Highlighting Racism in the Books is Not an Attack, It’s a Call for Industry Reform | Books

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It started with a tweet. Kate Clanchy, author of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me posted on her Twitter account that a Goodreads reviewer made up a racist quote and said it was in my book. She urged her nearly 40,000 subscribers to report the review which said she had fanatical views about race, class and body image, and used terms such as chocolate skin and Jewish nose. Prominent writers and columnists have rushed to offer their support, decrying how Clanchy could possibly be subjected to such inhuman treatment, including current Society of Authors president Philip Pullman, who said: But of all people and all the books that have had this happen It is sometimes difficult to remain optimistic about the human race.

However, it soon became clear that these terms were, in fact, in the book. Incredulous that the anti-Semitic and anti-black tropes could have made this a published book as recently as 2019, I downloaded and read it. I stepped back as a Somali boy is described as having a narrow skull, while a Muslim girl looks very butch with a distinct mustache, and another looked shiny because she has a shape of such a strong skull, which looks more like something a eugenicist might observe than a trusted professor. There is an unsettling exchange where Clanchy is baffled by a boy who, with his jet black hair and eyes and slender Ashkenazi nose, denies Jewish heritage. She draws her own conclusion that her family mustn’t want to remember that they are only seven generations away from a pogrom. After reading about a child’s Cypriot breasts and alluring hijabs, I wondered how readers would have felt about a teacher describing children’s bodies in this way.

Growing up in 1980s Yorkshire, I was the victim of racism at school from teachers who paraded me in front of 26 nine-year-old boys who didn’t believe girls could have black hair , allowing them to touch them. Reading Clanchys’ book, I was irritated by the dehumanizing language and felt a protective instinct towards children, bristling that any teacher could look at my own Métis daughters with such a test. I returned to the conversation on Twitter and found the academic and author, Professor Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, author and editor of The Good Immigrant USA, discussing how those who shouted the lie of Clanchys were already condemned as abusive trolls. It’s a familiar model: emphasizing racist language is qualified as aggressive and encourages stacking.

A flurry of readers has produced new evidence of alarming language, including Dara McAnulty, the 17-year-old autistic author of the award-winning Journal of a Young Naturalist. He pointed to several pages in the book that describe two autistic children as strange, suggesting they might be living in the land of ASDs. McAnulty then quit Twitter after receiving so much abuse that his mother had to try to hide it from him. Other writers have produced passages they claim depict stereotypical working-class families with broken noses and expansive tattooed arms and a poor young girl with a rotten 19th-century mouth, as well as segments where the author is injured. to see a woman become fat. As the title of the book suggests, Clanchy attempts to challenge his own biases through interactions with his students, but this is in itself troubling: children, especially ethnic minorities and refugees, are not a vehicle. to explore personal sectarianism.

On Twitter, Clanchy stopped denying the existence of the sentences and began demanding that they be read in context. Professor Singh, Suleyman, and I responded to her and Pullman with measured criticisms, only to be ignored. A grim realization came as they closed ranks and seemed to respond only to white criticism, snaking around our comments and questions as if we were invisible. Clanchy remarked that she was afraid to respond by mentioning another dangerous trope used against people of color, which we are to be feared. The white writers who had previously backed Clanchy quietly deleted their tweets and slipped away.

This apparent closure of the ranks is indicative of the UK publishing industry as a whole. In 2017, a poll found that over 90% of the industry identifies as white, which may explain to some extent how the book has passed many people without anyone picking up on its issues. So what is the solution ? More and more publishers are using responsive readers, which is a good idea but a short-term solution: Authors and editors have to do their own homework, yes, but also listen and learn when marginalized writers strive to highlight offensive content.

A group of white female writers ostensibly demeaned Singh, Suleyman and I as activists attacking Clanchy. Pullman suggested we research an offense and likened us to Isis and the Taliban, a comment that came when the three of us were already under a coordinated racist attack from the alt-right who targeted our emails and social media.

Clanchy has since apologized for overreacting to criticism from readers. She wrote on Twitter: I know I got a lot wrong and I appreciate the chance to write better, with more love.

Contrary to many claims, brown and black authors don’t like to point out racist language. We prefer to write college articles, search for books, watch Love Island, or play hide and seek with our kids. But racism is not something we can ignore. We see or hear it and immediately feel the heat of humiliation, the tingling of injustice on our skin. Anger rings in our ears, followed by fear of repercussions for speaking.

Cancel culture is a term used by people who fear responsibility. But freedom of expression does not mean the absence of consequences. We had every right to criticize a publicly accessible book on a public forum, not least because the author herself had drawn attention to the racist language it contained. Singh, Suleyman and I did not want to cancel Clanchy or his book, as evidenced by the educational links Singh continually shared that pointed to writing about other cultures, and my own appeals to our detractors to understand why the language was so hard. None of us disputed the fine work Clanchy did with the poetry of his students. Neither of us played a role in Picador’s decision to rewrite the book, nor do we think the book should be rewritten. No one controls the imagination or tells authors what they should or should not write. But we owe each other due diligence before we start writing.

Publishers have been producing books on race and identity over the past two years, a business that doesn’t make sense if the problem lies deep in the publishing itself. Writers, agents, editors, editors, and literary festival organizers need to accept that there is much to learn about true diversity and inclusion, and that empty platitudes and patterns of diversity mean nothing. they are punished for speaking out. Readers are not a homogeneous group of white, middle-class, able-bodied people, nor are writers. We come from all walks of life, and for books to represent that, publishing has to do it first.

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