Times Interview with Kate Clanchy - shared article in post

[NorthSouthEast]

This is a sobering, thoughtful, harrowing, blood-boiling read. What Kate Clanchy went through 😡. I’ve put this in FWR as it’s yet another story of a woman being cancelled on the basis of rumour, supposition and hearsay with self-righteous people scrambling to jump on the “be kind” wagon as it rolls another human being and their career into the mud.

Kate Clanchy: I was cancelled. It made me contemplate suicide

www.thetimes.com/article/7681d5ec-3773-4b36-ab95-e4ab409d7899?shareToken=e76def471fd13ded750d7295fd554675

Thank you for sharing this well written clear article.

Is that about the time she wrote about children she taught using horrible racist stereotypes? If so my heart never did bleed for her, and every time she demonstrates her sense of entitlement and lack of understanding of how offensive she was I feel less sympathy.

I read the book. Parts of it turned my stomach. The class-based entitlement rolls off the pages.

But how she's milked it since.

Utterly insane. I'm sorry she was put through that. I'd love to have seen consequences for the instigators and the 'friends' but I suppose it's better if a line is drawn. I hope they at least keep glancing over their shoulders.

Lovely picture of Kate at the start of the article. She looks amazing, fierce and strong.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg19p6kej1o

BBC article.

This is so sad. It was a horrible, horrible episode.

I suppose my reaction was coloured by having been an outsider child, never part of the prevailing culture my schools were set in, very aware of how that status and the stereotypes that went with them influenced the way staff interacted with me. Horrible and triggering. Clanchy's language was all from that playbook.

But as I said. she's still getting articles and sympathy from it four years on, so very good at self-publicity, even if not so good at respecting other people.

I've not read the book. I've read another book by her, 'Antigona and me', which is about her relationship with a neighbour and fellow school mum who is an Albanian refugee. She's very precise about how her position as a secure, middleclass Brit plays into the situation and she doesn't spare her assumptions or prejudices. It's uncomfortable and illuminating to read. As I say, I've not read the book that caused the fracas so I don't know whether she was not careful enough in her language in that book, but I will say that if you write about this subject honestly, you will have to use the language from the playbook.

'Mohit Bakaya ... asked her whether any of her students had stood up for her. “And I said they all did, publicly and privately. He was shocked and struck, I think, that he had only heard one side of the story. He was a well-informed person, immersed in the news, but he still hadn’t heard that all my students wrote an open letter.”'

I did read the book, and she wasn't throwing her prejudices at fellow adults, but at children, who she encountered in a school environment, that they attended by compulsion, not because they chose to interact with her.

An extra level of respect is required in that setting. Schools are dodgy enough anyway.

Interesting article. God I hope companies are better at handling things like this now. You can see mostly that their main focus is to get whatever the situation is off social media, and you can see why.

Makes me want to listen to the R4 series. And read the book.

'all her students' who of course were in no way swayed by fashion or peer pressure. Schools are horrible places.

I think this is a prime example of the hysterical frenzy of cancel culture. Actually have I crossed a line there with 'hysterical'
“I’m interested,” Clanchy says, “that all the people who attacked me were women around my own age, often exactly my own age, often white women just like me. I think that we’re the first generation of women to have succeeded and got anywhere. But the men can relax, because we’re just going to form a circle and shoot each other.”

Seriously I'm starting to worry at this behaviour among successful women who should have enough battle scars to stand firm instead of crumbling before sanctamonious 'sensitivity readers'.

It's fascinating that people who criticised Clanchy's writing (and I read the first excerpts and was shocked by them well before the online stuff blew up) were 'attacking her' and 'hysterical' and 'frenzied' and 'sanctimonious'.

But she is a special, first-generation successful (really?) white (relevant why?) woman so has to be validated.

Fashion and peer pressure tend towards cancellation.
I’m not surprised they supported her when their own words (chocolate skin and almond shaped eyes for example) were attributed to her by her detractors and used as the basis of her cancellation. Have you read the article linked?

Thank you for the share token, op.

No I haven't read the article. I read excerpts from the book before the online row, then after the row I read the book, then I read several articles by Clanchy over the next years.

I feel no need to read yet another.

The whole incident was nasty, people should not write lightly disguised descriptions of school children who have been forced into contact with them.They particularly should not use racial, national, appearance based stereotyped descriptions of them. Children are not publicity fodder for do-gooders.

I think you are failing to grasp the difference between criticising and cancellation. We are all allowed to criticise none of us are entitled to call for cancellation.
You seem to be inserting yourself into this without considering the children's experiences which you seem to diminish.
Different people will feel differently.

I am centering the children's experience. She used them. It should never have happened.

I've read it now. As usual, she has left out the bit where she tried to doxx the woman who left an unfavourable review on Goodreads and get her sacked. For writing in an online review site that she did not like the book or the disrespectful language in it. Sacked.

I am not convinced Clanchy was ever 'cancelled' - she has certainly been published in the papers and weeklies about this repeatedly over the last four years, but the message now seems to be that women like her should not have to face the consequences of their actions, that's for the little people.

That's a hard read and demonstrates what a mess we're in with this repeated public denunciation of people - so often led by the media looking for a story.

it's particularly important to know that the young people involved have consistently denied the allegations and that they are still in regular contact with her. The extent of her loss is significant and it's interesting that her ability to uncover actual facts about what happened has led to apologies from some of her critics.

Actually listening to those involved and evaluating complex situations is so often abandoned in favour of listening to online voices with strong opinions.

Clancy was a sufferer of the Barbara Streisand effect.

If she hadn’t complained about a reviewer, none of the blow up would have happened. She claimed the reviewer had made up quotes - but they were all in the book.

The book was awful. She sneered at those children, and she shouldn’t have exploited their experiences for her own personal gain.

No, you really are not.

The letter states: "We thank those for their concern over our wellbeing, but can very gladly clarify to any readers concerned that we have experienced no safeguarding or consent issues, and we have never felt excluded from the process. Though well-meaning people appear to want to defend us, in some ways their intervention is often disempowering and causing us distress, because it does not reflect our reality. We do not need defending: we will speak for ourselves."

Clanchy students defend author over safeguarding criticism share.google/TtHorVBWn24nb7ktW

We are all allowed to criticise none of us are entitled to call for cancellation.

Yep.

'Cancellation' is an odd idea altogether. Is it really new? Were people cut off, fired, unpersonned like this in the past? 'Sent to Coventry' and shunning used to happen, but social media seems to have fuelled a particular type of witchhunt.

Thanks for posting OP. I read the book before the row blew up and thought it was humane and beautifully written with a poet’s ear for language. As someone said above, Clanchy is careful to position herself as a secure middle class Brit, and part of the way the book works is to emphasise how different the students seem to her before she connects with them through language and poetry. I didn’t think there was anything racist or condescending in her writing and was appalled when she was hung out to dry by her publishers and the Society of Authors. It seems another case of how those attempting to do a good thing are torn apart for some minor infringement while actual racists, sexists etc get a free pass.

How was she 'cancelled' or 'shunned'? Her book was reprinted, numerous articles by her giving her version of the affair have been printed, and she is now a writer in residence at an Oxford college. That is not cancellation.

Some children saying they don't feel oppressed is great, but it doesn't diminish the horror of her writing about the 'Ashkenazi nose' of a boy with no known Jewish family as though he was a beetle she was pinning down in a display case. It doesn't take much knowledge of 20th century history to understand why she cuts such a sinister figure. The book is full of dehumanising, othering, descriptions of children who, as I have said repeatedly, did not volunteer to encounter her or to be categorised.

I feel sorry for her. I think she was only trying to give these kids a voice and some confidence.
(disclaimer - I used to vaguely know her and she was lovely)