Diversity, according to Lionel Shriver, has “crimped” and now “serves a strict, narrow agenda” that has nothing to do with quality. In her latest crusade against identity politics, the writer decries the “drunk on virtue” publisher Penguin Random House’s pledge to ensure new authors and colleagues reflect the UK population by 2025, “taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”.
Why so bad? Because, naturally, it will result in crap books. More diversity, as this all-too-familiar, offensive argument goes, amounts to less quality.
“If an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter,” Shriver wrote, “it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling.”
But what if – and Wide Awoke appreciates this may be unimaginable to Shriver – said gay trans Caribbean person is also a good writer? If he, she or they have, in spite of their talent, been unable to break into an industry that is notoriously white, middle-class and risk-averse? An industry in which a writer has more chance of making it on to the bestseller lists if their name is David than if they are from an ethnic minority?
Ironically, considering we talk about diversity more than we see it increase, the word and concept appear to be rubbing white privileged people up the wrong way more and more. Recently, another piece, by writer David Brooks – a white man! – outlined what he branded a “misplaced idolisation of diversity” and warned of the dangers of social fragmentation caused by “diversity for its own sake”. But the only real danger diversity poses, which perhaps is threatening to some, is greater inclusion.
Conflating diversity with a box-ticking or virtue-signalling exercise misappropriates its true meaning, which, if done properly by genuinely diverse decision-makers, is always about excellence. As a BAME, bisexual, female writer (I know, check out all my boxes). I have been on the receiving end of this, erm, pale imitation of diversity many times. The uncomfortable sense of being on a festival panel for tokenistic reasons. The time I won an award and was praised for ticking boxes rather than writing a book. This is not true diversity, but it so easily mimics it.
Equality and quality are not mutually exclusive. It is deeply hurtful to say that they are, because it suggests that those of us who fall under diversity’s wide umbrella are not as good, smart or worthy as the establishment; that it is merit, rather than prejudice and a certain narrowness of perspective that accompanies privilege, that has held us back. The truth? An “incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling” can come from anywhere. And so, too, can greatness.
