I Guess You Don't Need To Be Well-Read To Be A Literary Agent...

...at the height of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests I was sent a list, with accompanying photographs, of the top editors working across the major publishing houses in the UK. When I read it I burst into tears. It showed a sea of almost totally white faces...

So whines Natalie Jerome, who clearly never published any history books, or she'd surely have noticed she's living in a majority white country.

...for years, loud and growing calls to diversify its teams have been pretty much ignored. No wonder the industry today finds itself in a complete mess on race.

Does it? According to whom?  

There is a crippling and toxic silence around everyday racism and how it manifests in the media: erasure, sidelining, stunting of careers, the sheer mental exhaustion of operating daily in a predominantly white space and the routine grind of being marginalised.

Surely there must be countries where you'd feel more at home, then? I'm sure they have publishing houses in Africa, and I've no doubt they don't fret over seeing a sea of black faces around the board table... 

Meanwhile, I’ve observed within publishing the increasing mention and use of “sensitivity readers”. What on earth are they, you might ask.

No, I've no need to - I suspect I already know.  

Essentially a little freelance cottage industry of marginalised folk has sprung up, post-Clanchy, to check that books aren’t racist, disablist or any other -ist before they’re sent to print.

Who is stupid enough to voluntarily employ a group of censors and allow th...

Oh. Of course. 

What this means is that the predominantly white editors commissioning and publishing books featuring characters from diverse backgrounds are now checking these books with readers from these backgrounds in order to ensure publication does not cause accidental offence.

Which is an impossible task, because as soon as they've appeased one group, another will spring up, or the existing groups will move the goalposts. 

It's the fallacy of identity politics, and anyone giving people like this woman and her fellow activists a foot in the door deserves to be held hostage to their demands forever.