The unfortunate Kate Clanchy has been in the news again this week. Clanchy’s publisher, Picador, announced they would no longer be publishing or distributing her work. They had ‘parted company by mutual agreement’. I haven’t seen any comment from Clanchy about this and without any further information, it is hard to know the reasoning behind it. This has not stopped people assuming that it is a cowardly dumping of the writer as cover for Picador’s failures to address its own shortcomings in the saga, which it may well be. The result is that not only will Clanchy’s memoir be ‘cancelled’, so too will a forthcoming collection of poetry written by the pupils at her school that she was editing. Everyone loses.
‘Being cancelled’ is a term that is used to cover a wide range of actions, from losing your job to simply having someone dare to disagree with you. Pressure to ‘cancel’ someone in the most serious interpretation of its meaning – to silence them by removing their ability to speak publicly, or to take away their job or position – is often used in an aggressive manner by people who lack power, and sometimes in a disingenuous manner by powerful people to shore up their power and shut down criticism. While the people who make the ultimate decision to ‘cancel’ someone are those in a more powerful position – the employer, Twitter, etc.
The Kate Clanchy story, painful as it must be to many of those who are or were involved in it, is worth rehashing because it is such an interesting example of how ‘cancelling’ is framed. The topic is so emotive it is hard to be dispassionate about it. It is important because if we all carry on like this, we will end in a culture where many people will no longer dare to speak out and it is minorities and vulnerable groups who may well most suffer in that situation.
The trouble started innocuously enough, with a review on GoodReads. Someone read Clanchy’s Orwell-Prizewinning book Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me and criticised passages within it as containing anti-Semitic and racist tropes, which were quoted. Clanchy reacted by Tweeting to her followers that the review contained made-up quotes and urging them to flag it. This they did, and many people expressed outrage on Twitter and support for Clanchy, including prominent writers such as Philip Pullman.
So far so fair, until someone, a journalist named Monisha Rajesh, actually read the book. The GoodReads quotes were sloppy but pretty much what Clanchy had written. Clanchy conceded the point, but argued her words were taken out of context. Rajesh, plus Professor Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, two other women who criticised Clanchy, were then subjected to a deluge of racist abuse on Twitter. You can read Rajesh’s account of the affair in the Guardian. Clanchy herself also came in for a lot of nasty Tweets, including some I saw suggesting that she was a terrible and even abusive teacher (based on no evidence whatsoever).
Clanchy then apologised fully. I cannot link to her Tweets because – unsurprisingly – she has protected them, but you can read the Guardian article about her apology here. Picador waded in and announced they would work with Clanchy to revise the book and remove the offensive passages. And now, for one reason or another, that work has broken down and Clanchy’s contract has ended.
What to make of all this? The first point is that it was Clanchy who demanded a ‘cancellation’ in the form of censoring a review she disliked and whipping up support on Twitter to have it flagged. Worse, she denied she had written passages that she demonstrably had. Her critics had taken issue with her language and been entirely within their rights to do so; instead they were abused and shouted down. In this exchange, Clanchy, with her 40,000 supporters, many of them famous, was the more powerful and used her power.
But it was Picador, not Clanchy or her critics, who in the end actually did the ‘cancelling’. They chose to revise Clanchy’s work, with her, an unnecessary overreaction for most of the people involved in the controversy. Yet they had allowed the problematic language to slip through their editorial filters. As Rajesh rightly pointed out in her piece for the Guardian, publishing lacks diversity, being overwhelmingly white and middle class. A more diverse publisher might not have missed this, and then, when faced with criticism, might have reacted more moderately.
Because everyone has strong views on racism and on freedom of speech, this story has tended to be flattened out and trimmed to fit the preconceptions of the person discussing it. Clanchy made a mistake, a bad one, but she apologised for it and tried to make amends. That should count for something and should be respected. In notable contrast, the Jewish community forgave and supported the cricketer Azim Rafeeq, after he apologised for his anti-Semitic comments and committed to learning about the discrimination Jews face.
Unfortunately, some people are unforgiving. If you rootle about on Twitter, you can find people who have decided on no other evidence that Clanchy is a dreadful person, and unfit to teach or publish. (There is certainly evidence that she inspired and is regarded with affection by many of her pupils.)
More widely, the story has frequently been reported not as a news article but to bolster an opinion piece, with the bits sheared off that do not fit with the writer’s argument. These have tended to present Clanchy as a martyr to the woke mob in order to present free speech as under threat from people who complain about racist or sexist language and demand disproportionate punishment.
Debates about free speech are very emotive; using a distorted version of this story as handy ammunition for your position on it only stokes the anger and denies the complexities. If you look down to the comments on the Unherd article, you will see that already people are unfairly blaming Rajesh and Clanchy’s critics for Picador’s actions. The anger against people complaining about racism is stoked, and it becomes that much harder for people of colour to dare speak up and criticise texts. At the same time, if like Picador you don’t engage with criticism but just wipe out anything that anyone might consider offensive, it will become more attractive to stick with ‘safe’ books that won’t attract any controversy. On this occasion, we may well have lost out on Clanchy’s anthology of her students’ poetry. In the long term, we may lose out on so much more.