Ebony Elizabeth Thomas discusses the concept of "The Dark Other." The Dark Other is the dark outcast and antagonist of the story. These can be either "embodied or as shades," [1]. The Dark Other can either be the dark shadows lingering in the corners of the room, the actual monstrous antagonist, or both. Even when there is no people of color in a book, the Dark Other is still there in the form of a discussion of why the story lacks diversity. The Dark Other, however, mainly shows up as an antagonistic force. As Thomas puts it, "Mainstream literature and popular culture demand this positioning of the Dark Other as an antagonist," [2]. The real world forces publishing to have the Dark Other as the antagonist. However, this antagonist cannot remain. Thomas discusses the Dark Other and states, "Although the Dark Other is necessary for the fantastic, her presence is unsettling. She is not supposed to be there… she must be contained, subjugated, and ultimately destroyed…darkness must be destroyed or there is no story," [3]. The Dark Other is essential as it creates the fictional monsters everyone loves in fiction. Every fiction novel must have a monstrous antagonist to fight. The antagonist, therefore the Dark Other, must be eradicated for the story to end. These characters of color are often seen as monsters and must be removed. This trope causes many BIPOC readers to learn as they read that they are the villains of the story; they are the monsters. The bad representation of people of color causes children to have a negative view of themselves, but I will discuss that more later. 

Whiteness dominates speculative fiction, leaving no room for BIPOC characters or authors. Jewel Davis, in her article entitled "(De)constructing Imagination: Racial Bias and Counter-Storytelling in Young Adult Speculative Fiction," remarks how "BIPOC characters have been disproportionately delegated to genres outside of the imaginative, futuristic realm of speculative fiction," [4] When someone enters the bookstore, books depicting diversity remain in the lesser-selling section of nonfiction and realism. Diverse characters are left out of the endless-amount-of-possibilities genre of fiction. This lack of representation causes issues that I will discuss later on in this paper.

Philip Nel in his book about the hidden racism in children's literature discusses the University of Wisconsin's Cooperative Children's Books Center's list of one hundred ninety-three books labeled 'African/African American,' from 2014. After breaking down the numbers and labeling the books into a genre based on either reading reviews or the book itself, Nel states that "66 (34%) are realism, 58 (30%) have historical focus, 20 (10%) are biographies…Other genres have lower numbers:...7 fantasies, 7 science fiction works,...6 fairy tales/folk tales/fables/parables, 4 dystopian novels," [5]. Not only does realism dominate the sphere, but fantasy, science fiction, dystopian, and fairy tales/folk tales/fables/parables make up twenty-four books. However, Nel states that many of the books fit into multiple genres and his percentages do not add up to one hundred percent, so there is no saying how many of these books fit multiple categories. Due to this, I compared twenty-four out of one hundred ninety-three statistic to one hundred forty-four out of one hundred ninety-three. By looking at those numbers, there are six times more realistic books than speculative fiction books. There is a lack of representation in speculative fiction because realistic and historical genres consume representation of people of color in literature. Often, these realistic narratives center around the history of African Americans during slavery, abolition, or civil rights movements. This idea narrows African Americans down to their struggles and history rather than the now and the future. Black people exist outside of their history and their movements. They exist now. They will continue to exist. Nevertheless, we leave them out of everything, not just the fictional sphere.