JK Rowling was always my role model growing up, but now seeing what happened on twitter this week, I need to call her out and challenge her beliefs. I’ve read and understood her statement – I feel her pain and feel sorry she went through such horrible things. But that’s how prejudice begins – bad experiences make you fear or oppose a group not an individual. She’s a feminist and so am I, but being a feminist doesn’t give her the write to discriminate and invalidate how others feel or who they are. What is so hard about inclusivity for all that is so hard to understand? Can’t everyone just be themselves without having to be attacked or invalidated for something they know is true?

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am and how heartbroken I am to have to say this about someone inspired me for so long to write. Harry Potter was my childhood, but being an author who stands up against prejudice and discrimination to make a better world is my adulthood. No one in this world should face prejudice. No one should be made to feel less than anyone else because of something they can’t control. No one should have to justify who they are to please others, and no one should still be acting on their own senseless prejudices in 2020.

It’s always hard when your role model believes in something so backwards and hateful, and it’s harder to accept you looked up to them for so long. Especially when it goes against everything you’ve ever stood for. And it hurts to have to call someone you admired so long out on their crap. But what’s hardest is knowing that they probably influenced you too. It’s no secret a lot of my books have cis white male main characters because that’s the world I grew up in – where that was the norm, even as a minority myself. The characters in my mind took on that identity without me questioning it. Now I see that I and many other authors are part of the problem because of what the world taught us was right at the time.

However, there was good reason in The Luke Bright Series for the characters to be this way because I wanted to put prejudice in terms anyone could understand. I made my main character the most privileged type of person possible to highlight how it feels to have someone who has never experienced prejudice, experience it so cruelly. So people could relate to it and understand what the minorities have to go through. It’s close to home what’s happening because police brutality is something I’ve written about for years in terms I hoped anyone could understand and relate to so they would see the stupidity and hatred that drives it.

But that’s a big part of what I’m fighting against. Because sometimes prejudice isn’t just from misplaced anger or fear, it’s from ignorance and because people don’t know better? Why? Because we were never given that chance. It’s what Luke Bright realises about the Atlantic Split and it’s what a lot of us are realising day on day. Our lives have been so closed off so we’re part of the problem without even realising it.

That’s why education matters. That’s why we have to do something to make ourselves understand and be better. In every case. I’m learning this week that a lot of role models I’ve thought were for equality and peace and were actually for the opposite. Lincoln, Churchill, Ghandi – all people who I thought stood just for peace all have parts of history that were hidden away to hail them as heroes. Sure, history is a grey area and things were different in the past, but that doesn’t mean we should excuse people’s behaviour. And it’s okay to have had those role models once and feel guilty about it, but as long as you’re able to revoke them and call them out. Sure, they may have helped and inspired you, but they aren’t you. You now have to choose how you progress without that hateful nature making your work just like theirs. Take the good that inspired you in the first place out of the bad and use it to make yourself better.

Everyone makes mistakes but not everyone intends to, and that’s something we have to understand. And we have to accept that we ourselves will never be all good, just as our role models weren’t either. We’re never going to get everything right first time, but it’s our job if we truly want to be understanding and align ourselves with the good in the world, to learn what is right and spend every day doing our best to accept everyone. Then we can use that to be more like the role models we wish we still had.

Atlantic Split, At Liberty To Live and An Undercover Dream, the first three books in The Luke Bright Series are available to purchase NOW! The final book of the series A Long Lost Time will be released in 2020!

Please follow me on my blog and social media links below, and use the links on my website to purchase a copy of each if you have not done so. Don’t forget to leave a review! Thank you once again for taking the time to read this blog post

N.A.K