Diversity in the Arts

Pauline Johnson recites.

An acquaintance runs what is billed as “Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading series.”

Proposing a poetry journal to another friend, he asks, “what about diversity?”

Leaving aside larger issues, there is a special problem with calling for diversity in the arts. Because diversity in the arts is automatic.

This is so for at least two reasons. To begin with, novelty—diversity—is of entertainment value. Accordingly, anyone whose background or experience is out of the mainstream, or has not previously been heard, has a built-in market advantage. Why did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy, or on some remote island, or anywhere other than England? People want to hear about lives and places other than their own.

Secondly, art is from suffering. Art is sublimated anguish. They say you need to have suffered to sing the blues. But this is equally true of all art.

As a result, art in itself is the outlet for the excluded and marginalized.

Speaking of the blues, the dominant art form in America is music, specifically popular music. And what group has always dominated American popular music—since at least the early nineteenth century? The blacks, the Africans, the folks hauled over as slaves. Almost all American musical styles are African in essence. In the old days, to make it with an audience, performers who were not black had to do it blackface.

There are a few styles that are not African: country, bluegrass, cowboy music. These come from the Scots-Irish living in the Eastern hills, poor, remote, and forgotten. These come from the defeated, impoverished South, not the urban power centres of the North. Add some Hispanic influence to the Scots-Irish to make cowboy music.

Put it together, and you get an accurate map of the history of social exclusion in the United States.

Now turn to the UK: the dominant art form there has been literature. Who has dominated English literature for centuries? The “Celtic fringe.” The actively oppressed Irish in particular, next to them the Scots, next to them the Welsh. If a prominent author turns out instead to be English, you can almost put money on it that he is Catholic. The socially excluded fringes.

And so it goes. Start tinkering with that in the name of “diversity” instead of quality, and whatever you think you are doing, you are promoting the privileged over the oppressed.

Ethnic or immigrant voices have always been prominent, indeed dominant, in English Canadian literature: Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Robert W. Service, Stephen Leacock, Pauline Johnson, Irving Layton, A. M. Klein. What are you accomplishing, then, by insisting on skin tints instead of quality?

You might ask, here, what about women? Surely women at least have been excluded in the past from the arts?

They have not.

In the US, while they might have been at a disadvantage in the corporate world, women have long been as prominent as men in popular music.

In Britain, and in English literature, my own research is anecdotal, but it is confirmed by others who have done the leg work: women are very well represented in Victorian literary publications.

If we are unaware of this, it is because writings by male authors are on average better remembered over time.

Is this prejudice? If so, it is a prejudice that has grown, rather than declined, in modern times.

There is a simpler explanation. To create something for the ages requires more than mere competence. It requires genius.

There are more male than female geniuses. This can be accounted for by evolutionary biology, but aside from that, it is simply so. It is consistent in IQ testing.

So there seems to be no case for imposing racial or sex quotas in the arts.

In practical terms, what the current call for “diversity” has done is drastically reduced diversity.