Can Text ever truly represent groups of people?

Text can help represent ideas, cultures and portray characters. I don’t believe that text can ever represent a group of people, it may help us understand a certain group of people and what they experienced.

I have never read a text that has managed to express the emotions of groups that experienced any event or animosity. I think this may be because the understanding of history or an event, is very different from experiencing what people have lived through, thus meaning we can never TRULY represent a group of people with text alone.

Like an issue, we can understand it but actual solutions cannot be proposed unless you have an actual picture or understanding of the impacts of the issue.

Who gets to represent a group and who doesn’t? (Who gets to tell what?)

Technically anyone can represent a group based upon their understanding of them, it may not necessarily be accurate or true. In today’s date hate groups exist with certain values which are simply not justified or based upon any evidence. Even though I am not an advocate of this, it is allowed regardless of whether it is right or wrong. Problems do arise from this as views get built upon bias an absolute fiction and societies get misinformed about a variety of things.

Rational people on the most part tend to represent groups they are apart of, because of their experiences. They can portray a group better because interacted more within it.

Is the act of representation problematic?

It is, primarily because people of the same group still go through a range of experiences and have different interactions, which may be different from one another. So getting an accurate picture of all aspect of groups is quite challenging. However, generalizations allow us to get a more clear picture simply because there isn’t as much conflict between experiences. Though what arise from generalization are stereotypes which tend to be problematic when talking about representation.