Schwartz Media’s The Saturday Paper has swiftly walked back a decision to restrict entries to the Horne Prize essay competition about minority groups to people who belong to those groups.
The judging guidelines created by editor Erik Jensen initially stated that they would not accept “essays by non-Indigenous writers about the experiences of First Nations Australians”, “essays about the LGBTQI community written by people without direct experience of this community” or “any other writing that purports to represent the experiences of those in any minority community of which the writer is not a member”.
The Australian reported this morning that writer Anna Funder had quit her role as judge over the restrictions. Commentator David Marr announced he had also quit via a piece for The Guardian.
Marr said that he immediately made it clear he couldn’t not be a judge under the guidelines (which the judges were only made aware of over the weekend):
I messaged Jensen at once: “I’ve been a big critic of such restrictions. Men can write about women, gays about straights, blacks about whites. You judge, as always, by quality. That’s likely to be higher when there’s direct experience. But you can’t disqualify for lack of it. And if we’re not going to accept whites writing about Indigenous experience, how can we have whites judging Indigenous writing?”
“The Saturday Paper and Aesop respect the need for diversity in storytelling and for people — especially people from minority groups — to tell their own stories,” the Saturday Paper said in a statement.
“This year, in the hope of addressing this need, we introduced several new guidelines for The Horne Prize. We acknowledge these guidelines were restrictive and should not have been included. They have now been removed.”
Indigenous journalist Jack Latimore, said the decision was “baffling and disappointing” and the initial guidelines had been welcomed in Aboriginal communities.
“People have told me they only submitted because the guidelines were the way they were. They were submitting because they thought their work was going to be given proper, due consideration: so that policy had been celebrated”.
Latimore said Aboriginal writers were “absolutely sick and tired of their stories being ripped off by privileged white people”.
“These stories have been harvested by white people . . . it’s that sort of colonial approach of reaping the land of everything that’s valuable and leaving the people with custodianship over it with nothing.”
The statement from the Saturday Paper indicated that Funder and Marr had “chosen not to continue as judges”.
“And of course, it sounds like Marr and Funder, who had the problem with it, are still gone, and they don’t have the guidelines. So, it’s all for nothing now.”
Isn’t that technically a “lack of diversity drive” since they were proposing to exclude people?
Didn’t really make sense to say “hey, it’s intrinsically bad if people write outside their lived experience, but it’s totally OK for these middle class white literary types to judge outside their lived experience” and I don’t blame Marr or Funder for quitting, their positions were untenable. Bit daft of Jensen to make the change without consulting (and probably changing) the judges.
If only it wasn’t 90% rubbish lol.
I must make one point regarding minorities and that is the relative power and access to media that mainstream authors have vs those in the minority group. When Germaine Greer says “when a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho), it is as if he murders her and gets away with it” with regard to trans women, no one publishes my mother’s puzzled reply implying that she is completely up herself. Nevertheless the trans community have to weather the fallout from these type of pronouncements without having a voice in media at all.
I really do get the freedom of speech but I would also welcome an environment where unopposed hate speech is no longer the norm.
Meant to reply to Mark….sigh…..the aging brain…..
I get the thing about freedom of speech but as a trans person have to say that much that has been written about trans population by non trans people is complete rubbish, from the totally ‘ foil hat’ theories, through objectification to straight out ridicule.
I am personally sick and tired of everyone talking about us but never with us. I am looking forward to the day where trans writers can talk about being trans and actually being heard rather than the plethora of sensationalist ‘coming out’ stories which is all we get now.
Well, that shows how far “the gays” have been accepted, that a prominent gay man can’t see how marginalised groups are excluded from discourse nor why excluding those from outside those same groups from commenting on them has merit.
It may not be the correct approach, but it’s baffling that Marr doesn’t even see the merit in it.
But silly of the prize organisers to make that decision then let the judging be done by people outside the group. If anything, it would make more sense to have the judges drawn from those groups.
These things are never black and white but the idea of restricting who should write about what smacks of censorship and anti inclusiveness. But mostly cultural poison and lack of smarts.
I take Gwen’s point but would point out that lots of rubbish is written about all sorts of matters. Latimer needs to cite a few examples. Perhaps we can have an aboriginal only competition and see how that goes.
If it is true that “People have told me they only submitted because the guidelines were the way they were.” – rather a rhetorical device, then does that not suggest small fish wanting to be big fish in a restricted puddle?
It’s almost as if YAM can return in triumph to harangue the next Lionel Shriver wannabe.
Note to the, no doubt non existent, sub editor the double negative in “Marr said that he … couldn’t not be a judge”.
So, he can, err… right?