Sunday Morning Reading II: "Clearly the BBC, like the Booker prize and everything else on earth, was secretly dedicated to the “disappearance” of women of colour"

Here's Douglas Murray in The Sunday Times on how identity politics is spooking our cultural institutions - and how the BBC fell foul of the woke-erati:

This year’s Booker jury is said to have been deadlocked between those who wanted Margaret Atwood to win because of her “titanic career” and backers of Bernadine Evaristo, who has the advantage not only of having written a “polyphonic novel” told from the perspective of 12 black women but of being black herself.

Even the “safe” compromise the Booker jury came to — awarding the prize to both women — failed to satiate the woke-erati. The usual identity-obsessed critics immediately slammed the judges for failing to give the award solely to a black woman. Was it not sinister, they suggested, that the first time a black woman had won the Booker, she had been made to “share” it? They spoke as though the prize were a well-known bastion of, and mouthpiece for, white supremacy. 

Such culture wars now go off like cluster bombs, detonating across the cultural landscape. On Wednesday the BBC was forced to issue an apology. Its crime? That in talking about Atwood in an unscripted moment, one of its news presenters had said Atwood had been awarded the Booker prize alongside “another author”.  

Evaristo was among the first off the starting blocks. “How quickly & casually they have removed my name from history — the first black woman to win it,” she tweeted. “This is what we’ve always been up against, folks.” Other authors took to social media to back her up. 

The BBC presenter’s unscripted non-naming of Evaristo was, they said, evidence of the Booker jury’s “serious mistake”. Clearly the BBC, like the Booker prize and everything else on earth, was secretly dedicated to the “disappearance” of women of colour.