Anatomy of a Cancellation: 2. The Words

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. When you write a book, once it goes on a shelf and it's for sale and someone buys it, it becomes a public document. That now means people are allowed to engage with it in any way they choose. This is Anthony and Axegorou, a poet and publisher. The book we're talking about is "Some Kids I Taught" and "What They Taught Me" by writer and teacher Kate Clanchi. It's a memoir about Kate's 30 years of teaching English and poetry to students, often from immigrant, refugee and working class backgrounds. In 2021, a storm blew up online around some of the language used in the book. But we're going to start this episode a year earlier. When Anthony first came across Kate's memoir. I work in schools, I work with young people, I come from a minority background, I'm a second generation working class, Cypriot. And so I was interested in the subject. I followed Kate on Twitter at the time and she had like a big following and she was constantly putting up. Poems were written by young people. Did you know Kate Clanchi at all had you ever met her before all this happened? Yeah, yeah, we've done some workshops together and yeah, very pleasant, very kind of invested in the work and young people and poetry. It's 2020 and at this point Kate's book is being showered with praise, described as uplifting, inspiring and honest by reviewers and selling well. It's just one that all well prize, the UK's most prestigious award for political writing. When I kind of saw the book won the prize, I think that's when I picked it up and I started to read. I struggled from the beginning. I struggled with a lot of the language used to kind of describe young people. I felt some of it was overly sexual. It was racialized very early on from like page 7 where I think she mentions Cypriot bosoms. This is a section where Kate is musing on some of the different students she's encountered. She writes, "My eye was tuned into the multiracial London pupils I'd taught the year before, who had by the same age Somali height or Cypriot bosoms or styled stiff Japanese hair." Why would you write that? Like what compels you to want to write Cypriot bosoms on a kid? Is it a male writer going into a school if I wrote that about a young girl straight away that would be alarming? So why are you in it? I have read a lot of historical writing about the British in various parts of the world. It was like the race came first. But Anthony keeps reading. I got to a point where I was like, "It's not one reading what I'm reading. I think because I felt quite a load." You know, you know, you're reading is a very solitary thing. So I messaged another friend of mine and I said to her, "Have you read Kate Clanchise book?" And then she said, "I literally couldn't get past page 30." So I was like, "I'm not on my own on this." Some months later, a negative review of some kids appears on Goodreads, the website where anyone can post and share reviews of books they're reading. We heard about this one in the last episode. Kate really objects to it. The writer goes by the handle carried one. I'm a teacher myself and I had so many issues with this book. The narrative is centered on this white middle class women's harmful judgmental and bigoted views on race, class, and body image. When I read that, I was like, "Yes, that's what everyone has been saying, but no one wants to bring the heat because the culture isn't like that. It's not a take-down culture. There's an issue here. Just keep it to yourself. Kate does good things and move on." Is that what you were feeling? That's what we all thought. When you say, "We," how many people are you talking about? How many people are you communicating? 10 to 15 different writers, journalists, critics, academics. They'll work in academia. Last episode, we heard Kate's version of events. What it was like for a devoted teacher to find herself at the centre of online outrage, feeling shunned and suicidal for a book she says was written with love, but which got caught up in a moment of reckoning, which raised profound questions about the language used in books, and what is and isn't acceptable for authors to write. This time, we're going to take you through the story from her critics points of view. I'm Katie Razzle, and for BBC Radio 4, from Shadow World, this is Anatomy of a Cancelation. Episode 2. The Words. It's Friday, July 30, 2021. Kate writes on Twitter, A bit later, she posts again. This time, a screenshot of the negative Goodreads review, which calls phrases in her book "racist." 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." None of these terms are in my book. Kate writes, "It's all made up." At first, she receives some warm and supportive responses from people taking her at her word. International best-selling author, Philip Pullman, says, "Although some people who read the screenshot of the review on Kate's post do question her. One Twitter says, "If you did write the quotes which are being highlighted, maybe you should step back, swallow your pride and think about why people are upset." But Kate pushes back. Some of them are straight up made up, some of them taken so far out of context that they're in the opposite of the original. If you read my book, you can check. It's when she doubled down. That's when it took off. When she denied the fact that she didn't write these things, and then somebody screenshot it, text from the book and said, "Kate, you did." One anonymous account called "Kellamity with a K," posts pages of Kate's book onto Twitter, and underlines phrases where she describes a student's skin as chocolate coloured, and another student's eyes as almond shaped. But Kate, they tweet, "A lot of these terms are in your book." It was clear this is what you had written about these children. You're denying it, but here is the evidence from your own book. I had never heard of Kate before, and I had never heard of the book. This is Manisha Rajesh, she's an author whose book around the world in 80 trains, one of prestigious travel writing award, her latest books about traveling by night train. I'm a travel writer, I'm a lifestyle journalist, I suppose, to some degree, and I'm also a mom. I've got two little girls, and I have a mini-daxon called Juno. And what is it you like about trains? I've said not to like about trains. I just love the fact that you can line bed with a cup of tea and look out of a window and move through the world. You don't have to do anything. It's all being done for you, and people come and go, and you get to hear these extraordinary stories. At the start of the Kate Clanchie for Rory, Manisha says she doesn't even follow Kate on Twitter, but so many people are engaging with Kate's initial post about the nuisance goodreads review that it pops up on her feed. At first, Manisha takes it at face value. I actually replied to it saying, I have a contact at Goodreads if you need any help. I don't know who she was, I just thought it was a writer who was being harassed on Goodreads. And then a few days later, I saw the same thread, and at that point I started to read. She realises that people are agreeing with the Goodreads review, and posting sections of the book they take issue with. I could see that she was then saying that these are taken out of context. I then saw people saying, well, actually in context, they almost look worse. So, she decides to take a look at the book herself. I read it one morning, for a straight two hours. I need all my facts. I'm not going to comment on something until I've read it. I was sitting at my corner desk in my flat. My four-year-old was at nursery and my two-year-old was napping, and I remember feeling sick by page eight, maybe. The language in this book is so dehumanizing and upsetting to read, and it immediately made me think of being five years old back at school when a teacher pulled me up onto it. Sorry. Sorry, I'm finding this really hard. It's clear that even four years on, this is still a really difficult subject. As we'll hear, Manisha's involvement in the story caused her a lot of grief. Sorry, I think I just blocked out this all period and tried not to think about it, but it really has just completely taken something out of all of us. We take a pause for a moment. Manisha later shares that childhood memory she finds so upsetting. Her teacher calls her in. Apparently, the boys had said they didn't believe that girls could have black hair, and she stood me on a desk and showed the boys that it was possible for girls to have black hair, and then she took me back to the class. Manisha knows Kate's book well. She gets out her copy, which has little daxon-shaped post-it notes on some of the pages, and reads me a section. My eye was tuned into the multiracial London pupils I taught the year before. This is the same passage Anthony flagged. Kate is comparing her London students from the year before to those in a small town in Scotland. These winter-colored mouse-hair children so pale and so freckly with their muttering similar names. Fraser, Susan, I was having difficulty as Prince Philip said he had with Chinese people in telling them apart. I remember just seeing the comment about Prince Philip not being able to tell Chinese people apart. It was so shocking when he said it, but to see it reproduced was so shocking to me that something like that could be put into a book, and layers of people had seen that and decided that it was acceptable. There was a particular paragraph that made me almost unable to read any further. She's talking about a young girl called Syrah, and she's watching her run around playing basketball, and she says Syrah is very butch-looking all together with square shoulders and a distinct moustache. I remember being mocked at school for facial hair and bullied horribly because I had black hair compared with all my classmates and so my facial hair was more distinctive than other people's. I read this book thinking a teacher is looking at these children in this way, while she's in a position of trust, and I now have two little girls, and if I thought that their teacher was looking at the shape of their breasts or their facial hair or their furry eyebrows as she described one other child as having, it would make me so sad. At this point, Manisha decides to get involved on Twitter. She gets into a discussion with two other writers, Shimen Suleiman and Sunny Singh. Shimen is a poet and writer who co-edited the essay anthology "The Good Immigrant," and Sunny is a novelist, journalist, and professor of creative writing. Neither wanted to take part in this series. This trio were likely unaware that this public chat would seriously impact their lives and lead them eventually to be viewed as the three main critics of Kate Clanchi. Here's Manisha again. When all of this started, I didn't know Shimen. I had met professor Singh once at the Henley Literary Festival and we started to discuss how anyone could put this into a book and have it not flagged out. Like many others, they start tweeting extensively about Kate's book multiple times a day. Here's a few examples, including some very strong language. Sunny Singh. What the actual fuck is small square and afghan versus so rounded and mellow and Pakistani? Even with her neon lip, white, saviourist fuckery, this is grade A shit. And somehow this book made it through the full publishing apparatus and everyone was just fine with it. Shimen Seliman. You won't listen Kate. You are repeatedly being told how damaging these descriptions are and how problematic it is that you've centred yourself in the lives of children of color. One of Manisha's posts says, "Chocolate colored skin, just disgusting. I remember being on the receiving end of this racist crap aged four." And she says, "One kid back then told her she looked like a chocolate bar." It's quite tiring actually trying to explain why you can't talk about our skin in terms of chocolate or you know that's Manisha again. There are different ways to do it and it's the fixation on skin color. Can people write physical descriptions? You absolutely can. You can talk about the tone of their voice. You can talk about the way they laugh at the end of a sentence. You can talk about how they fiddle with their earrings when they're nervous. There are so many different ways to portray somebody's character and somebody's presence to make people feel like they're there with them. And it's not just that that bothers Manisha. This was a teacher placed in a position of responsibility. There is a power dynamic there. There's lots of people, possibly lots of people listening to this who would think that their language she used in her bird was perfectly reasonable, you know, not offensive. I can't tell people what to read and nor should I. And I can't tell people how to feel when they read a book that's completely up to you. But what I would say is just try and remember that there are people from every walk of life that don't look like you that don't have your socioeconomic background who aren't represented like you and trying to think about how they are represented and whether you would be okay with that if that was you. If I read the original Kate County book and liked it, am I racist? I think you're just unaware. I think you're unaware and in need of education, maybe. But not perfect. All of us have prejudice. But I think when they've flagged up and it's pointed out to you to be defensive and to push back, isn't going to help anybody in the long term. This is World of Secrets Catching My Teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app or wherever you get your BBC podcast. I know I said this episode is from the critics points of view, but the argument is about Kate Clunchy's choice of words. So let's hear how she defends her writing. I can certainly see some things might make people unhappy. What I'd like to do is go through, just so we're really clear, some of the terms that you were accused of using. Yes, is that all right? Let's go through that now. I asked her if we can go through the quotes that she originally said are all made up. The first one is so afghan. Yeah, that's right. So there's a passage. There's a Pakistani boy shaking hands with an Afghan boy and it's about the holding hands in the corridor. And I'm looking at there different faces, one of them so Afghan and one of them so Pakistani, which is about multiculturalism and the difficulties with it and yet the goodness of it. So here are these two people from the different kinds of Islam and politically opposed countries and here's their friendship. So that's what the contact of that is. Yeah, I'm just looking at that. There are funny pair. Is that so small and square in Afghan, with his big nose and premature moustache, mose so rounded and mellow and Pakistani with his long-lashed eyes and soft glossy hair? Yep. And maybe that's a bit tackless. I don't think it's poisonous though. And it's certainly in the wider context of the passage, I think it's fine. And then almond-shaped eyes were all we were talking about. The words in question are about a character called Shakila. Here's how Kate describes her. She would call out to me for words urgently. Her black almond-shaped eyes snapping, slim fingers blossoming. She's Hazara who are the almond-eyed people from Central Afghanistan who are kind of an oppressed minority within Afghanistan. Kate believes it's fine to say almond-shaped eyes because it's a term the Hazara use themselves. And a term that the girl the character in the book is based on has used to describe herself in real life. She's even used it in her own poems. Although none of this is made explicit in Kate's book. It reminds me of a broader point made by her critics. is children even in some cases uses overly sexual language. If you're working with teenagers, extraordinary things happen to their bodies and appearances and they're often preoccupied by it and it's a comedy and a drama and if your pretending it doesn't happen then you're not noticing the teenagers. It's parts of their identity and parts of their physicality are arriving and I talk about it and I do not talk about it in a harmful way. Or a damaging way. Or in a way that anyone has actually also recognised themselves. Jewish nose was another thing. That's not in there at all. But what is in there is I was baffled when a boy with jet black hair and eyes and a fine Ashkenazi nose named David Marx refused any Jewish heritage. That's right. Do you find that uncomfortable? Not really. But a bit. To say that's racist is working it a bit. To say it does harm. I mean, that's personal. It does harm to whom? Who's harmed by that? Well, I think the points made by the people criticising you were that these are racist tropes that are being used by somebody who shouldn't be using them. I don't think that's a racist trope. I mean, to say that people do have different faces. They look different. It's very distinct. It means quite a lot to Afghan people, for example. If you can say to somebody, are you a Zara? Not Pashto. I move on to the words chocolate skin. It doesn't say chocolate skin. Yes, it says a deal is more muscular and square set with chocolate coloured skin. Yeah, and it's in a very specific context, yeah. In this passage, Kate is describing a pupil who's come to help her at an open evening. He arrives late with a bloody nose. It's long, but it's a section Kate wanted us to hear. A deal always seems so grand. A tall, Somali boy with a deep voice and the almost aristocratically calm manner that sometimes goes with being extremely good looking. I hit him first, he says, before I can ask. Who, I ask, Kumar, he says. Kumar, you hit Kumar. Now I'm really baffled. Kumar, as far as I'm concerned, is super nice. Not just spectacularly clever as their deal perhaps, but bright and helpful and always opening doors for you. I thought you guys were from the same country, I say. A deal size. Then he looks at me along a praising look. Is that how we look to you, Miss? He says, really. I think again, Kumar is long and slender as many of the Somali kids are with a thin nose, narrow skull and very dark, almost black skin. A deal is more muscular and square set, the chocolate coloured skin, a broad base nose and rounded head. Very different, now I think about it. About as widely different, in fact, as I, with my Nordic height and Celtic colouring, from a petite olive skinned Mediterranean woman. Aren't you both Somali, I ask? You told me, you were Somali. Miss says a deal, I'm mixed like Kenya Somali mix. My mum and dad, they're from different. He hesitates, he won't say the word tribe. We've talked about that. They're from different groups. It's all mixed up there. Somali and Kenyan, my mum, she looks like me. My brothers, they look like my dad. They look like Kumar. Kumar, I look different, I look Kenyan. Kumar says, I look Kenyan. And his nose starts bleeding like any of my skin is still in process. Are you worried, I ask, that you might not get your papers if they think you're Kenyan? A deal takes a long time to reply. His shoulders are shaking. At last he says, I'm worried my whole family won't get their papers if they think I look Kenyan. I can't pat his back, he's a boy. I look at the heaving paper towel. I rack my brains for something comforting to say. At last I try. Look, don't worry too much. Kumar, he's totally not the British government, you know. People like me, that's who's in government. And what did I just show you? You look Somali to me, I've got no idea. Most of us white people, English people, you look the same to us, we've got no idea. So, in this passage, the boy's physical descriptions are part of the story Kate is trying to tell. And she says she's acknowledging her own prejudices and assumptions, portraying herself honestly. But when I read it to Anthony and Axe Guru, the poet and publisher we heard from at the start of this episode, I mean, bloody hell man, like that is wild. The amount of unnecessary fetishization that all you're trying to do is land a point of immigration and visa status. You could do that without any of those descriptions about the color of their skin, the height, good looking, the Afro-Taw Africa. None of that needs to be there. And to say that, you're white people think you look the same. I mean, what on earth is that? I've read that book for years, but it just infuriates me. You're reinforcing stereotypes. And people read that, thinking, oh, that's nice. Well, even after all this time, hearing that again, just confirmed exactly why so many people, not just one or two, huge swaves of people were disgruntled and upset by what she had written. In British media, it's far worse to accuse somebody of racism than to actually be racist. And that's what we realised very quickly. In early August 2021, just a few days after she, sunny and shaman, start raising criticisms of cake clanches, books, some kids, things take a sharp turn. It was within about four or five days that we started being branded as attackers, detractors, activists, pylon, all of those words. And it became very ugly. A warning, there's some exceptionally strong language coming up. Here's a tweet directed at shaman. Man, do I feel sorry for you women? I'll full of fucking nonsense. Stop dividing on race. Shaman lived in the US previously and seems to have picked up attention from what she describes as far-right accounts. Manisha posts a screen grab of an anonymous email she's received. It felt like we were going to be the example that if you dare challenge the establishment, this is what's going to happen to you. So you'd better sit quiet and not say anything about it. I had racist emails, threatening ones. It was so frightening. My Instagram, I discovered had an inbox that I didn't know about and there was a whole flood of messages in there saying, "Fuck off, back to India." We were just seen as honestly three angry brown women aggressively trying to destroy this woman who'd done all this wonderful work. Why are you trying to destroy her? Of course not. No, far from it. I didn't know who she was. All I cared about was children being written about in this way, in this dehumanizing way, brown and black children, who I saw myself in as a child. So far, this story has been about the words and author chose to use and whether they were wrong. But we're still just in the first weeks of the controversy. It will only widen and drag on for years. Because the critics aren't just focusing on cake, can't she? I remember thinking this has gone through an agent. It's gone through an editor. It's gone through copy editors. And it made me just question what it said about publishing. That's next time on a anatomy of a cancellation. Air culture can cancel someone in the blink of an eye. Celebrities, sport stars, politicians, influencers and royalty can all find themselves in the firing line. In the age of AI-generated evidence, lawsuits written in legalese you need to pass the bar to decipher how are you supposed to separate the fact from the fiction? That's where we come in. I'm Anishka Matandarati and this is Fame Under Fire from BBC Sounds. We'll myth-bars, debunk, pre-bunk, fact-check and get to the truth behind the timeline. There are new episodes every week, so make sure you listen to Fame Under Fire and subscribe on BBC Sounds. This is the story of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia with a dark secret. school's head teacher. This was someone I respected above anyone else and the investigation led by students he's trying to silence. Listen on BBC.com the BBC app or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.