Anatomy of a Cancellation: 1. Kate’s Story

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It felt like everything I believed in was suddenly collapsing. This is the story of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia with a dark secret of the school's head teacher. This was someone I respected above anyone else. And the investigation led by students he's trying to silence. This is World of Secrets, catching my teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app, or wherever you get your BBC podcast. The other day, I sat down to watch a film by the acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, called Rashomon. It came out in 1950. Rashomon is credited with being one of the first Japanese films to make it big across the world, one of the most influential movies of the 20th century. It even has that rare claim to fame, a whole phenomenon named after it, the Rashomon effect. In the film, the same story is told from different points of view. It all revolves around the murder of a samurai. And in each telling, you learn different, often contradictory things. It's hard to work out what really happened. What is the truth of the matter? And is an objective truth even achievable? Perhaps it's just human nature to recall events through the prism of our own feelings and experiences. I know what that's like, don't you? Well, our story, the one I'm going to tell you here, feels very Rashomon. It's about a book published in 2019 that lots of people thought was brilliant, a raw and human portrait of what it's like to teach kids from all sorts of different backgrounds in schools in Britain today. But later, many other people said they didn't think it was a brilliant book at all. They thought it was racist and deeply problematic in all sorts of ways. It led to what some said was the unjustified cancellation of a prize-winning writer and teacher, but to others was a long overdue reckoning for the world of publishing. A woman who'd been faded by the liberal establishment and who then saw her reputation, she says her career destroyed. It grew into a culture war about race, class, and who has the right to say what. So what's the truth? Well, it depends on who you ask. The language in this book is so dehumanizing. Like, who signed this off? The amount of unnecessary fetishization. I do not think that I wrote in any way a racist book. It's a wonderful one. We started being branded as attackers, detractors. It became very ugly. It was a bit of a witch hunt. There was a level of vindictiveness in the punishment people wanted her to bear. Everybody's very open to free speech, but they just don't like free speech when it's critiquing their work. I was abused and scapegoated. It really has just completely taken something out of all of us. In this series, we're going to try and unpick what happened. Each episode will tell a story from a different perspective. Some of the people we'll hear from have never spoken out before. For many, it's still incredibly raw. The events of 2021 have changed their lives, but this story is about so much more. I'm Katie Razzle, and in my job as BBC Culture Editor, I've watched a social media and tech have increased the temperature on the debate about who gets to decide what's acceptable when it comes to what people write and who they can write about. And the high price to pay when you're considered to be on the wrong side of that line. For BBC Radio 4, from Shadow World, this is Anatomy of a Cancelation. Episode 1, Kate Story. Why did you want to do this interview? Well, in 2021, my career, both in teaching and in writing, was suddenly taken away from me in a kind of famous cancellation event, which has defined me. This is Kate Clanchey. She's at the centre of this story, so let's get her perspective first, on her sudden polarising and very public, full from grace. I'm a symbol of a particular time and an extreme version of Cancel Culture, and I can't think how to get through that. I thought that talking about what happened and exploring it might be a way of opening it up and making it better. Kate is a writer, poet, teacher, and author of the memoir "Some Kids I Taught" and what they taught me. It tells the story of her 30 years teaching in British state schools. I always wanted to be a teacher, I think. I think I was one of those lining up your deadies kind of a person. I find young people endlessly amusing, endlessly interesting. It's exhausting teaching, but it's endlessly creative, fun. I started to write poems when I was 27, 28, and I had my first book out. I was just past 30, and I won all the prizes. I won a forward prize and a sold-out prize and some a set more in the award. By the 1990s, Kate's thriving in her career, and after time out to start a family, she returns to teaching in a secondary school. In a different role, opened up by her literary success, writer in residence. I had this self-defined job. I worked with this wonderful interdepartment. People I absolutely loved. It was this multicultural environment where I felt very happy. I love poems, so yeah. So she. I kind of developed my impractice. I developed a teaching practice of reading poems aloud, having students respond. She's talking about where she comes from. I come from the streets that replace grass and flowers with concrete and syringes. I come from grey, flats, towers. Children are very adaptable in it, and if you just give them lots of poems to read, and poetry is the thing that you do in your school, then lots of people start doing it. So what we're going to do is make our own list, it's a list poem, thinking about where you come from. In 2015, BBC Radio 3 commissions a documentary about how she teaches her kids to write poetry. You can go inside the house. What's inside the house? Draft exclusives and double glazing. And when you enter the house that smells of peace, love, and you're hardly welcomed, and invited to T. Bostrak Kishmishnachud, this is my hand. I really started to motor, and so they were, you know, glorious years. It was really wonderful. You're a bit there, thank you. That was fantastic. If you can help me put the seats in the chairs in the table, I'll be really grateful. In 2017, Kate discovers new audiences for her students' poems on social media. I started putting the poems on Twitter, and people started to follow them, and that is a huge thing, you know, when I always asked the kid first, and I just used their first name, but when you have a poem, your poem, and 30,000 people have read it, then you feel great. In 2018, Pick a Door Publishers, a book of poems by some of Kate's students, build as a unique anthology from a school with 30 languages on one focus. Poetry. It's called England Poems from a School, and it's a great success. Suddenly, Kate and her pupils are all over the media. She joins me along with two of the poets. Welcome to all of you. It's so nice to see you here in the studio with me. I love this collection, Kate, there's lots of. Here they are, on Radio 4's Culture Programme front row. Muka Hang, hi. Hi. Can you tell us what your poems called and then read it to us please? Definitely. It's called When I Came from Nepal. When I came from Nepal, as I clutched my suitcase, thick, hot sweat built up in the slits of my palm. By this point, Kate is in her 50s, and has been teaching for three decades. In 2018, she's awarded an MBE for services to literature. With years of experience and countless stories, she feels ready to share a slice of her life in the classroom, so she drafts her memoir. Some kids I taught, and what they taught me. She, the teacher, is the main character, but she says it's an exaggerated version of herself, a more narrative-friendly version. She doesn't know it then, but this decision to write this memoir, it will drastically alter the course of her life. So the book is about me listening to children, and it starts right from the beginning of my. teaching career, and it kind of goes an arc all the way through. And it's when I realise things, when I learnt things, and all the stories are true, but I have told them quite carefully. Also, I was very concerned to make sure that Kate in the book isn't a saint, and she definitely is not. It's very difficult to keep your temper. It's very difficult to keep your patience as a teacher. As a teacher, yeah. You know, beautiful rewards do not come in every lesson. People are not born saints. If you're in a very crowded classroom with lots of noise, and it is jolly difficult to stop and listen. There's a lot of moments when I dramatise mistakes, and when there's a lot of flat ironies as Kate, you know, tumbles over again, and little bits of exaggerated language. My aim is to draw the reader in and deliver some of the same shocks that I got, you know, deliver some of the same surprises. The book is about the realities of teaching, warts and all, but at the same time she wants to keep the real kids safe. Here's Kate reading from the book's introduction. Children have the right to privacy just as adults do, and more strongly than adults, the right to leave their old selves behind them. So even where the stories are the most admiring, and when individuals positively wanted to be identified, I've detached these accounts from their original names, times, and places. Some stories need more privacy, and I've provided that with occasional very extensive blurring of identity. This next thing she writes, I also want you to remember. I hope, however, that a fence would not be given even if a general identification were made, because I've included nobody, teacher or pupil, about whom I could not write with love. The memoir is published in April 2019. It's a hit, praised in the media as honest, inspiring, and full of good stories. It did fantastically well. It got absolutely golden reviews, you know, and I got lovely letters as well from teachers. Said it was uplifting and wonderful and palpable love. It did sell quite a lot of books, so right, you know, that's nice, isn't it? Everything's going so well. Then, in March 2020, we all know what happens. The world comes to a halt. Covid means life is suspended. The only way to stay in touch is online. Kate's getting a lot of engagement on Twitter, posting her students' poems. It was a way I could just put them out there and lots of people could enjoy them. Here's this kid who came from Syria and won an incredible poem, they wrote, you know, occasionally I would put something like Aisha doesn't think much of her poetic abilities and then everyone would go in, oh, it's our fantastic poem, which was, you know, really nice. Did it feel addictive? I mean, you absolutely. It was the first thing you reached for in the morning at a point or it became so I did become addictive to that little high of getting the appreciation, yeah, definitely. It's hard not to. To give you a flavour, in a screenshot that Kate shared with us, a poetry related tweet of hers from before Covid got 4200 retweets, 21,000 likes and more than 1,000 comments, a decent hit of dopamine. Does it tell you anything about yourself or do you think we're all like that? I think most people would be like that. In the summer of 2020, some kids wins the UK's most prestigious prize for political writing with the award ceremony held online because of Covid restrictions. The winner of the all-well prize for political writing for 2020 is Kate Clanching for her book Some Kids I Talked and What They Talked Me. Kate, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I was just really pleased that people were recognising that it was a political book because it is a political book. It's not nice stories about children. It's about money and class and the politics of education and it felt like a dignity given to teachers which is actually the introduction. So, Kate's enjoying her moment in the limelight. Everything she's worked for is coming true. She's at the peak of her career. Meanwhile, there's something else going on in the summer of 2020. A profound shift in the wider culture, supercharged by a horrendous act across the Atlantic. Between Kate's nomination for the all-well prize and her winning it, the video of the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer sets off protests across the world. In the UK, it galvanises conversations about racism, empire and colonialism like never before. Yes, you're right. We're all right to say black lives matter. Institutions and companies scramble to respond. The black writers guild write an open letter to the publishing industry demanding it be more inclusive. Famous signatories include Bernadine Veristo and Mallory Blackman. The Natural History Museum starts a review of offensive exhibitions, including those about Charles Darwin. All of a sudden media content, whether it's books, films, TV shows, activists are really invested in these things and how black and Asian people and other groups are represented in them. This is onamik Sahar, professor of race and media at the University of Leeds. He describes how George Floyd's murder and the ensuing protests intensified a kind of online activism that had been building in the previous decade. With social media that has allowed them to talk back to, if you like, the dominant culture of a dominant group, in a way that that group have never been challenged before, you know, in modern history. All of a sudden, people who have been formerly marginalized, who didn't have a voice, who basically had to, let's just say, accept a representation of a South Asian shopkeeper on the most popular TV show in the world ever, The Simpsons. Thank you. Come again. We just had to kind of grin and bear it. All of a sudden, we reached the point where actually we had built cloud and actually called out, well, you know what, that's not right. So by 2019 and 2020, there's a groundswell of activism. There used to be a saying in media that all press is good press. So it doesn't matter if it's a negative review. If it's been talked about, then that's great. That's going to create awareness and maybe lead to sales. But all of a sudden, you have this thing called cancel culture, which is some brand new, but in the time of social media, it becomes an issue again and something that becomes a tool for activists, rightly or wrongly, to use to kind of assert themselves and their politics and their values and their beliefs. So it becomes a way in which the dominant group can be challenged. And Kate Clunchy is about to find herself and everything she's come to represent, singled out by the very people she might have thought would be on her side. This was someone I respected above anyone else and the investigation led by students he's trying to silence. This is world of secrets catching my teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app or wherever you get your BBC podcast. As the pandemic drags on, personal tragedy strikes Kate. Her elderly parents both catch COVID and in January 2021, they die within weeks of each other. In the following months, Kate begins to notice less favourable takes on her book cropping up. She's accused of exoticising and stereotyping children. And on Goodreads, the website where anyone can rate and review books they've read, there is one post in particular that really upsets her. It's written by someone with a handle, Keradwin, who says they're a teacher. Keradwin writes that Kate uses overtly racist language when talking about her students of colour. One of you in particular, and he said I'd said things like slant-ey eyes, which being absolutely not and added false quotations from some kids, there's nothing you can do about that. Kate says her issue isn't that it's negative. It's the factual inaccuracies and misquotations, and it doesn't stop with Keradwin. People writing things like, she uses the real names of the kids throughout, they're all identifiable, you know, complete lies. As we heard earlier, Kate is emphatic, that the children she's writing about are not identifiable, they're not named, or she's changed details. There was lies, there was miscrotations, and there was also these false allegations, and of course that bothered me and it went on for months and months and months. And then I started getting really weird emails, what kind of emails, just kind of you're a racist bitch, we're going to come for you kind of things, which I just used to delete. You know who they were, aren't they? Just anonymous addresses. She turns to Twitter. On July the 30th, she appeals to her followers and asks if they have any suggestions on how to get good reads to take down the Carried Wind review, because Kate says it is factually inaccurate. This is nine months after the review was first published. Why did this affect you so much that you decided to take it to Twitter? I think I was just very upset and very tired. I mean, of course, obviously I regret it. I don't think anyone could have thought it would have resulted where it went for a start. It was just also, I don't know, you know, the feeling of being attacked, I didn't quite know why, the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of, you know, I was bereaved, it was on my own, just having a bad afternoon. Kate also posts a screenshot of Carried Wind's review, which says of Kate's writing. Kate Clanshee describes young people of colour as racist stereotypes. She describes students as so afghan, black young people with chocolate skin, others with slanted eyes, almond shaped eyes, an African voice or a Jewish nose. She calls one young person African Jonathan. On her post to accompany the screen grab Kate writes, "None of these terms are in my book, it's all made up." It may have been inadvertent, but in posting this to Twitter, Kate actually draws a whole new set of eyes to her work, and it backfires like she could never have imagined. "Let's move on to this week's big literary scandal. This is the story about Kate Clanshee." That's the spiked podcast, and this is YouTuber Josie Ulford. "Over the last two weeks in the UK, the writing community has been uproar on Twitter over Kate's language in this book. People have said that she has used racist, ablest and fat phobic language." It's August 2021. Just a year ago, her book won the all-well prize. Now, she's being publicly shamed. "I've not met a single writer of colour who hasn't been appalled by her book." We asked BBC colleagues to voice up some tweets. "This author clearly doesn't see anything wrong with what they've written, which isn't just appalling, it's deeply troubling." When Kate tweeted that the carried-win review was full of inaccurate quotes, a flurry of people responded with pictures of pages from her book, highlighting precisely where some of these words can be found. Kate is accused of lying. "They kept saying, but these words are in your book and I was trying to reply, but they're not. I did not recognise those phrases because they were so taken out of context and distorted." One of the examples that Kate says has been distorted is slanted eyes. It appears in the Goodreads review which Kate posted to Twitter. "That's just not there. So, what seems to be there, let me have a look. There is no slanted eyes. Oh, there we go. Her slanting, sparking, black eyes. What I've written there is not slanted eyes. It's slanting, sparking, black eyes. It's got two other words in between. So, there was an absolute false quotation. To take a phrase out of the context of its sentence is against journalistic rules. That's not what you do. That's not a truthful quotation. They presented words out of context in many ways and also out of order. And when you look at that now, do you think all of this is about things being taken out of context? Yeah. That's how you say it. Yeah. I think you have to seek offence to find offence there. If you read the book and you allow for ironies and context, it's not an offence book that abuses anyone or uses racial stereotypes. It's the opposite of that. It shows people with very diverse identities. It shows the very diverse identities of people of colour in Britain and the different ways that they perceive each other and that they are perceived. It's not a racist book. And at the beginning when it was happening, did you feel supported by Piccadot or your publisher? No, I never felt supported for them for a minute. They were absolutely unsupportive. We'll be hearing more about the publisher later in the series. The substance of her book, what it's really about and how exactly it's been written, will occupy us in episodes to come. But at this point, in August 2021, Kate says she is seriously struggling, facing a ton of criticism that she feels is unjustified. Just a warning, what's coming up is pretty unpleasant. And with very strong language. Should I read some out? Let me know me. Tweets to you, you mean? Yeah. Tweets about me. What a horrible person, fucker. There's something so insidious and alarming in her exercising authority over groups of children whom she seems to view as nothing more than empty receptacles. Fucker, fucker, walk into the C.K. Clanchi. It's really seconding to see how Clanchi talks about her students, given her whole persona as an angelic white teacher, gifting her students of colour poetic expression for the experiences, not intent with racist tropes in her work, decides to sling a mountain of her own feces at autistic kids, fucker, fucker. You might wonder, why didn't she just delete Twitter? Stop looking. But she couldn't. And the spiral took Kate to a very bleak place. I would very much like literally to die at the time. That's what I wanted very much. You have to just always, always fight it because it's not the right thing to do. But I think that anyone who's been through that knows that that that's what it's for. It's so that you will be destroyed. And yeah, it's genuinely, it's hard to find my life worth living, very, very hard. Even now, yeah. And at the time when it was at its worst, if you don't mind my asking, are you saying that you were considering killing yourself? Absolutely. And I think, when I wrote about that, lots of people wrote to me to say that's what had happened to them as well. What kind of people? People who'd experienced cancellations. As far as Kate is concerned, she was the unlucky one who got picked out and made an example of. In order to achieve a fence in some kids, you have to really work it and go for it. Do you think there were no learnings for you from that book and what happened afterwards and that some people say they found it offensive? At the time, all you can feel is sorry to have caused anyone any of that hurt. But I do not think that I wrote in any way a racist book. And I think that the only thing that was to be learnt from what happened to me was that people can be abused. It was just a masterclass in abuse and scapegoating. You mean you were abused? Yeah, I was abused and scapegoated. But back to that rachim on effect, a deluge of opinions are rolling in and there are people with a very different take. The book to me just came across as incredibly dehumanising. And I don't know about you, but I certainly don't ever look at people's skulls and decide what that might mean about them. I just remember a load of writers, critics, academics, weighing in. And they were weighing in because what she was saying, she was missing the mark, she wasn't listening. Those are two key players in our story and you'll be hearing more of their side next episode. As for a race and media scholar on a mix, Sarah, who you've already met, I just find it interesting that Kanchi, for one of her better phrase, was called out on it at this point, whereas maybe 10 years previous, she wouldn't have. You could argue maybe Kanchi got caught in the crossfire when there was more horrendous things that had been published, that were less high profile, but that's what that moment signifies. It's that all of a sudden, not just books, but sentences and words became political. So what exactly were those sentences and words, and what made them so charged? That's next time on a anatomy of a cancellation. I'm Ragnar O'Connor. From BBC Radio 4 and the History Podcast, this is the Magnificent O'Connor's. In Warthorn London, a man is murdered. The police arrest 23-year-old Jimmy O'Connor. He's sentenced to death, but Jimmy is my dad. For 80 years, my family has fought to prove his innocence, and now we're making one final attempt to uncover the truth. But are we ready for what we'll find? The Magnificent O'Connor's. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This was someone I respected above Anyone else, and the investigation led by students, he's trying to silence. "This is to the media. I'll be destroyed." This is World of Secrets, catching my teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app, or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.