A place at the Table

In the conversation about diversity and inclusion, two things have come to prominence this week.

1) Star Wars actor Kelly Marie Tran felt compelled to delete her Instagram account after suffering months of racist and sexist abuse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44379473
Chris McCrudden has this to say about the more ethnically diverse Star Wars reboot:


So, to sum up - Diversity and inclusion isn't just about being nice and try to make sure that everyone gets a turn at pass the parcel - it also makes fiscal sense!

2) Author Lionel Shriver criticised the stance of Penguin Random House for it’s goal to reflect the population of Britain by 2025 - in seeking to publish more authors and employ more staff who reflect the ethnic/socio-economic/differently abled make-up of Britain. Her words, in The Spectator, were these:
Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that 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, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. 
Now what can we safely infer from Shriver’s own words - that she thinks that writers of colour are completely incapable of producing anything of excellence? Ditto anyone with a disability? Or someone who falls into the LGBQT+ catergory. Also - crap education? Not a particularly articulate way to dismiss someone who doesn’t have a university degree, Shriver! (Penguin Random House have got rid of the requirement that their employees need a degree, in a bid to encourage more working class people to their roles. They are also one of the few companies that offer paid internships, for the same reason.)

I attended a PRH insight day last year #WriteNowLive - qualifying for it because I fell into one of the categories that Shriver so vilified - BAME. All attendees had to submit a sample of their writing and, of the 1700+ who applied, 150 were chosen - so it wasn’t enough just to be BAME (or LGBQT, or have a disability), Shriver, they had to see some promise in your writing too! They then shortlisted a handful of folk to take part in their mentorships scheme (I didn’t make this cut), before finally deciding on the lucky few to make the final cut. I say lucky but what I actually mean is the most talented. Because it’s not like the talent, skill, imagination sheer bloody genius isn’t there, it’s because maybe, for a vast number of reasons, publishing has been barred to these people for decades.
I didn’t realise, until I participated in and Unconscious Bias course at work, that people with ‘foreign sounding’ were far less likely to get shortlisted for an interview than people with traditionally British names.

I’m casting my mind over the books I’ve read recently, that have been written by the ‘tick-bos’ people Shriver is so dismissive of and that I’ve loved:

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
A brilliant, insightful book.

Mr. Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo
Funny, warm, brilliant. I found myself missing the main character, Barry, after I’d finished it.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
A really important book in present day America and also a cracking read.

Gold from the Stone: New and Selected Poems 
By Lemn Sissay
I’m a little bit obsessed by Lemn Sissay and his poetry is amazing. If you follow him on Twitter he often posts little snippets - ebullient, hopeful little pieces that ‘stoke your soul’ in the way that all great art does.

And do you know what - I know it sounds petty and childish but I’ve loved all of those books far more than I loved anything by Lionel Shriver.

What about marginalised voices in TV. Did you watch A Very English Scandal recently? So good I watched it twice. Penned by Russell T Davies, it was an absolutely magnificent piece of television and Norman Cook’s courtroom speech about how he wasn’t going to be masturbated in a corner then ignored was one of the most rousing I’d ever heard (Not sure how close this was to what the real Cook said in court). Up until that point I’d found Cook an irritating little squirt but when he made that speech he was liked a Gay rights, anti-establishment crusader. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it - the establishment. The predominantly white, middle class, Oxbridge education literary establishment, feeling threatened by the new voices peeping through - they feel they are going to be swept aside. Those ‘other’ voices were always there, Shriver and others, there was Maya Angelou and James Baldwin and Christopher Isherwood and Patricia Highsmith and plenty more...There were always there but Penguin Random House are just trying to remove some of the hurdles to other emerging talent - is that really so bad?
In September 2017 I sat in that large hall in Bristol and the CEO of Penguin Random House talked about his favourite book by an underrepresented writer (something we’d all been encouraged to do). He held up a book by a gay writer (to my shame I can’t remember what is was) and said that when he read it, as a teenager who was gay, it made him feel accepted.
As a child of mixed race parentage, I didn’t see myself reflected an awful lot in the books I read, growing up, but I’m happy that my children will have far more of them to choose from!