Mick Hartley

Is there more to say about the cancellation and rehabilitation of author Kate Clanchy? Yes there is. Hadley Freeman in today’s Sunday Times:

In 2021, when lockdown was driving people insane, Clanchy’s 2019 book about working with children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was suddenly derided on social media as racist, because she used physical descriptions like “chocolate-coloured skin”. The charge was led by three women: Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, all middle-aged, middle-class writers, like Clanchy. Pan Macmillan, Clanchy’s publisher through its Picador imprint, abjectly apologised to them and parted ways with its writer. But apologies never satisfy witchfinder generals like Rajesh, Singh and Suleyman because, as one children’s author (who is still too scared to give her name) said to me last week, “They don’t want to fix problems, because their entire brand is outrage. That’s how they promote themselves.”

Anyone who was on Twitter in that weird period of 2018-23 will know how witchfinders operate, leaping on any perceived swerves from progressive orthodoxies by other writers with the enthusiasm of flies on excrement, demanding their banishment. I had to block Rajesh years ago because she sent me so much online abuse. When The Sunday Times interviewed Clanchy in 2022, Rajesh tweeted, “Jesus f***ing Christ. Picador have just emailed to let us know that @thesundaytimes will be running an interview with Kate Clanchy this weekend.” She then grossly insulted those responsible. Quite why Pan Macmillan felt the need to tell these bullies anything is one puzzle. Another is how on earth it became the norm for adults to behave like emotionally incontinent tyrants. When The Times ran an interview with Clanchy last week, Rajesh posted a video of herself weeping.

Which she deleted after it was ridiculed. After an old tweet of hers was found deriding Clanchy for her tears. {See here – ““Understand what they mean before crying about it”]

It would be comforting to believe that dark age was over — comforting and wrong. Last week a leaked memo confirmed the BBC was as complicit in spreading gender propaganda as the publishing industry, running endless puff pieces about drag queens while censoring stories about bullied women. I am thrilled that Clanchy has got some justice. But it is striking that, of all the cancelled authors, the BBC has focused on one who was attacked for reasons that weren’t speaking the truth about gender.

That’s an excellent point. As Clanchy herself admits:

I agree with @HadleyFreeman . I am the witch that is easiest to talk about because, as a friend told me, ‘You’re only a racist, not a terf’.

From the comments, an interesting Sunny Singh quote:

“I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.”

Phew. It’s all in there. So, no debate then – just the familiar postmodern academic jargon.

From her bio at London Metroplitan:

Singh is recognised as a pre-eminent decolonising public intellectual. By embracing a pathbreaking, compassionate and transgressive academic practice, she is today one of the UK’s leading champions for inclusion across all aspects of society.

Compassionate? For inclusion? Tell that to Kate Clanchy.