Identity politics rules create weird literary apartheid: Lionel Shriver on Q&A

Lionel Shriver says the scope authors have to work with is being narrowed by political correctness.

Lionel Shriver appears on the ABC's Q&A.

Australian journalist and author Ruby Hamad accused fellow author Lionel Shriver of misrepresenting black people in a context of racism on Monday night’s episode of Q&A.

“White people have had centuries of being the voice (of authority) and speaking for and about everyone else,” Hamad said, accusing Shriver of using racist tropes of “angry black women” in her new novel.

Is it possible for authors of fiction to “aptly empathise” with worlds and identities that are not their own? #QandA pic.twitter.com/k8Y8O2AODR

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) September 2, 2019

“(Representation of minorities) is part of the way in which power dominates and controls,” Hamad told the audience.

“The criticism of Lionel’s character was not that it was a black but … that it was a black woman who ended up getting dementia and being put on a leash by her white husband’s family.”

Hamad said Shriver was not writing in a “vacuum devoid of any context — the context is 400 years of slavery and segregation and lynching”.

Shriver defended her ability to write characters of whatever race, calling the rules “identity politics” was putting on fiction was going to create “a kind of weird literary apartheid”.

“Fiction writers — their whole job is to try to imagine being different people, and therefore to say that you are not allowed to project yourself into the minds of characters who have a different race or gender or sexual preference than your own,” Shriver said.

Shriver said the scope authors have to work with is being narrowed by political correctness.

“Right now, just because of this conversation and the sensitivities of the time, any white novelist, who includes characters of other races is aware that those characters are going to be subject to super scrutiny and it creates such reluctance that my colleagues may think the better of it,” Shriver said.

Writer and ABC broadcaster Benjamin Law said the problem is when minorities are being represented but not in any meaningful way.

“There has been a long history in performance in television in literature basically across the arts where people have been spoke about but not engaged in the work, where people have been marginalised within publishing on the stage, and felt they had their stories represented by other people. and that is kind of a form of historical dehumanising,” Law said.

Political correctness and identity politics

Shriver and Hamad turned to the issue of identity politics and racism in a brief sparring match.

“I am hoping that it is not your purpose to set in the modern day white women against minority women and in the context of who has been more oppressed … that’s one of my main problems with this way of thinking, the identity politics thing,” Shriver said.

“I can’t let that stand. If there’s a rivalry or a division in feminism, a division in our society, it’s not caused by people of colour because we’re talking about oppression.”

“White women being agents of white supremacy/settler colonialism is well proven in the USA... how has this manifested in contemporary Australia?” #QandA pic.twitter.com/ZSPull4Stj

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) September 2, 2019

Black Lives Matter Activist DeRay Mckesson conceded Shriver’s point, but said there needed to be an acknowledgment of truth before there could be healing between racial divisions.

“I hear this idea of nobody wins when we play the oppression Olympics. This is not a winning game …. There new research actually suggests white women explicitly participated in every facet in the institution of slavery … and when we talk about truth and reconciliation and we are reminded that truth has to come before the reconciliation,” Mckesson said.

Shriver said one of the major causes of Donald Trump’s election was the hysteria of the left-wing of politics and an overzealous culture of identity politics and accusations of racism.

Does Lionel Shriver believe that backlash against the “Liberal Left’s” tribalism led to Donald Trump’s election? #QandA pic.twitter.com/K5G0axJqEl

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) September 2, 2019

“One of the worst things about the Trump administration is the effect it’s had on the left — it hasn’t sobered (the left) up in the slightest and instead has driven the language to become ever more shrill,” Shriver said.

Shriver said people who use “dryness, a little drollness, a light touch” are better able to criticism the US President.

“(Trump thrives on invective, he thrives on name calling, and I’m afraid the left to a great a degree have fallen into that trap,” Shriver said.

Shriver said left-wing politics had not allowed a discussion on issues such as immigration.

“They were told they couldn’t talk about immigration … there was a suppression of a discussion about immigration, its pros and cons, and it is one of the reasons that people got fed up, because there’s only one standard view of immigration in the US that’s acceptable — it’s the most wonderful thing in the world and anyone (who disagrees) is a racist,” Shriver said.

Mckesson said President Trump lost the popular vote, and there had been a “purging” of votes.

“More people voted against him, it wasn’t that the left was so volatile that people suddenly didn’t vote. It was at the right suppressed the votes,” Mckesson said, “What does it mean when they’re purging a million votes in one state and knocking people off the rolls in high numbers?”

Mckesson said President Trump had tapped into a fan base that was already there.

“Trump voters existed a long before Trump was there … White nationalism white Supremacy was really a voting base that people didn’t think would vote like that,” Mckesson said.

Dean of Columbia Journalism Steve Coll said President Trump thrived on political spin and his election win was not driven by a hysterical left wing of politics.

“(President Trump) is populist in character … but (what he is saying_ not aligned with that’s happening at the border. The rates of crossing (at the borders) during the Trump Administration have for the most part been down or normal compared to a decade before … that’s what 2020 will be about and now it’s very loud, it’s very divisive and it’s only the beginning,” Coll said.

How does Steve Coll see an "independent, professional press" remaining relevant in a context of increasingly blurred lines between news and opinion? #QandA pic.twitter.com/BqX9BH3AOI

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) September 2, 2019