"Diversity activists won't admit they've won"

[beastlyslumber]

Good article on how publishing is now tending to favour "non-white, non-straight, non-men" writers. I think the general theme of leftists not accepting that they've already won is apparent in almost every walk of life, not just publishing. Which makes me think that their objectives are not actually to achieve equality, but to achieve utopia.

link: unherd.com/2022/07/publishing-will-never-be-fair/

Why do I always forget the link? I blame the menopause. Or I'm just an idiot.

Totally agree. Exaggerating the quality of a novel in the name of diversity helps no one. Also, people increasingly win book awards not for what they’ve written but for who they are.

Harold Bloom was so right.

There’s no incentive to admit victory.

When I read that it made me think of the scandal around The Rosemary Tree, when an Indian author basically took the story, set in rural England, and plopped it into an Indian village.

One of the several interesting element was that the plagiarized story was widely praised where the same critics wouldn't have given Elizabeth Goudge the time of day.

I work in a library, and you can see how it plays out in what is published. There are some established blockbuster writers, but literary fiction seems to actively avoid stories that don't tick certain boxes. Youth fiction and sci-fi, are the same.

I don't think it is victory to them. Like, I'm always pointing out the massive gains we've made in social justice in the past fifty years - but leftists think that makes me a bigot/fascist. What they really want is to be fully in control of everything, especially in control of what people think.

A lot of what is getting published at the moment is pretty mediocre, but it does tick the right boxes. That's probably always been the case, but the boxes you need to tick are different these days.

I also assume that some of the young female new writers are actually men.

Which is why they can’t admit victory. Their control relies on the narrative that there are groups who are universally excluded and oppressed.