What struck me is that the story’s author tried to disguise the fact that the “peddlers” were inspired by the Roma people (it comes out in the comments) — changing names, accents, appearance, et cetera, but didn’t seem to think about overturning the stereotype itself. I believe this would be possible to do with a minimum of disruption to the story, while still doing all the things artistically and creatively that the author seemed to want to do in it.

The story proper begins, “It was the right sort of day to sell a child to the peddlers.” The mother of a truly horrible child finds some peddlers and trades the kid for various goods. The story continues with the wicked child doing horrible things to the peddler and his wife, until they leave her hanging in a bush to trouble the next person to come along.

But what if the peddler didn’t just simply agree to buy the child? What if the peddler had sorta-kinda gone along with the suggestion, then gone back to his wife and said, “Holy sh-t! This lady wants to SELL us her kid! Where do these landspeople get this stupid idea?” They discuss the matter and decide a woman who would sell her child is surely not a fit mother, and it would be best to go along with the scheme and raise the child as their own.

Suddenly this fictional story takes place in a world where one group has a bias against another group that perhaps doesn’t match reality, thus calling into question the stereotype. Without this tweak, it’s assumed that yes, it’s perfectly sane to expect to be able to sell a child to a peddler, so the stereotype stands as reality.

The best stories, the ones I aspire to read and write, can really mess with our heads in wonderful ways, undermining our stereotypes and assumptions and generally rearranging our mental furniture (with or without our leave). This can happen for the writer as well as the reader – if the writer is paying attention as she writes.

My favorite example of this is Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, in which the barbaric people have light-colored skin, hair and eyes, and the civilized, sophisticated people are the people of the Archipelago, who have dark skin and kinky-curly hair. Reading it as a kid, I didn’t quite realize what was going on until a few dozen pages in, at which point I had an A Ha! moment. In that moment, I realized that I had a (previously) unconscious bias: I had assumed the main character and his people were like me, and they were, they were fully realized characters with hopes and dreams and flaws and messy lives – but they also weren’t. They looked different from me. They weren’t white.

That was a powerful moment for me, and it has kept me on the lookout for my own unconscious bias since then. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I manage to bring my bias to light, where I can examine it critically and maybe chip away at it for next time. I hope not to fail publicly, but that’s part of the risk of publishing your writing – you can neither bury your mistakes like a doctor or plant trees and shrubs around them like an architect, you just have to hope they go out of print.