences of those working in my preferred genre. But beyond that, I think both Black authors of any genre and speculative fiction authors of any race have two of the most glaringly obvious experiences of diversity syndrome.
When readers pick up work by Black authors of speculative fiction expecting it to be centered on the authors’ identities, or approach these authors with questions confined to specific racial or genre-based expectations, they are pigeonholing the authors and limiting their own ability to experience the richness of these narratives. These authors are frequently specialists at crafting stories that are intensely meaningful to our current reality without trying to “make a point” as Black authors, something the social impacts of diversity syndrome might indicate they should aim to do; we should really be trying harder to understand that Black speculative literature is much bigger than just Black.