Welcome. This is the last Blog until September 14th due to holidays. It may just be about a ‘silly season’ news filler; then again it might be indicating another alarming shift in the collapse of our culture. Certainly it takes sides - the right or the wrong one? I’d love to know what you think; and please do forward to others you think it might interest.
Kate Clanchy: A Good Woman Down
The cover of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book is cheesy but informative. ‘Critical Theories’ has the word ‘critical’ ruled out, and ‘cynical’ scribbled in above it – giving us the very full title of ‘Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship made Everything about Race, Gender, Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody’ (2020). Whilst ‘Critical Race Theory’ has had the most attention (particularly perhaps amongst Christians), Pluckrose and Lindsay cover also Postcolonial, Queer, Feminism and Gender, Disability and Fat studies. Behind all it sees post-modernism’s prioritising of language as being the locus of knowledge and power, largely malign, and so formative of culture. Language is used to control understanding, thereby requiring vigilance on the part of all identity groups who see themselves as oppressed and therefore needing to expose the linguistic and conceptual oppression being foisted on them by a linguistically powerful and hegemonic establishment.
A similar, rather more journalistic furrow is ploughed in Douglas Murray’s ‘The Madness of Crowds’ (2019) which covers Gay, Women, Race and Trans, and like Pluckrose and Lindsay both look back to the intellectual undergirding of post-modern (or further back for Murray, Marxist) theory; all of it over-heated by the sudden rush of social media communication.
Which brings us onto the sad story of Kate Clanchy. A few years ago my wife and I were given a Christmas present of her edited collection: ‘England: Poems from a School’ (2018). It consisted around two dozen poems written by pupils from a very wide variety of ethnic backgrounds at her Oxfordshire Comprehensive school. It was commended by Philip Pullman, featured in a Guardian article and was on BBC radio. They were extraordinary powerful evocations, very often of the pain, nostalgia and yet also freedoms and security of moving to England. Before ‘giving a voice to the voiceless’ was to become a cheap cliché, the poems did that just that – with dignity, delight and shrewdness.
Subsequently Kate Clanchy published ‘Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me’ (2019), her own account of thirty years of teaching – in Scotland, Essex, East London, Oxfordshire, marked with a love for the rich texture of everyday life of ordinary children, some from a variety of minority ethnic backgrounds, some with entirely Scottish or English roots. Teaching inevitably has an asymmetric power imbalance. Even the most warm-hearted teacher will (maybe especially) have a slightly patronising and sentimental attachment to the children. Clanchy’s determination that ‘names (and details) have been changed to protect the innocent’ means that the somewhat composite children who are described in substantial numbers and close but foreshortened detail in the book, can be recognised, perhaps a bit too easily, as slight stereotypes. Yet the book won the Orwell prize for political writing, and was rightly praised by the judges as ‘moving, funny, full of love’.
But that was 2020; this is 2021. Phrases such as ‘chocolate-coloured skin’, ‘almond shaped eyes’, ‘African Jonathan’, or an ‘unselfconsciously odd’ autistic child have become insulting not moving, demeaning not funny, caricaturing not full of love. So the full blast of post-post-modern hermeneutical suspicion is being fired off at the book. Clanchy’s defenders, like Philip Pullman, first rallied, then abandoned their post, as the Society of Authors rebuked them both. Clanchy first fought back, it seems foolishly denying that she wrote what she did write, then collapsed, agreeing to rewrite a bowdlerised version and offering an intense iteration of her moral failings of the like barely seen since the days of Chairman Mao. ‘I am . . .no one’s saviour’ she intones in response to the allegation in The Bookseller which invoked the ‘white saviour’ cliche and that she had used her ‘power and privilege’ in ‘benefitting from her pupil’s stories’. (Are there writers for whom there is no benefit at all in what they write, even humble bloggers?)
So what should Clanchy’s revision look like:
* cut out the detail – someone may be fat, but why do we need to know?
* chasten the adjectives – ‘brown’ will do instead of ‘coffee coloured’;
* drop ethnic references – calling Jonathan ‘African’ is inviting us to stereotype;
* don’t let the children seem interesting – who are you to decide?
* develop authorial neutrality – implying value assessments of other cultures is simple post-colonialism;
* don’t let on that teachers have power – hierarchy is evil:
* remember you are a ghost – your thirty years of teaching has done no good to no one, it all happened without you;
* above all, love isn’t all you need – it leads to relationships, and relationships with people of other ethnicities (or social class, gender, age, place of origin etc) risk impacting their true identities.
In short, the replacement of Mark 1 ‘Some Kids I taught . . . ‘ with Mark 2 ‘Some Kids I taught . . . ‘ will be a disaster not only for Kate Clanchy’s writing career, but also, to quote Pluckrose and Lindsay, it ‘Harms Everybody’ in the culture she and we are part of. Someone who writes movingly, amusingly, elegantly has had their wings clipped by people who are turning anti-racism into a spectator sport where the occasional misplaced phrase brings the whole work into disrepute, and where disagreement leads not to debate but to withdrawal. How can a book that is applauded in 2020 turn into a work of shame in 2021? Simply because an intense and vociferous minority shouts loud enough, and because social media now means a relatively small number of opinions can readily agglomerate into a fearsome mass. No wonder Philip Pullman ran. What is now becoming the norm, as Douglas Murray writes, is ‘analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy’ (p 245). Chimene Suleyman writes that the ‘white authors’ who defend the book are ‘invalidating the people of colour who are upset by it’. Note the chilling word ‘invalidating’ – not just ‘disagreeing with’, or ‘saying they are wrong’, but actually ‘invalidating’, that is undermining the value of their very being through not being aghast at the thought of ‘upsetting’ them. Surely, too, the group with probably the most cause to be upset are those described a little condescendingly in her first teaching post in a Scottish mining town. The children of many ethnicities in her London and Oxford schools are depicted with much more enthusiasm (which you can choose to call liberal patronage).
Presumably this means that those ‘people of colour’ who speak in defence of Kate Clanchy must in turn be ‘invalidated’ by Suleyman. But post-colonial theory can dispatch them very easily (read Fanon) – they are victims of false consciousness, brainwashed into seeing things as their oppressors see them, failing to see that as they pour out their hearts in poems that in part appreciate what it means to live in England that in so doing they have imbibed a false identity - they need ‘re-education’. A Pakistani-background Muslim pupil has written: “Kate gave us platforms we never expected. She fought for us to be in rooms and places we had never been welcomed in before and made sure people heard what we had to say. . (R)acism . . not something I’ve ever associated with Kate. . (She) has impacted my life in so many positive ways it’s unimaginable”.
Critical/Cynical Theories and ‘Activist Scholarship’ have made an illuminating and heart-warming book about teaching into ‘everything about Race, Gender and Identity’. Whilst the ‘racial’ references have drawn most fire on the book, its critics do cover the canon of ‘grievance studies’ – she is also ‘classist’, ‘fatphobic’ and has ‘an outdated view on transgender young people’. Just as Kate Clanchy has felt the need to bring her head below the parapet, so other writers will be discouraged from letting their heads rise above it. The expression of free, honest opinion in a once diverse society has been that much more restricted. The incident also illuminates the inherent weakness of western secular liberalism. A movement that has always found its validity in being on the leading edge of the right side of history is vulnerable to being outflanked by fiercer, stronger, more radical voices, just as those voices increasingly fall upon one another, as in the trans vs feminist skirmish. A mentality that foregrounds being ‘progressive’ rather than tethered to absolute convictions will always, ultimately fail to defend freedom of opinion.
By allowing remote, theory-based criticism to trump Kate Clanchy’s pupils ‘lived experience’ of affirmation and hope, the weakness of her publisher and ‘supporters’ have privileged an abstract understanding of race over against the primacy of loving relationships. They have transformed what was a dance, albeit of unequal partners, into a game of chess where the two sides operate on rigidly prescribed conventions. Our common humanity is the loser.